John van Gurp

I’m at a bit of a crossroads here… I need to consolidate my web materials.
jvangurp.com has been my website for a few years. When I set it up initially there was a bit of thought and I spent some time trying to get the right look using plain html (with wysiwyg editors). Now I seem to have more sites and hobbies and household tasks and workdays than web editing time. As a result some sites have suffered and don’t present a very good face, as it were.

This Wordpress approach is really fantastic. It looks so nice and it’s so easy. I haven’t taken the time to customize it to any degree however, until I sort out what to do with the old information. I can’t just turf it, as some of the pages get a lot of hits and I get emails from all over the place thanking me for some of the information like the Cruise ‘n Carry outboard motor manual pages.

So what’s the answer? Just create links to the old pages and put the links here? Copy the page bodies and images and paste them into Wordpress pages? How do I maintain the old links then? Redirects of each one? That might work…

I also have a newer site halifaxcams.com that I want to develop further, but again the original site is linked from many other external sites and I want to maintain that.

The latest project is my Quinpool Kid blog on the Halifax Herald online myConnect site. It’s a lot of fun having that blog and with the traffic it’s an opportunity to communicate with many more people.

I’m also still keeping up the Samba Nova site but am thinking some kind of content management approach might bet better… then again it’s working fine for now so maybe I will just leave it. What puzzles me though is how loittle use the discussion forum gets. It could be an amazingly useful tool but people in the band just don’t seem interested. I suspect the problem is common.

In the meantime I use it to archive all information I think will be sought out by people in the future. It has all kinds of organizational notes for this year’s Drumfest, and in a private board has email addresses and phone numbers.

Dreamhost’s mailing list feature has been really useful. Samba Nova relies on it almost exclusively now…

Anyway… I’m sure that 5 years from now I’ll be puzzling over the same challenges on some different set of systems. It’s more about communications and organizational processes than about any technical tools.