A Whole New World

Welcome to my new domain, and site, seanlockephotography.com .

This is the name under which I’m going to try and consolidate all of my photography information, from my blog, to my business facebook presence.  I’m still working on the big picture, so this is the first step.  I’m not going to be blogging at seanlockedigitalimagery.wordpress.com any more, so please bookmark this new site if you want to keep up with my iStockphoto Buyer tips and the other various information I dish out.

If you want to know a bit more about my set up, read on.

Background Information

The new domain was registered with godaddy.com, who I’ve used for many years, and have had no issues.  I will grant that my needs are fairly simple though.  I host my web space with page-zone.com.  Same as above – many years, relatively few problems, simple needs.  After a few minutes trying to remember how to put the pieces together, I recall that all it takes is pointing the nameserver attribute on godaddy to the nameservers in the account information for my new account on page-zone.  Over the next 24-48 hours, I find my computer randomly reverting to the godaddy default page as the new information cascades to various places around the net.  After two days, it seems to be pretty reliably resolving the correct site.

I’ve decided to go with WordPress to power the site.  I was using (obviously) it for my seanlockedigitalimagery.wordpress.com blog, so I’m fairly comfortable with the use of the system.  My goal here was to be able to host it at my domain, for better search optimization, as well as to gain ftp access and to be able to do things like put ads in if I wanted.  I used the Fantastico installer on my site’s cpanel administrative interface to install WordPress.

The overlying theme comes from PageLines.com and is the Platform Pro Template.  I really like the clean look of it, so I haven’t done too much modification to it, but I am sure things will be changed in the future.  There is a bit of a learning curve in figuring out how all the template pieces and widgets and things work, which I am still tweaking.

After setup, I had to use the WordPress export function on the old blog so I could transfer all the previous posts here.  The file was 3.2 MB, and the WordPress importer has a limit which comes from your webhost’s php upload limit attribute.  While I waited for the site support to change the limit on my account, I found this WordPress Splitter, which breaks your archive .xml file into smaller chunks which can then be imported under the default php 2MB limit.  I went with 1MB chunks, because 1.8MB gave issues.  The importer will download and host any attachments (ie, any uploaded images) that were in the old blog.  So all my blog images have been duplicated here, in case the other site goes away.  Before splitting, I did have to do a search and replace in the XML file to point all the internal links to the new site so they wouldn’t break.

One of the features I have on my corporate digitalplanetdesign.com website is an automatically updating display of newly accepted images to my iStock portfolio.  To incorporate this functionality into the WordPress site, I had to write a widget, which is just a little piece of code that does something.  This meant I needed a local place to develop the plugin.  I already have EZPHP on my laptop – apache server, mysql and php, so I downloaded the free WordPress installation package from WordPress.org.  I used PhpMyAdmin on my localhost to create the WordPress MySql database, as detailed in the 5 minute install instrucitons, and soon after following the rest, had it up and running.

The widget grabs the .rss feed from iStockphoto that lists the last 10 accepted images, and parses it to pull out titles and links.  I then wrap each in the new referral code data from iStockphoto before sending all the html back for display.  We’ll see how that works out.  Big thanks to a great tutorial on widgets, which I found here.  I know enough php to be dangerous, but this blog was really helpful.  Now, I want to write some more widgets!

That’s the skinny.  Hope you like the new site, and sorry for the delay in updates as I’ve been working on this for several days.