About the new site

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Old Links to TKDTutor pages

Since the OLD articles no longer exist, links to articles on the OLD site will open to the homepage of the NEW site. Over 600 articles from the OLD site have been converted to the NEW site, so please do a search to see if the OLD page has been converted to the NEW site.

Intro

On 14 August 2017, I began converting TKDTutor.com from a Joomla website hosted on Lunarpages to a website/blog hosted on Google Blogger.

Maintaining the OLD site became too much of a burden so on 1/1/2018 I replaced it with the NEW one. The NEW site is now the official site, however, since TKDTutor is so large (over 900 articles), it will take months to convert all the articles to the NEW site. Please be patient and check back often for new additions.

Why the change

Joomla is a great content manager; it makes cataloging and maintaining a large number of pages easy. However, with each new update of Joomla, it becomes more complicated to maintain a large site. If you have a small site, it is great; but with a large site, you constantly have to update numerous extensions, fight against hackers, and try to block rogue crawlers that use up your bandwidth.

A Joomla site is hosted on a web host's server. To keep costs down, a shared server is the best deal. However, when your site is attacked, the web host offers little support for shared server sites and you must upgrade to a dedicated server or pay to get extra support.

Lunarpages was an okay web host but it was too susceptible to attack, too slow loading pages, and too expensive. For domain registration and hosting, Lunarpage cost me $150 a year. For Google, its $12 a year. Google Blogger is fast, has free hosting on its servers, and it has all of Google's resources keep it protected.

I considered using Blogger years ago but for me to use it I need to store the articles as static pages and Blogger had a 20-page limit. Now that there is no static page limit on Blogger, I decided to switch to Blogger.

One problem with using Blogger for a large site is that each static page is saved as a separate file. So if I make any major changes to the article format, I must reformat each of 900+ articles individually. Whereas, Joomla saves the content of pages to a database; page formatting takes place separately. When an article opens, Joomla finds the content for the article in the database and then builds the page. This process is handy, but it means pages take longer to load.

This means I'll need to keep the format of articles in Blogger very basic and simple.

Process

I first considered and experimented with the idea of putting the articles on static pages inside Blogger. However, I rejected the idea because of the logistics involved in cataloging all the articles in one long list in Blogger since there is no way to label or sort the pages. So I decided to make the articles into Google Published Documents that I could store and catalog in Google Drive. A shortfall of this method is that search engines cannot index the articles in published docs. I converted 160 articles to published docs before the next great idea.

One night I awoke with a eureka moment, went to the computer, and devised a workable system for cataloging the articles using Google Sheets. So, now I am converting all the articles to static pages that will open on the website.

I first had to design the new website/blog. Now I am deleting, editing, and updating all articles, rewriting some articles, adding some articles, and deleting some articles. Some of the articles were written 20 years ago. Along the way, site design changes meant I had to make changes to all the previously completed article pages, which added to the work and slowed progress.

Now that the NEW site is online and I am converting articles from the OLD site to the NEW site.

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