For longer than I can remember, I’ve had a website. Before websites, I had a Gopher site, if you have any idea what that was. But as technologies changed, and the tools for updating a site changed, I have had to reengineer my little home on the Internet. For some years now, I’ve used iWeb to update and maintain my HenryMelton.com site. Before that, it was hand-crafted pages, sometimes using Dreamweaver to handle the link-checking and automated tasks.
Now, it’s come to pass that iWeb has been abandoned so long that I can no longer safely use it to update my pages without risking horrible formatting errors. So, I did what so many other people have done, I took a look at WordPress. My hosting service has many software tools already installed, so it was effortless to set up a new branch on my site. Henrymelton.com/0 was my iWeb site. Henrymelton.com/2 became the WordPress version. The learning curve wasn’t too bad. I replaced the functionality of my landing page easily enough and set up the links needed to make everything available.
From long experience, I know that changing any links is hazardous. People find interesting pages and share them to their friends. Those links are out of my control, and often, totally unknown to me. As a result, I intend to keep the zero branch active and unchanged for as long as I can — years certainly. But everything new will now be done on the WP branch.
I invite you to go visit. If you want, you can compare the old with the new. In any case, if you have HenryMelton.com bookmarked, that’s fine, it will be redirected to the new site. But if you have a link that says “henrymelton.com/0/something_else” then know that you might be wise to search out the new alternative and change it.