Site Update: Photoportal Page, Short Links, and Hosting

Over the last week, most of the work has been behind the scenes. I started work on the PhotoPortals page, looking into ideas for how that should work. Turns out that there are lots of options, but some ideas that seem great will take development. I think I’ll start with something simple, explore options and gather feedback, and evolve it over time. This makes sense because I hope to evolve photoportals themselves over time, adding richness and variation, so the presentation may well want to evolve, too. But none of that is evident yet because I needed to get some other things worked out.

Internet links (URLs) are integral to photospheres because they are the way to provide access to users. I use a URL shortening service, short.io, to make links shorter for posting and to track how different links are used. The solution uses the domain link.wholereality.net/ as the base for short links. That all worked, but the primary domain itself, wholereality.net, wasn’t working. It hasn’t been a problem, but I have plans for that moving forward, so decided to get it fixed as part of deploying the photoportals page. That involved working with my hosting provider but it eventually got fixed. And I learned some things about hosting, DNS, and subdomains.

Lastly, I did some detailed investigations of different ways of hosting this work – my current host, one better known for WordPress hosting, and hosting on wordpress.com itself. Some more work needs to be done, but it seems likely that I’ll move from my current host.