On June 17, Jackie suggested that I pay to use the NextGen Gallery programme so that she can ask them for help in resolving the problem, which I promptly did. Her email on the 21st shows the exchange with NextGen, who now think that we have a hosting issue which needs to be resolved by Melbourne IT. Both Jackie and I have spoken with them and Jackie has exchanged emails. They have issued a ticket to undertake the work suggested by NextGen. I’m about to head overseas. I wonder what I will find on my return.
One can expect the kind of presentation and functionality issues (which Jackie was able to promptly resolve) to occur after such a major upheaval to the website. However, I emailed her today about a new set of difficulties I encountered when I tried to overcome the failure of certain photos to download to the albums. They were present on the admin site, but not on the website. When I attempted to create a new image, I was either not allowed to change the sort order (the position of the image in the album) or save the changes. Instead, a 403 error page appeared. Nor was I able to add new images to an album. Jackie replied, saying she would get on to the problem.
Since the beginning of 2024, I wanted to launch a new album titled Animal Builders, which has long been a subject of interest to me. Try as I might, all the emails and phone calls I made to Be IT Safe about the album, were ignored, though I received an invoice for AU$75.24 on the 26th of every month for hosting and upkeeping my website, which I invariably paid. It was only today, having engaged Jackie Keys to develop the site on its new domain name, that the Animal Builders album was inaugurated and what a great thrill it has been for me. I set to work and have uploaded fourteen images. The previous new album was Filming it All, launched in January 2016.
With time running out, I phoned the editor of The Tamborine Mountain News yesterday morning and she gave me the phone number of Jackie Keys, a highly regarded website developer, whom I promptly phoned. She agreed to fix the faulty functions resulting from the backup of biodiversity.com.au and came up trumps today.
Today, my IT expert, backed up biodiversity.com.au and transferred it to speciesdiversity.au, with the help of a digital expert from Melbourne IT, whom he phoned. The backup was successful, save for two vital functions which were missing. The Album main page was present, but clicking on any of the thumbnails, resulted in a blank screen with the text: Not a valid template. The species search function produced a text: This form is not secure. Autofill has been turned off. Everything else on the site had been transferred and worked properly. All the album images and texts existed on the admin site. I also paid Melbourne IT to host the site.
Every two years, Melbourne IT send me reminders about the renewal of my domain name on the 17th of May. When I phoned to renew the name this morning, I was told that biodiversity.com.au would expire on the renewal date because I no longer had an Australian Business Number, something my accountant confirmed when I phoned him shortly after. You can imagine how shattered I was, fearing that my website, evidence of my life-affirming activity for 27 years, would vanish into thin air, leaving me with a huge, impossible to fill, void. Then, I dug my heels in, determined to keep my online presence alive. I discussed domain names which didn’t require an ABN and asked if speciesdiversity.au was available. On 2.5.24, I bought the name.
A major update to the site was carried out over the preceding weekend, which has left two considerable problems and a minor problem to be fixed.
Before the site went live in early October, I kept track on its progress. On 1.9.18 I noted that the Gallery only had 42 pages instead of 72. By 19.9.18 there were 72 pages. However, having now curated the Gallery for the past three weeks, I discovered that some of the missing pages had got lost in translation, ie some of the pages were not successfully migrated from the old to the new site. A tell-tale sign was the 3 remnant night images; proof that 9 of the images which made up the page had been lost. To cover for this, a number of back end pages consisted entirely of birds, fungi and rainforest plants, as if they were mini album pages. Rectifying this was in itself, cumbersome additional work, to curating the entire Gallery in the manner adopted for the Albums. Thankfully the job is now done, though I tend to be consistently inconsistent in this project and I will need to check all the texts for missed typos.