Midwest Lost Site Blog

If you poke around the site, you sill see some minor changes. I’m actually (once again) performing a rewrite of the site. Usually I try to ensure there are no broke links, spelling and grammar are corrected, generally clean up, and and make minor changes. Most of the changes are behind the scenes. You will notice the link colors have changed. This is because I have started adding style sheets to the site.

With the “upgrades” to the site, it only took me a matter of hours (rather than days) to update all of the HTML. Moving forward, the changes I made will allow me to write new pages faster. This is a very good thing because I tend to drag my feet in writing the HTML after I have the photographs up.

I’m very very satasifed with the site. Please let me know of any comments or feedback you have. Also let me know if I missed any broke links or pictures.

I’m sorry for not getting the HTML done sooner, it seems I forgot to write pages for Agudas Achim Jewish Cemetery and Mitchell Cemetery. This is an error I have corrected tonight. I also did some clean up on the West Virgina pages. Let me know if you find any broken links or anything else that needs corrected.

This post deals with 2 events. First off, I was giving permission to photography a cemetery that is on the property of a Dublin, Ohio business. This required several emails and coordinating with their PR & security staff. Due to the requirements placed on me, I am not allowed to mention the business, the exact location of the site, or show any pictures that depict their building (which was kind of hard and I was not able to post several of my favorite photos from the shoot).

Mitchell Cemetery

The second piece of of news is that when I visited Salem Cemetery on 10/20/2007, I had the chance to meet with a news paper reporter for The Times Leader. Here is a link to scans of the actual article. I really wish I could have found a copy of it online. This is the first media attention the website has received, so I am pretty excited.

I found the following site while searching around on the internet today. I’ve already contacted the the site and find they are really cool. I look forward to possibly meeting with this group and doing some exploring. Feel free to check out their site:
Egypt Valley Paranormal Investigations

I’ve also done some minor maintenance to the site (mainly fixing broken pictures and spelling errors). This year has been a drag, because I’ve got some personal things going on and have not had a chance to do much exploring. I still hope to go out once or twice before it gets cold.

I found out today that my contact script had died. For anyone that has sent me a message and I never replied, I am sorry. I never got it. I did spend the morning working on a new scripting package. The new package should be a lot more secure, but should look very similar to the old script.

Being as the same script had been running on all 3 of my sites, I will be triple posting this entry.

This post is a dual post both in my personal site blog and the Midwest Lost blog.

You might notice that the site photo gallery looks a bit different. Lately I created a new personal photo gallery. After creating it, I moved all of my personal stuff over from the Midwest Lost gallery and reorganized it to reflect it’s new position as gallery for only Midwest Lost gallery.

This morning I was doing some house cleaning on my hosting account. I have 2 domains, and was just organizing folders and files to make it easier to find what I want to specifically manage. Anyways, after moving the folder that houses the blog, the blog quit working.

I tried reinstalling and new installations, and everything. Finally I found a note on a website to remove a line of code from a config file and that fixed it. But I had lost my configuration with all of my posts and information. I almost cried.

Luckly, I realized in my stumbling to fix the problem, I had changed the config where it calls the database information in the database that holds the blog info. After modifying the config one final time, I managed to recover my blog and restore it to pre house cleaning.

There are several morals to this story. Read the documentation before trying to fix a problem. Sometimes the fix is in front of your eyes and you can save yourself alot of misery.

Being as my webhost was holding my old blog hostage with their “included blog”, I decided to move away from it to something with a bit more features and options. I had wanted to do a direct export from the old blog to this one, but was unable. Luckly I dual posted all of my entries on myspace. I was able to recover all but 3 or 4 of my posts.

Atleast with this platform for my blog, I can export the data and back it up at will.

I know the site has been looking screwed up the past few days. And that is my fault. I was working on another website that is on the same web hosting package as this site. I accidentally uploaded files for that site to the wrong directory and made the website go away. To compound the problem, I had a backup, but kept forgetting to upload the files to fix the problem when I was home and had access to them.
But all is fixed. It took me all of about a minute and a half to restore the backup last night and put the website back the way it should be.

On a slightly different note, I found some other UE blogs that I wanted to provide links too. I found them a fun read. Here are the links, and I will be also posting them on the links section in the lower right corner of the screen.
http://www.neueu.org/blog/
http://www.undergroundozarks.com/blog/

I always kinda knew that this blog had an RSS feed, but I also find out that my gallery has an RSS feed setup too. So today’s post is going to be about providing the url’s to access the RSS feeds of both of these features of my website.

• RSS Feed for Site Blog
• RSS Feed for Site Gallery

In addition to this little discovery, I’ve also been doing some cleaning up to the site and modified the code for my contact page. After submitting your message, you can either go back to the page you came from or go to the homepage. Before all you could do was go to the homepage.

Expect more updates to the site as the weather is kind of crappy and makes going out a hassle.