We recently had a visit from our son-in-law, Colin. I’ve said before that I don’t check to see if anyone actually reads this blog. However, I know from our conversations that from time to time Colin takes a look. This was confirmed during the latest visit when he mentioned that he liked the picture of the F/A-18 in the header. Since I changed the look of the site only in early September (see A new look) then he must have looked at it in the past month.

Anyway I thanked him for his comment, but had to tell him that unfortunately the F/A-18 had now disappeared from the header. Why? Because I’ve decided to change the image in the header at the beginning of every month.

For fans of the F/A-18 it’s still in the blog though: see NY Air Show – US Navy F/A-18 Super Hornet

As may be apparent I’ve changed the look of the site.

Last Saturday I started to experience severe performance problems. It was taking an inordinate amount of time to load a page and as often as not I would get an error message of some kind. So I sent a message off to my web hosting company. However, before I could get a response from them I started tinkering. First I tried a couple of things on the server. The error log told me there was some problem with ‘php55.cgi’. I took a look at my various domains and noticed that they all seemed to be using PHP 5.6 except for this one which was using PHP 5.5. So I changed it use the more recent version. Didn’t help.

Then it occurred to me that it might well be a problem with WordPress (which I was responsible for) rather than a server related problem.

I tried an automatic upgrade to the latest upgrade to WordPress and something went badly wrong. I suspect that with all the performance problems the upgrade aborted in mid course (without telling me of course) so some of the files were from the old version and some from the new – never a recipe for success! Now nothing worked so the only thing I could try was a manual re-install, which I did. Things were now much better except that I was getting error-messages related to the theme I had been using. I had been tiring of the old theme anyway. It as a bit graphics heavy and the sliding graphics seemed a bit too flashy and in any case seemed only to repeat the textual menu. So I decided to look for something simpler and came across this one, which I’ll use for now. It looks fine on my laptop and I like the way it seems to emphasize the images rather than the text, but when I checked the site on my ipad I noticed that the top menu wraps in a, to me, very unattractive way. So I may change it again if I can find something better.

I may make some other changes too – including downplaying the role of the blog, adding a static front page and other pages of galleries/portfolios. This probably won’t happen for a while though. I spent most of yesterday fixing the above problems and I’m not in the mood for another marathon session.

Apart from adding new content I don’t often make changes to this site – the last time was in April, 2013. However, I got sick of looking at the same old pictures in the sliding panels below the main header. So I decided to replace them with some more recent images.