newmovies.ie, where is it gone!

Posted by: Sean | Posted on: May 27th, 2010 | 0 Comments

Last June myself and Sean MacEntee launched a website called newmovies.ie and in case it's not obvious to you, it was about movies ;)! The site was doing alright, but nowhere near how well it should of been doing. On average, each month that website got about 150 unique visits, which is not really a lot. After a while the site ended up being put away on a shelf and forgotten about, every so often a few new movie trailers were added to it but nothing that would get a lot of traffic. It finally came to renew the domain this year, and Irish domain names are not as cheap as a .com, they are about 4 times more expensive and I wasn't sure if I wanted to hold onto the domain or not. I ended up deciding that I would go ahead and renew the domain. Shortly after renewing it I moved most of my websites over to a new server here in Ireland since I was getting rid of my old server. During the move I backed up all of newmovies.ie, including its database. I could easily just through it back up now, back with its old publishing software, Joomla! but I think it would be of no benefit. Joomla! was a learning curve for me, for the first few months or so of using it I wasn't very sure of where everything was or how to go about editing a file, even one as simple as the front page, eventually I came to terms with it and I am now confident with where most things are within Joomla!. One of the major drawbacks of using Joomla! was that over time it became very slow, it would take a long time for pages to load, most likely due to the amount of modules/plugins that were being used. In the end we decided that there was no point putting the site back up using Joomla! since it was slow and it could probably perform better using other publishing platforms such as Wordpress, which myself and Sean know virtually inside out by now! The idea was to basically port the old design over to Wordpress and start fresh, new content, new members, new everything! I am still all for doing this, but I am not sure when it will happen, I would ideally like to have it done before I have to renew it again next year, otherwise it would be a waste of renewing it this year. So where I am at the moment with it is that I am trying to think of a different approach that could be taken other that directly having movie trailers, there is a way that I can make a simple page that has all the latest trailers, that would automatically update, this is just a matter of copying some code from the people who provide us with the trailers and then adding a bit of style to match the sites layout. I am thinking of incorporating other features into the site, but just not sure and what to include. So some thought will have to be put into this domain over this summer and I think once I have completed a few of the sites that I want to get done this summer,  if I have time I will come back and get a kick start with this domain!

Clean slate

Posted by: Sean | Posted on: May 26th, 2010 | 0 Comments

Over the last 24 hours I have been busy with getting my computer into a good performance level for this summer. To do this I decided to fully format my computer and start fresh. Since I have a lot of files on my computer, I knew the longest part of this would be backing up what I need. That took a while, I ended up keeping about 90gb of files, this included some programs that I needed. I also had to backup my iTunes library this was really simple, I just copied my music folder and then exported the iTunes library file and that was it done! Since I am working on a few websites, some for myself and some for clients I backed up those files into a few different places just in case the hard drive I was using to back up the files managed to fail, it would be just my luck that it would and I would have to work my ass off to recover what I lost! I backed up all my files onto an internal hard drive which I actually keep outside of my computer, it is just a spare hard drive I have lying around that comes in useful for doing just this thing! To get my files onto it I used a set of cables I bought a while back which provide power to the hard drive and also has a usb cable for transfer! The next step was just to format the hard drive, I always worry after I just push that format button, in case I forgot to back something up, it would be lost forever, luckily it hasn't happened to me yet, and hopefully it never will! I reinstalled Windows 7 onto the computer once the format was complete, it took about 20 minutes which is not a bad time for installing it but usually I would install it from a usb key, which only takes about 10 minutes, that is a much faster way of doing it however I didn't have a spare usb key to put Windows 7 on so I had to do it using the disc. I worked on this from 11pm last night to about 2am, in that time I backed up all my files, formatted and reinstalled windows and then once all that was done I started on getting all my files back onto the computer. Putting the files back onto the computer was actually pretty fast and while the files were copying back on, I installed a few of my programs including my anti-virus suite (Pc-Tools Internet Security), iTunes and Tweetdeck. Once the files were back on the computer I organised them into a better order than I had them before. I used to have my pictures, videos and documents all mixed together, now I have them in separate locations, that should help me find things quicker in the future! I decided that was enough for one night, which was actually the bulk of the work complete. Today I just added on the last of the programs I use regularly, such as Microsoft word, FileZilla (ftp program), Gtalk, msn, Photoshop and Dreamweaver. The reason I wanted to reinstall my operating system was because over time your computer tends to become slower than usual and doesn't perform to its best abilities, this can happen from parts of programs being left behind when you uninstalled a program, it also frees up space. Also any entries in the registry that are not needed are completely gone now so the registry is smaller now since there is basically nothing on the computer. Now my computer is working much faster, I do notice the difference. The boot speed has drastically increased, which is great! :)

work begins on my new theme

Posted by: Sean | Posted on: May 25th, 2010 | 0 Comments

I have finally begun working on my new theme for this blog, if you were on my blog last Saturday night around 2am you may have seen the early version of the new theme. I activated it temporarily just so I could see how images on my blog post would be affected and a few other parts that I want to change in it. I bought the theme from ThemeForest, I have bought themes from that site before, and they are good quality so I don’t mind paying a bit for them. Now though I am in the process of setting up wordpress on another domain so I can edit the new theme without it affecting anyone who is visiting my blog because when I am editing I might break something when I am adding things into the theme!

 

The theme itself is very different from my current theme; it is in fact completely different in terms of colours. This current theme is dark, and the content seems very squashed. In my new theme the colours are much brighter and there is a lot more space for the content, the blog itself will be much wider in width and should be very lightweight which will help boost the blogs load speed. I am undecided if I will be keeping my current logo for this blog, it looks great but I am not sure if it will suit the new theme, and I think it is about time I got a new one. The current logo is made by LogoNerds, I am not sure how much I paid for it when I got it, it wasn't a lot, so I might try and either make my own new one or get another one made. When I put out my new theme I am going to update my list of bloggers in the sidebar, there is a few blogs I have started to read lately so I think I should add some new links, to show some support :D.