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Rediscover Pulpconnection

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With some self-imposed downtime, I used this opportunity to look over my site, make some updates, and even rediscover a thing or two.

Amazon Store

Heh, I had forgetten that I have a store on Amazon where I highlight items mentioned here. I had strayed away from this Amazon store for awhile, trying different things, but the store’s still there so why not clean it up?

I removed some older products and added in more items including a section dedicated to the Olympus OM-D EM10 Mk II. I added a few more sections and moved products around to better fit the new sections. This store is also a good place for me to bookmark often used consumables that I need to restock on periodically.

Menus

I didn’t like the feel and flow of my previous menus, so I changed things up a little. I’m still not certain if the current menus will stay though. I need to include more categories to really capture the content on my site. Building these content pages are harder than I would have thought unless I’m doing it wrong.

Email Subscription

Although I had never sent out an email newsletter for Pulpconnection before, I did set up a TinyLetter account where you can sign up to get email notifications. And yes, I actually did send out my first email newsletter this weekend (more so to learn about TinyLetter). Will I keep this up? Not sure, but again, it is a resource that I can tap into.

Fruity Background

With a 20% discount at iStock, I figured it was time to get a high quality image to serve as the background image of Pulpconnection. Going with a pulpy theme, I like the dark wood backdrop with the bright citrus fruit accents.

So take a look around and rediscover Pulpconnection like I have. Sign up for email updates and check out (and maybe even buy) stuff from my Amazon store.

 

Possible Guest Blogger

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Well lookee here, there may be a guest blogger making her debut here on Pulpconnection. Her qualifications are excellent with shopping at Ala Moana, watching TV, and reading books. I mean doesn’t that just scream Pulpconnection?

Um, yeah, I dunno. But Kimi (let’s call her that) wants to share her experience eating a $14 peach or something like that. Intrigued? Actually yes, I am. Don’t let the pulpy readers down, Kimi!

Note to Self: Evergreen Post Tweeter and WordPress Timer

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Just a reminder to myself that the Evergreen Post Tweeter plugin conflicted with the WordPress timer service, at least for my blog. As a symptom of this, scheduled posts wouldn’t post on the publish date and time, and there would be a backlog of actions queued up.

I was only aware of this since the UpdraftPlus backup plugin wouldn’t run its automated backups. UpdraftPlus itself would complain about incomplete actions. On a hunch, I disabled Evergreen Post Tweeter since it times the posting of old posts on Twitter. Sure enough, after disabling Evergreen Post Tweeter, WordPress started behaving normally. Scheduled posts published on cue, and I have yet to see incomplete actions reported by UpdraftPlus.

Pulpconnection Now Encrypted

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Thanks to DreamHost and their partnership with Let’s Encrypt, Pulpconnection can now be reached using the secure SSL communications at https://www.pulpconnection.net.

But…

I did it wrong or at least didn’t really have a good understanding of what I was getting into. While secured communications is a good thing, I didn’t realize how much unsecure communications was actually going on. Pictures are not loading and some widgets are busted, assumedly trying to use http versus https.

That and my site’s certificate has an unfortunate mismatch due to the www prefix. Yeah, times have changed, and the URL convention of starting with www is no longer the norm. So the certificate I got from Let’s Encrypt is for pulpconnection.net, not www.pulpconnection.net. Yes, it matters.

I may be able to reconfigure my site to remove the leading www, but I’m not sure what havoc that may cause. So for now, I’ll leave things as is, but if you go to https://www.pulpconnection.net, your browser should warn you of a mismatch. This is (mistakenly) intentional until I can figure out how to fix it

WordPress Theme Expired?

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I’m not quite sure what happened but Pulpconnection’s home page was showing a blank white screen for awhile. I don’t know if this was caused by the latest version of WordPress, v4.4, or the license for my theme expired. Or it could even be an incompatibility between the theme and WP 4.4. Whatever the cause may be, I temporarily switched themes to the included Twenty Sixteen. Pulpconnection showed posts once again, just in the Spartan look of the theme.

So now, I’m temporarily installing the Canvas theme and tweaking it. If this unusual behavior is due to an expired theme license, I’m bummed that’s how it works and may have to find a new theme that still behaves even though expired.

Now “Spinning” on SSDs

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Things here at Pulpconnection should be a little snappier since the site is now “spinning” on SSD drives. I got a notice that Pulpconnection has been upgraded to DreamPress 2. Supposedly this move to solid state drives alone can ramp up performance up to 200%. While I don’t think my site loads twice as fast, any speed improvement is fine by me, especially at no additional cost.

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