New Site Look And the Headaches it Came With

Post date: Jun 9, 2019 4:27 PM

So the remainder of 2018 went by without much action on MIM. It was a year of dealing with a never-ceasing series of chronic pain flare-ups and focus on health paired with mandatory overtime at work and challenges of raising a preschooler.

I did do another Nanowrimo attempt in November, but even that didn't go so well between planning and throwing a preschooler's birthday party and Thanksgiving. (There was also quite a lot of killing time in the form of binge-watching movies and TV shows, but I won't get into all the mental and emotional crap that led to that being the go-to avoidance strategy. But at least I'm closer to up-to-date on some cultural norms.)

2019 started much the same way, but finally got a bit of a reprieve in the late March-April time-frame. Thank the gods!

But that didn't make time for MIM or any writing as I had hoped. Right as I was feeling more up to, well, anything, I had a big move to pull off (local, but it was Gabe's first move at an age where it really meant something).

I also got a few requests to review some books and products during this time and figured, "Yeah, sure. I can totally squeeze that in during the points when I can't work on the move."

It was going well, and then lo-and-behold, Google had made the switch to the *new* Google Sites mandatory. Well, damn. I squeezed in what I could and then focused everything on the move.

That accomplished, I then had to focus on getting myself grounded and centered. The move came with a lot of surprises along the way and, by the end of it, I was definitely on the strung-out side of things.

With the little time I've had since, I've been working on trying to update the site.

The new Google Sites meant having to completely re-do some things, like the Share buttons. (If you're unfamiliar with how it works, only just about any other website, you can just input a code on a single page and all pages automatically get updated with the share buttons. But Google Sites is anti-Java, meaning having to generate a different code for each page--hint: there's a lot of them--and then update each page with its code.)

In addition to that process, I've had to make updates to fix broken links, resort the navigation (Google decided it was best done alphabetically despite how the layout was set in the old version), add the links and new reviews as promised, and choose which of the very limited layout choices available was best suited for MIM (yes, this was the best of the options; perhaps it'll motivate me to include more images and the like).

If that wasn't bad enough, when I finally felt like I'd made all the necessary adjustments to publish the changes, Google then decided they needed to verify that I owned my own URL (funny, they didn't seem to have a problem continuing to link my URL with the old version of my Google site since the last time I verified).

06/14/2019 Update - Well, it took 5 days, but the URL is working again and the site is now live. What a headache!

Would've only taken a couple hours, but the New Google Sites was sending me to an incorrect page with incorrect parameters to enter, so while my domain name host and I were scratching our heads and wondering what I was doing wrong, Google was wondering why I had some other verification code set up (and failing to mention it).

But it's all squared away for you now.

It's been a time-consuming adjustment, but hopefully worth it. And there's still a few little things here and there I've likely missed that will need adjusting.

Feel free to drop a message to point out any broken links, problems with the share buttons, crazy formatting, or just to let me know what you think!

Blessings,

Evy