Bengfort.com

Well, it appears that we have hit our first road bumps with using the blogger function: specifically, it may be blocked in China, and that is not a good sign. Devi spent a few days trying to get her blog up and running, but with no success because she was not allowed to log into the website. We will continue to try to get her up to speed, but it may be a while before her blog starts publishing.

Luckily Jaci and Bethany seem to be up and running, each with their own unique style of blog! My first question was if it felt like we were leaving bengfort.com to go to these blogs, and I think the answer is yes! Except for the fact that the web address still says www.bengfort.com and hopefully still has the little favicon at the top; the blogs look completely different, and I have no good way of putting navigation onto the blogs except links back to the main page or the blog pages in the little section of the Blog that says “Links”. Is this acceptable?

Next is caching- which is kicking my butt. I know mom may have missed the Birthday banner that I put up on the website because she had an old homepage cached in her browser, she didn’t hit refresh, and therefore the old website loaded without the new content. When my visitors can’t see the new content, they don’t get the most from the site, and miss things like Birthday banners or Christmas wish list links, etc. And back to the blogging: they may miss comments put on the page, or not have their comments post quickly. We need a way to fix this, but I am not sure how yet (feel free to add a comment letting me know how, if you can!)

Finally, I have no way to track who is visiting the blogs, unless folks are using comments, which they are not, which means I have no idea if people are reading about what is going on, which is not a good sign, and frankly I am scared that they are not, which is a bummer.

So with these thoughts in mind, I am going to troubleshoot, please send suggestions my way!