You haven’t heard from me around here in a while because I have been a bit preoccupied lately. In addition to our property search, home purchase, cross country move, and welcoming Wyatt into our pack, I have been buried with PHP, MySQL queries, FTP sessions and function calls.

Say what, you say? It’s been quite a learning experience really, which I care to share in depth someday. But for now, I’ll just tell you what it means…

We just completed our migration of Tripawds to the WordPress MU platform, but RVblogz was my first WPMU installation. You say what again? Basically, it means we are now offering free blogs for tripawd lovers and full-time RVers.

Yes, we announced RVblogz a long time ago, but the recent migration to WPMU has enabled us expedite blog creation and offer much more robust features for RVbloggerz. In fact you can get your own free travel blog in seconds, now that we have automated the blog creation process. Well, WordPress MU has, but we made it work!

If you want to check out a fine example of how full-timers are using RVblogz, check out the Purcells On Wheels traveling family blog! Or, how many of you have heard of the Killbarney project?

Rebuilding the Tripawds community has been exciting, as Jerry’s discussion forum members have grown to 800 strong. Now they can all have their own three legged dog blogs. And with the RVblogz Communities feature, members can create their own mini-facebook, all about RVing. OK, well maybe not. But in addition to easily publishing a travel blog with over 100 themes to choose from, you can create your own little RV community with a message board, Wiki pages, and news items.

There’s much much more we will let you read about RVblogz. But why not sign up for your travel blog now and join the community? Or join Tripawds so you can chat online with us in the new and improved Live Tripawds Chat.

So much to tell, such little time … just wanted any readers we have left to know why I’ve been such a stranger lately. And now that we’re headed back to ranch so I can work the Vickers hay harvest, I may become even stranger yet. If that is at all possible.

If you’re seeing this post, then we have successfully migrated to our own dedicated server. You may not be since DNS changes can take some time to propagate throughout the world, but I digress.

We’re still working out some kinks so feel free to report any technical difficulties. Thank you for your patience and continued support!

Anyone who ever wants – or needs – to raise funds for anything online should definitely check out this ChipIn! widget.

We’re collecting contributions over at tripawds.com to help fund our first managed server hosting account. The community on Jerry’s site has grown beyond our current shared hosting plan’s capabilities. And it showed as poor performance in the Tripawd Discussion Forums and Chat Room.

So, Bob is provisioning our new dedicated server. Soon I get to learn cPanel and endure the WordPress migration thing for the tripawd blog and move the Simple:Press forums. That means this site will follow. Expect downtime over the upcoming week. Thank you for your continued support.

We’ve been asked a couple times now about the differences between setting up your own WordPress blog and having a free blog at whatever.wordpress.com.

For inquiring minds who want to know, here’s an exchange I had a while back with one such interested party who has valid concerns about blog spam. I replied with what I feel are the primary benefits of running our own installation of WordPress.

… any advice you could offer on running your own instance of WordPress rather than setting your blog up at xxx.wordpress.com … WordPress offers cautions about the potential problems with spambots posting to blogs, and note they have a variety of things in place to prevent this.

I’m wondering how much of a problem you folks have found this, and what provisions you may have had to take to secure your own blog against illegitimate postings and other intrusions?

My Reply: The “Akismet” anti-spam WordPress plugin that comes with a standard installation of WordPress catches the majority of spam comments received through our blogs. Periodically some will get through, but by configuring our blogs to require moderation of first-time comments, we can easily “spam” them without them ever appearing on the site.

We also use the WP-Deadbolt plugin which lets us blacklist specific domains from attempting to register for our blogs. This also greatly reduces the potential for comments from known spammers.

In all, spam is not an issue for us, and we have our four blogs running on our own WP installations. Management and moderation of spam must take us less than an hour a month.

The major difference between installing your own WordPress.org blog, and having a WordPress.com blog – aside from the custom domain issue – is flexibility. At xxx.wordpress.com, you cannot install plugins or customize the code behind your blog.

With your own installation you can hack away to your heart’s content and tweak the code to customize functionality and appearance however you see fit. This does however, require additional time and technical ability.

Here are just a few links that discuss the pros and cons in more detail. Hope this helps at last somebody out there!

WordPress.com Software and Free WordPress.org Blogs, Benefits and Cons

What’s the difference between WordPress.com and WordPress.org blogs?

Hosted WordPress software blog vs. xxx.wordpress.com blogs

Before we left Northern California, we wanted to take another gander at the rural Siskyou County town of Etna, in the beautiful Scott Valley, just west of Yreka.

Etna has always been one of our favorite spots. With the stunning Marble Mountains as a backdrop, this old ranching community is the gateway to some of the most spectacular, rugged scenery in the state. We’ve had many backpacking adventures in those mountains, and were never disappointed (well, except once when cows trampled our campsite, but that’s another story . . . ).

Since we hit the road, Etna has always stayed on my short list of possible places in which to buy land. And now, with a good basis on which to compare it to, we set out to take a closer look.

As we drove from Eureka to Etna, and still hadn’t arrived after reaching the four hour mark, we started thinking, “Wow, this is farther than we remembered.”

It took us a total of six hours to get there, and “there” wasn’t really anywhere. The biggest metropolis, Redding, (population 90k) is two hours away. Getting to paradise was an exhausting, grueling drive. Hmmm, guess I blocked that out.

Nothing had changed since we’d last visited. The old familar landmarks were still there. Bob’s. The ice cream shop. The brewery. But after taking a hard look around, we realized that the place seriously lacked any kind of ethnic or age diversity, and even a real economy. Not even the summer adventurers like us could infuse enough cash into that area to breathe life into it the rest of the year. What I once thought was quaint, now looked like a tired town going down the path of extinction.

After consulting with a local United Country agent (UC is the best resource for rural property sales) , we hit the backroads to check out some land parcels. But to our disappointment, anything we could afford was either so far off the beaten path that four wheel drive was needed year-round, or it was in one of a couple of tidy rural subdivisions with cookie cutter “rustic” homes. Once we measured our criteria against reality, we knew this wasn’t the place for us.

After just two days, we crossed Etna off our list. And because the rest of California isn’t anywhere I’d want to live, we crossed the entire Golden State off our list as well.

Just a few years ago, we could’ve moved to this little piece of paradise in a flash. We were so tired of Eureka. But our world was smaller then, and we were too stupid to know any better.

Funny how 18 months on the road can change your perspective on things.

OK, so far so good with our upgrade to WordPress 2.7. No fatal PHP errors or major incompatibility catastrophes. This is a good thing.

But we haven’t yet upgraded the theme which is probably why your saying, “What’s the big difference?” But with so many hard-coded theme template modifications, I may not upgrade Mandigo anytime soon. The new version does have some pretty cool new features, but I think I’ll just quit while I’m ahead here and get to work on Jerry’s site to see what can of worms I can open with the Discussion Forums upgrade.

You can consider this post just a test drive of the new WordPress 2.7 interface, which I must admit is pretty sweet. And a test of our NextGen gallery and TrackPing plugins.

The only other change you may notice – if you ever used it – is the missing “Email this Post” feature. Well, the WP-Email plugin didn’t play nice after the upgrade so we’ve eliminated it. No worries though, the new Sociable plugin lets you email this post using the first “Share This Link” icon below.

Please let us know if you experience any new technical difficulties, or if your subscription feed no longer works. But then, I guess you’d never get this if it didn’t!

The new year brings change indeed. Everywhere, including here. It’s high time we upgrade WordPress and all the plug-ins on this site, so that’s what we’re doing.

The site may be down or appear broken for a while, but we hope to be back online soon … really soon. Please stand by.

What’s this have to do with Mt. Shasta or our dashboard Jackalope? Absolutely nothing. Just please stand by.

We just received the funniest comment on any of our posts, from someone named Harvey. (Sorry RhodesTer.)

It made me laugh. And it reminded me of fellow workamper Al, who we met working here at Vickers Ranch.

On the post I wrote about trying the NextGen Gallery Worpress plugin, Harvey said:

“You got a picture of canned pork brains, and everybody wants to comment on what program you’re using!”

ROFLOLFYIETATBD!

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Did we happen to mention that this blog is now officially one year old? (Hold the applause.)

It’s been over a year actually, considering we started it as a marketing tool to sell the graphics company we built up for ten years. We slowly turned it into a travel blog once we hit the road, so there is no firm anniversary date.

With that said, I hereby present my state of the blog address, with analysis, on the one year anniversary of launching our full time RVing sabbatical road trip adventure travel lifestyle change property search community escape tribute blog.

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If anyone follows our adventures close enough to actually check for new photos on our gallery page, I truly wonder why. But they might have noticed some big changes there a little while back. I gave the galleries an overhaul, but didn’t announce it because we went for a while there without a camera. And what fun would new galleries be without new photos?

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