Making progress on the blog 📝

I’m making some progress on redoing the data structure to trim down the blog size to make it more efficient with years worth of space to grow. Rather than keep PDFs of all the maps I will have the blog seemlessly generate them on the fly. Doesn’t seem to be real CPU intensive to do that and if I see performance problems I can cache the fifty or hundred frequently requested maps. Most of the PDFs on the blog are image based, I don’t do Vector PDFs due to the size of the maps.

Taking out some obsolete code from the blog, some of which hasn’t been actively used or maintained in over a decade. I’m not going to keep the interactive 3D models as they’re kind of big and Q3D2JS plugin keeps breaking their format requiring changes to the blog code. Also the side by side history format is getting dumped as I don’t use it much in favor of the mapwarper.net website.

I’ve decided to monetize the blog with web advertisements but not the home page. This way people that are here primarily for maps or info about camping can get their information while my blog homepage is free of ads. I hate ads but with the cost of hosting going up, it should cover the cost of hosting and maybe give me a few bucks to cover my time creating maps.

I’ve come up with a framework in my head to make the switch over while not breaking too many things in the change over as I delete and upload the new versions of the data structure. The thing is I want to delete part of the old structure while uploading the new structure without taking all of the blog offline in the process. I should be able to do this but it takes a bit of planning as its a major undertaking, requiring a large amount of data to be re-uploaded in the process. mod-rewrite should get me most of the way there though in the transition – my goal is to break as little as possible or change links around.