“Image of the Week” Busted, Awaiting New-Look Restart

My “Image of the Week” site busted yesterday with a server-forced PHP upgrade. Apologies to readers!

Since the photo-BLOG software we used is over a decade old (it wasn’t Word Press, but instead Pixelpost), incompatible with the newest PHP, and not produced/supported anymore, it’s toast. We’ll have to start over.

Elke thinks she can recover the text from the database, and I have all the images stored on my PC. IOTW was fun to do for over a decade and nearly 500 photos, but it’s dead in the water in the original form.

We’re going to start a new one, likely in photo-BLOG software that is modern, maintained, well-supported, and frequently updated, such as a Word Press theme. We use Word Press for SkyPix, the huge weather and water photo and story site I’ve been running in some form since the mid-1990s. SkyPix now is over a thousand pages under the “Tripod” theme for photographers, with more added every month, and it has been robust for four years.

We’ll likely use a different theme for the new IOTW, one that shows or links previous entries for ease of navigation, loosely similar to the old Pixelpost version of IOTW. What I don’t know yet is whether we’re going to try to reproduce IOTW all the way back to 2009 (again, nearly 500 posts), or just start over with a blend of old and new images, one per week. That will depend mainly on workload.

Either way, IOTW will make a glorious comeback, even if in a new look and form. I enjoy posting weekly images and musings from all over my historic photography portfolio, and won’t let untimely site-killing “upgrades” put a stop to that.

[EDIT 21 Jul 19] As of June through mid July, the old site has been temporarily restored whilst the new one is being constructed. I will post a separate BLOG entry, with link, when the new Image of the Week is fully ready to view.