First an announcement:  If you’re here because you didn’t get an email from the blog this week, please see the very last bullet at the bottom of this post.

And for those interested, you can read much more about other blog tech details / status  / news following the Merritt Island photo update.

Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge

Late Thursday, Kevin K. asked if I wanted to go photographing Friday morning.  I did and we decided to meet early and visit Merritt Island.   We arrived way before sunrise, so we stopped first at the Titusville Municipal Marina for a quick photo in the dark.

Pre-dawn at the marina – Titusville.  Olympus high res mode, two frame panorama

Next we went by the fishing pier on the North west side of the causeway.  From there you can  shoot through the bridge toward sunrise.  I liked the viewpoint, but I wish the sunrise color had been better.

Dawn through the bridge. Olympus high res mode, two frame panorama

After this we headed to Black Point Wildlife Drive.  There were a lot of birds there and we ended up going around twice.  I was worried that it would be dull and overcast, but we actually had some very pretty light for most of the morning.

Roseate Spoonbil feeding in the shallows

Hooded Merganser (female)

We also saw (among others):  American Robins, Great snowy and Reddish Egrets, Great Blue and Tri-Colored Herons, White and Glossy Ibis, Norther Shoveler and Pintail ducks, Belted Kingfishers, gulls, terns, Osprey, Vultures, and more.  We were hoping to spot some White Pelicans, but didn’t we couldn’t find any on this trip.

Enough of the pleasant content.  Now on to the agonizing stuff.

Blog status  / news

It’s been a very tough week at Central Florida Photo Ops HQ.  Our head of tech support (me) along with Google search, and two different hosting provider customer support lines struggled mightily to get the blog transferred and back up and running again.

There’s good and bad news.  Good news:  The blog is mostly back up.  And the head of tech support probably won’t get fired since there’s no one to replace him.  Bad news:  He’s not getting a raise anytime soon.

I started looking for a new hosting provider over the Christmas break since my agreement with GoDaddy is almost up .  My blog’s been responding a little slow and GoDaddy’s renewal fees  and their SSL (https) offerings were expensive.  And even though Bob Parsons is no longer CEO, there’s the whole GoDaddy Elephant thing.

I did some online research and discovered that inMotion hosting is highly rated and has some inexpensive plans.  Since this is a non-commercial, personal blog, I don’t feel I need a high end hosting plan and decided to go with them.

It was very easy to open an account and purchase their WPS500S plan.  The rest of the process wasn’t as easy.  Here are some of the issues I ran into:

• Since I purchased a WordPress specific hosting plan, I thought InMotion would automatically install WordPress for me.  They didn’t.  I could have installed it myself through their cPanel interface, but I wasn’t familiar enough with their software and what to expect.  A call to their tech support took care of this right away.
• Next, I requested that InMotion transfer my content from GoDaddy.  I gave them my login credentials, but for some reason they couldn’t access the old account.  I ended up doing this myself by FTPing into GoDaddy and copying my content files first to my computer (for backup) and then uploading them to InMotion.
• Next I initiated the domain transfer to move edrosack.com from GoDaddy servers to inMotion servers.  This was probably a timing mistake (see the bullet below about follower migration).  The domain transfer happened relatively quickly and I could see the new edrosack.com on the web.
• Next I turned on inMotion’s included SSL capability.  This was easy and I now have an https connection.  My blog readers don’t do any business through my site and don’t sign in, so this probably isn’t strictly necessary for them.  But Google factors this into search rankings so it’s good to have.
• I then went about configuring WordPress to make it match the old installation.  I had lots of problems with the Jetpack plugin.  It turns out that InMotion enables the Mod Security firewall by default and the WPS500 hosting plan doesn’t allow customizing  this.  Jetpack relies on access to the site xmlrpc file to work and Mod Security blocks this by default.  I was able to resolve this with another call to InMotion tech support.
• Since I was now worried about security on the new site, I spent some time installing firewall / security plugins and testing / configuring them.  In the process, I managed to lock myself out of edrosack.com at least once.  Fortunately, I could still get to the site file system so I could nuke the security software and then reinstall / reconfigure it.  Whew!  It would have been embarrassing to have to call inMotion on my second day with them to get that fixed.
• Most of my content transferred ok, but I couldn’t get the NexGen gallery plugin  to display my Portfolio without re-setting it and starting over.  In the end, I decided to use the gallery provisions included with Jetpack and re-did my portfolio pages.  I needed to update them anyway and now they reflect some of my more recent work.  Please check them out if you get a chance!
• And late on Saturday as I was finally getting things fixed, my cable internet here at home went down for the first time in months!  This stuff is just too hard!
• The final problem (that I know of) and one that I haven’t resolved yet is that since I couldn’t connect WordPress.com to both my old and new providers at the same time, I was  unable to use Jetpack’s  subscriber migration tool. So for now, I’m waiting on Jetpack to respond to a support request.  Once I hear from them, I’ll know how to proceed.  If they can’t re-instate my subscribers, I’ll have to send out an email and request that folks re-subscribe.  Stay tuned on this and I’ll let you know what happens.

Well, that’s much longer than a normal blog post, so I’ll sign off now.

Thanks for stopping by and reading my blog. Now – go make some photos!  And if you’re having issues with your server, don’t call me!

©2018, Ed Rosack. All rights reserved