Static Home Page and Blog page

Web Technology

I decided that I wanted a static front page for this site (I’m not sure that’s the right decision but we are going to try it for a while).  So when I set up the site I managed to get it configured the way I wanted.  A few day later I decided that I also wanted a page to hold all my blog posts (this is normally how the front page is configured).

Try 1 

As usual what I do when I don’t know what I’m doing I’ll start by clicking through all the options.  I wanted a page so I started in WordPresses Page tab.  I made a new page however it had no options to configure it so it did not seam possible.

Try 2

If at first you do not succeed .. turn to google.  After a search I found this page.  I didn’t feel like watching the video so I just followed the text instructions.  However, it directed me back to the page tab that I’d just been at.  I assume that at some point wordpress has changed how to do this.  What I did learn was that it should be possible to do what I wanted and it’s functionality built into work press.

Try 3

With the renewed knowledge that what I wanted to do is possible I went back to my default behavior and started to click though options.  Something in the article had mentioned that most themes support this so I wondered if maybe it was in the theme setting.  Sure enough under Appearance ->Themes->Customize-Static Front Page I found what I was looking for.  A place to set both what I wanted as the front page and where I wanted my blog post to appear.  In “post” pull down menu was a list of all my pages.  I went and created a new page for the posts and then came back and assigned it.  Up next I needed to add the page to my default menus and I was all done.

Setting to add a post page
Setting to add a post page

Got It!

As an aside I’m pretty sure this is the same place that I turned off the dynamic front page to start with.  Isn’t it funny how our brains work.  At the time I had no need for the post portion so while I’m sure I read the option it was not important to me at the time so I just forgot all about it.

The Confused Lot Story

Site Information

Sometimes inspiration comes in the strangest of forms:  The spark that prompted me to take Confused Lot live was the need for a web site in order to apply for an iTunes Affiliate Program account (I have since been rejected but I’ll keep trying).  WWDC 2014 had an excellent overview of the affiliate program that got me interested in it.  The video can be found here as “Affiliate Tools for App Developers.”  After watching that a year ago I really wanted to experiment with the program but it requires ether a web site or an app in the app store.  Over the last few weeks I’ve been interaction with the iTunes store a lot, from search and buying apps to trying Apple Music.  I have also been playing with appshopper.com and was reminded of the affiliate program.  I decided I should try and get an account.  I debated releasing an app that I have partially ready but figured that would not be fair to the users.  So instead I decided to launch the website I’d been thinking about for a while but not doing anything about.

A few years ago, mostly as an excuse to play with content management systems, I started a blog about photography and technology called loosewirephoto.com (which is dead at this point).  My plan was to post regular pictures and stories about me experiencing with technology related to photography.  The name came from a project I was working on at the time to control my camera with a Raspberry PI.  (I never got around to posting about that but it was a pretty cool project that not only could control the camera but also feed it GPS coordinate and mimic the Nikon GPS accessory).  Anyway, for quite a while I had my camera rigged to a bread board and then to the PI with a mess of wires.  The name and logo came from this.  It captured the playful nature that I like to apply to learning.

At about the same time my wife (fiancee at the time) got interested in permaculture and was day dreaming about turning the vacant lots next to our house into an amazing garden (which hopefully we will still do at some point).  We really didn’t know anything about it but thought it would be cool to blog our way through all our trail and errors.  The name Confused Lot just popped into my mind.  What triggered it was that we were of course talking about the lots of land and also permaculture gardens often look a lot less organized that your standard yard.  But I also must have heard the term “confused lot” in reference to a group of people that are confused.  (A quick google search seems to show that the expression is more common in International than in the US)  But that is exactly what we would be.  As anyone just starting off on something new, that we know next to nothing about, we would be confused.  And just as with loose wire photo the name was playful, a little self deprecating, and hopefully conveyed the message that this was a safe place with little judgment, where  experimentation is encouraged, and failure is equally and success are equally celebrated on our learning journey? It turned out that the domain name was so I bought it.

Over the couple years since then we have not worked much on permaculture (we do have a very nice square foot garden) but the philosophy of learning through trial and error has endured and we are launching this site as a way to celebrate that and share what we learn along the way.

So we hope that until next time you

 keep trying til you get it

I’m also trying to get this site indexed for Derek Quam

Building an airplane in flight

Web Technology

This is now my second post to the site.  My first post was about trying to get SSL working on it.  When writing that post, word press failed to update the second half twice.  This seemed to happen exactly when I was writing about the admin log in portion.

Try 1

I was in the admin tool writing the post.  I opened a new tab and went to the the admin home page.  It brought up a log in prompt.  I did not log in.  When I went back to my authoring tab there was a log in prompt there too.  I logged in however nothing I wrote after that point was posted.

Try 2

I figured that just bringing up the log in window must have messed with the cookies used to hold the log in credentials.  So I needed to a way to keep separate cookies.  The most obvious way is to run two separate web browsers.  However, that is a bit awkward and you  might make the mistake of forgetting what browser you are in and open an new tab.

Try 3

So is there a way to have keep cookies separate in the same browser.  It turn out in most modern browsers there is in the form of “Private Browsing.” So I opened a new private window to use for exploring the site and kept the authoring tab in a regular window.  This mostly solved the issue however there is one danger of working this way.  That danger is that you may still accidentally open a new regular window into the site and thus corrupt your authoring.

Try 4 – Got It!

What I finally settled on as the best way to do this is to open the authoring tool as in a private window.  One of the nice things about a privacy window is that the tab itself is completely isolated from all other tabs and windows.  So it will be impossible for something happening in another window to disrupt the authoring tab.  The tab you use for exploring and checking the site can be a regular window or a another private one and it will not matter.  This is what I have settled on and I’m using the process right now to author this.  I would suggest that this might be a good process for anyone either experimenting with a site as the work on it or even for you “users view” preview.

’til next time, keep trying

Enabling SSL part 1

Web Technology

Today I’m going to try to get SSL working on this site.  This is tricky because:

  1. I don’t have an SSL certificate for confousedlot.com
  2. I don’t want to purchase a certificate for confousedlot.com

However, I do have a wildcard certificate for *.faidley.org and the two domains are hosted on the same host.

Try 1

I was hoping I could provide word press with an alternative url for the secure portion of the site (user log in and admin pages).  However, word press does not seem to provide this functionality.

Try 2

The confused lot page lives in a sub directory of faidley.org’s public html so I should be able to navigate it to through that structure.  In theory http://www.faidley.org/confusedlot.com/ should also be the home page of confusedlot.com.  However, word press must be doing some magic since it reports a 404 when I access that page.  At some point

Page did not work
Page did not work

Edit: Word press decided to delete the second half of my post.  So the rest was missing the first time I posted this.  I actual did figure out what happened and will post about it soon.

Try 2.5

Well I don’t really need the whole of the site to be SSL enable but I really would like the back end.  So lets try the faidley.org path for that. http://www.faidley.org/confusedlot.com/wp-admin/ That appears to work, however, wordpress actually does a redirect on that back to confusedlot.com so this will not work either.

Keep trying

I will have to keep trying on this one.  I’m pretty sure I could move the whole site to a default faidley.org location and use a redirect on confusedlot but then all users looking in the address bar would see a faidley.org address.  I would also like to investigate to see if there are any plug-in that do what I need. While my particular need is a little unusual it should be the same as someone trying to use their hosts SSL certificate with their hosted domain.

’til next time, keep trying