I hadn’t planned on a special Easter post this year, but this one has been lying around for a while, so I’d just like to say Happy Easter to everyone with this little update. Althought there might not be happening too much right here at the moment, I’m still posting photos daily over on the Photograpghy Blog and I’m posting some spacey news regularly over on Google+ too, so I’m definitively not out of the loop. But now on to the news…
A couple of weeks ago, I finally moved the blog to the new Bibra.eu domain, something I wanted to do since sometime last year, but I never got around to it. This actually involved creating a complete copy of the site and putting a redirector in place of the old address, so I wouldn’t have to change every graphics url and all files are still in both locations – luckily, I have plenty enough webspace for that. On the surface, the address switch changes nothing because all old urls are still valid and will be simply redirected to the new domain if they’re visited, so there will be hopefully no dead links. The other two websites, DVDLog and my Photography Blog are not affected by this and still remain at their current addresses.
The other change under the hood is a slightly optimized and updated template, which actually looks mostly the same, but has some rewritten and improved CSS code. It also has an experimental mobile template, which kicks in when you open the website on a tablet or phone in portrait orientation – this is extremely beta, if not alpha, because the re-jiggered menu is still not functional and there’s currently no way to call up more menu items or the sidebar. I’m still figuring out how to implement a popup or slide-out menu for touch displays, which isn’t all that easy because the CSS hover property doesn’t work on touch devices and I’m not good enough with Javascript to write something from scratch. But I’ll figure it out and in the meantime I’ll think of an in-between solution soon.
Another feature I’ve recently added is SSL encryption for all my sites – I discovered that my provider All-Inkl.com has added easy support for Let’s Encrypt certificates a while ago and of course I took advantage of that. This is mostly a way for myself to encrypt the WordPress backend, but all three websites are available with SSL encryption now. Although keep in mind that parts of the sites, especially some of the graphics, will still be loaded over unencrypted connections, so this is only a half-secure solution from a visitor’s perspective and I’m aware that Let’s Encrypt certificates aren’t really worth that much. For that reason, I haven’t made the SSL encryption mandantory, but you can put a https:// in front of my websites and they will be fully working.
That’s all for now – as usual, everything here is more or less constantly under construction and if something is broken, please don’t hesitate to tell me here in the comments.