Dear friends and followers, as you might have noticed there have not been blog updates for over a year. Sometimes the life is just throwing something in front of you and you just have to chew it.
For the impatient readers here is TLDR: we’re back, the blog is alive again and supports mobile.
The long story began about two years ago when I started to get emails from Google that our blog is not mobile browser compatible, and we should update it if we want to stay in their search results. At the same time the end of life for Drupal 7 was starting to creep closer and that was our blog’s platform. I thought it would be easy just to upgrade to Drupal 8, get a new theme and be done with it. Not so fast. First of all, Drupal 8 is a totally different beast compared to 7. The learning curve was steep and despite of my IT career I had to raise my hands. Everything was overly complicated. Drupal 8 was not anymore something that could easily be thrown to a server and patched together during the weekend for the blog. Also, Suwena blog is multilingual and none of the upgrade tools worked without issues.
Meanwhile WordPress had grown from a software that was used to host hobby blogs to a full featured content management system. After making various tests and thinking about what can go wrong, I bit the bullet and installed WordPress. The migration was smooth except that all images in both the languages were quadrupled. Our blog had over 2000 images per language on a site. OMG, now suddenly there were over 16000 of them. Also for some reason the captions of all English images were in Finnish and vice versa.
The speed of internet has increased and now everybody is having 4k TVs or even smartphones with 4k screens. There were much smaller resolution in the older images. So, to get everything current I went through all the images and updated the resolutions where possible in addition inserting them to new theme that supports mobile devices as well.
Meanwhile we have also relocated to live in the island of Malta and started to build a house there. All this combined with our busy business life left overall very little time to work with the blog.
Anyhow, all updates are now done. In upcoming weeks, we will update the stories from our sailing in Galician rías and in Portugal.
Enjoy the sailing blog and fair winds.