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Welcome to My New Site for 2015

Updated February 28, 2015: The domain stevemunro.ca now points to the site hosted at WordPress and is synonymous with swanboatsteve.wordpress.com.

Updated February 17, 2015: All articles and attachments from the old site have now been migrated here.

Starting on January 1, 2015, all of my new content will appear here.

For a period of time (likely until March 2015) “stevemunro.ca” will take you to my original site where articles are still active with comments. Given the number of hotlinks to recent activity, I am leaving those articles in their original locations.

Access to the new site will use the URL swanboatsteve.wordpress.com until February 28, 2015.

When the migration is completed and activity on the old site dies off, I will switch my domain to point to the new site and it will be accessible either via the WordPress domain name or using stevemunro.ca.

With the new site comes a new naming convention for posts and attachments. This is unavoidable. There will be different effects depending on the status of the migration.

  • Before the domain name is cut over, references to posts and attachments on the old domain will resolve there and display normally.
    • A copy of all content from the old domain from its inception in 2006 up to the end of 2014 will be available on the new site (this is a work in progress with only some attachments from 2008 and earlier remaining to be fixed).
    • During the migration, some of the hotlinks to attachments are not automatically updated, and they still point back to the old site. From a user’s point of view, this is transparent, but from mine, it is a cleanup job that will progress as I work through the articles.
    • There is an Archive Directory Page containing the post identifiers used on the old site along with their titles. Each entry is hotlinked to the version of the article on the new site.
  • All articles for 2014 have now been migrated to the new site.
  • After the domain stevemunro.ca is repointed to the site at wordpress.com, links to content in the “old” format may not work because of the file structure on the new site. WordPress appears to be handling the mapping to the new naming structure, but I am not sure that this is uniform for all articles.
    • Hotlinks using the old convention of “stevemunro.ca/?p=nnn” (where “nnn”) is the post id will fail on a “404” error. There is a hotlink from the main page to the Archive Directory to assist readers who come in with an old link.
    • Hotlinks to attachments using the old convention of “stevemunro.ca/wp-content/uploads/…” will fail. Sorry.
    • These problems will inevitably affect search engines such as Google that will still be pointing to the old content until they “discover” the new site and update the links.

If you have problems on the new site, please leave a comment here and I will try to rectify the situation.

If you’re looking for the link to RSS feeds for individual articles, they won’t appear automatically. However, it’s easy to build a URL for the feed: just take the article name and add the word “feed” at the end. For example, for this article:

https://stevemunro.ca/2014/12/29/welcome-for-2015/feed/

Thanks to everyone for putting up with the disruption this will cause. My site is coming up to its 9th birthday at the end of January, and needs to sit on a more robust service provider than I have been using since the inception.

16 thoughts on “Welcome to My New Site for 2015”

  4. The new site exerts stricter controls over how browsers display it, making it a lot harder to read in some places; tiny type, some text rendered in light grey on a white background. I can’t find any controls. Are they hidden somewhere I haven’t looked? Do they need enabling?

    A lesser picky point: old site presented comments oldest-first, new site shows them newest-first. A control for that would be welcome too.

    I have no objection to anyone else’s preferences, I just want to control my own, the way the web was originally meant to be (not that many places allow that any more).

    In case it makes a difference, I’m running Firefox 34.0.5 on Linux.

    Steve: I am still messing around with the CSS settings from the theme that I picked for the site. Definitely, I will look at type sizes and colours for readability. The theme is called “Misty Lake”, but obviously it’s a tad too foggy!

    The “make the type bigger” control is actually an add-on that is not available on this site, but Firefox has the ability to change the presentation size (View > Zoom). You can also use Ctrl and the Plus and Minus signs (at least on the Windows version) to change the type size.

    The comment sequence is an option in the configuration and I have changed it to oldest first so that you can read threads top to bottom.

    Liked by 1 person

  5. Happy new Year Steve! Will all of your old content still be publicly available after March 2015?

    Steve: Yes. Content up to the end of August has already been moved over (along with a few articles dated later because they were started earlier in the year, but updated later). The final migration will pick up content from September through December, 2014.

    Many of the articles that have been migrated still contain URLs pointing back to the old site. I am tracking these down and fixing these so that by the time the migration is completed, there should be no internal references to the old naming system for articles and attachments.

    As an aside, a comment that I deleted made reference to ads on WordPress.com. In fact, you only get ads if you run a free site, and I am paying quite a modest fee to be ad-free.

    Like

  6. I like your new website design. The old one was good too.

    While I differ from you on many issues such as the Scarborough subway, Eglinton Crosstown (I want it 100% grade separated), Sheppard subway, DRL, etc –- I would like to thank you for the social service that you are providing by keeping us up to date and trying to improve service for all (by your headway, etc analysis for example).

    The amount of your own unpaid time and effort you put into all this plus having to pay for the website, many of us are grateful to you. Keep up the good work and may the new year be a very pleasant one for you and your family.

    Just a question: the old website had a picture of some train track in a beautiful green space instead of a swan – was that old picture taken somewhere along the Richmond Hill Line?

    Steve: The picture on the old website came as part of the WordPress “theme” that I used initially nine years ago, and I have no idea of where it was taken. When I set up the new site, I decided, for a time, to use a completely different picture so that there would be no confusion as to which site someone was looking at. The swan is on the River Avon in Stratford, Ontario, in a photo I took in 2010.

    Once we are back to a single site, I am thinking of changing the photo, or having multiple photos that appear randomly.

    Thanks for your compliments about the site and my work in general.

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  7. Hi: I am a bit puzzled at your criteria for moving over content to the (rather classy) new site. You appear to have moved over some fairly old posts with their comments but there are several December 2014 posts that remain on the old (familiar) site and continue to attract comments. There is probably no ‘right way” but I had assumed that you would first move posts over if they continue to get comments post January 1 and then, as time allows, move over the static ones.

    Steve: The move of some “recent” posts was a side effect of the way I selected which ones to bring over first. I did them by blocks using their post numbers which picks them by their original creation dates. However, some that were updated later have December 2014 (for example) dates but were picked up in the move. This happened before I realized it, and I chose not to back them out. My concern was that hotlinks on sites like Facebook and Twitter, as well as current references in other blogs, would take people to the old site where the “old” URL would still work.

    In any case, I like the new site and hope the rest of the move is not too time consuming and hair-pulling!

    Steve: There are still many posts on the new site that include links back to the old one — typically references to other articles, but also some of the attachments that didn’t migrate properly. I will be tracking down and fixing these before the final cutover.

    When you can catch your breath I am looking forward to your long-promised review of the operation of the 504 King car. The TTC has certainly made changes (adding buses, all-door boarding, more realistic timetable) but I am not sure it will actually make much difference unless John Tory’s illegal parking blitz becomes the new normal and they manage the route properly. On Saturday I saw a procession of 504s and then none for ages.

    Steve: Of course the parking blitz will do nothing for off peak, and one of the major things I found in the work I did re King for the City and TTC was that a focus just on the peak won’t solve anywhere near all of the problems. I also want to review just how productive various changes on King and other routes, notably St. Clair, have actually been in the improvement of service.

    Like

  8. One of the differences in comment sequence from the old site is this. Replies to older comments show up as a threaded group. It’s not unmanageable, but I have modified my scanning behaviour to keep an eye out for new replies above the bottom of the list.

    Steve: Yes, I turned on that feature for the new site. Feedback anyone on whether this is a preferred arrangement?

    Like

  9. I, for one, am not yet convinced about the suitability of swan boats for public transportation. Can we get an environmental assessment on that?

    Like

  10. Potentially silly question here; How can I subscribe i.e. get email posts whenever you create a new topic ? I managed to do this on the old site but don’t recall how ; )

    Thanks!

    Steve: Sorry about that. I have turned that option on for this site, and you should now see a “Follow” button in the lower right corner of the screen that will allow you to subscribe. You can also use the RSS feeds to see recent posts and comments.

    Like

  11. Steve, I use the Comments RSS to see the recent comments using IE (the only browser that seems to implement it in a way that is useful to me) but the new website doesn’t show anywhere near as much history as your old site. Is there a setting I can change somewhere to get it back to what it is on the old site? (I don’t want to miss a thing!)

    Steve: I have changed the setting so that many more items are displayed in the feeds. This is not something that you can control — it is a setting within the site configuration.

    Like

  12. Hi, Steve. I follow your site via the RSS feeds. Your latest post, on January 23, “Does The TTC Use ‘Safety’ As An Excuse For Inept Management?”, came through as only a snippet of the first paragraph. This is a familiar tactic used by some sites to force readers to visit the actual website so the visitor can be fed advertising. (I won’t mention the names of such as the CBC and the Toronto Star who practise this.)

    Please tell me this was just an accidental slip and that I’ll be able to continue to enjoy your content fully by RSS feed.

    The new site is looking nice and clean, by the way. I do like the high-res swan.

    Steve: I changed the feed to just give excerpts. People can get to the full article, if they want it, by clicking on the title. There are no adverts, but this cuts down the amount of data transmitted for a feed.

    Like

  13. Hi Steve, I also follow your site via RSS and tend to do most of my reading while on the subway. Thanks to the lack of mobile reception in the tunnels, it’s not possible to download the full articles on the fly, and there’s no easy way to pre-load the articles on my phone . Can you please switch back to full articles?

    Steve: I can’t keep everyone happy. Some want full articles, some want only the excerpts.

    Like

  14. Do RSS posts really use a material amount of data? Since they are exclusively text (unless the user chooses to auto-load images) I would imagine that the posts don’t use much data at all. Forcing us to view full articles on your website is far worse, since the regular site includes the swan graphic, previous comments, etc. Your swan photo alone is 151Kb, which is a pretty big chunk of data by mobile browsing standards.

    I would also imagine that most regular readers are going to read every single one of your posts from top to bottom, unlike other feeds where they will just skim the posts. In your case, excerpts create an unnecessary extra step which annoys your most faithful readers.

    As a compromise, you could set up dual feeds for those who prefer on excerpts. I suspect there are few of those people, since they are pretty universally reviled among those who use RSS.

    Steve: There is no option to set dual feeds. It’s one or the other. Waiting to hear more feedback from others.

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  15. Congrats on the new site.

    I am also an RSS feed reader person (using Feedly if it matters). I for one would prefer the full articles vs. excerpts.

    Someone above mentioned that comment threading is now enabled… not sure how this manifests itself in the RSS-Comments feed, but whatever 🙂

    To transit infinity … and beyond (with swan boats of course).

    Steve: I recently turned comment threading off to avoid confusion.

    Like

  16. Personally I’d prefer the full articles in RSS for the occasions where I read them cached offline on the subway.

    At home it’s not that big of a deal though.

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