Burlaki [back] on the Hudson

Heh! The whole thing took me less than half a day to turn around, and a couple of hours were idly spent on waiting for DNS changes to propagate.

I have one strange artifact in the Travelog, which I will have to look into at some later time. I also do not yet see the mail server resolved to the new platform. But other than that, burlaki.com is now residing at a new host. And I actually managed to get the cost down to one-fourth of what I was paying before. It’s not that great deal of money, but it makes me happy nonetheless.

If you catch any strange behavior with the website, please let me know. Cheers!

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… but there will likely be an intermittent downtime at burlaki.com in the next couple of weeks.

The reason for that is that I am moving the domain to a cheaper hosting platform.

When I started the website about four years ago, I was not expecting that the main blog would become practically the only regularly used feature. I did know that I wanted to host the picture gallery within the site, I suspected that I might need more than one blog running, I had plans for other “fun” sections, I even considered eventually building an online store to parallel Natasha’s eBay activities.

So I went for dedicated hosting, with enough room to grow in my hosting plan. At $9.95/month, it did not feel like a tremendous expenditure.

As time went by, all the site grew into was three different blogs and a picture gallery. Quite a while ago, I concluded that it will not grow into anything else. With such limited needs, paying ten bucks a month for hosting was definitely a waste.

Since both blogs and galleries can be well hosted for free on a variety of specialized platforms, I considered moving wholesale to WordPress and one of the photo sites, supplemented by a set of index pages on some free hosting platform for purposes of re-direction. This worked for Becky’s blog (which she has not been updating for months) and for Picture Gallery, both of which are now hosted externally to the main site. But the main blog and Travelog section both make heavy use of WordPress plugins, which are not available at wordpress.com. I am loath to lose some of the older posts that rely on those plugins.

I also thought of moving to a no-fee domain hosting platform, but researching that I realized it was an obvious case of “you get what you pay for”. I’d rather spend a little money but be able to rely on prompt assistance and not run into regular “this option is only available for premium accounts” responses.

Without boring you any further, I will be moving the remaining two pieces of this site, the main blog and the Travelog, to a host that will provide me with everything I need to run two blogs within one site but charge me one-third of what I am paying for hosting today. The downtime may occur during the time I switch DNS routing from old host to the new one, and also if, for some reason, the newly configured site does not work as needed right off the bat. You should not notice any design differences, though; I am transferring the entire configuration without changing anything.

If you use RSS to subscribe to my blog, and you experience longer-than-usual interval of silence from me, you may have to re-subscribe. While the URLs of the two blogs will remain unchanged, I am not sure if RSS will catch up with different DNS routing by itself.

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A small album of pictures taken during our recent Virginia/DC trip can be found via the links on the sidebar or directly here.

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It was a good summer.

Some of the best memories are now immortalized in the new album, accessible through the links on the right or directly here.

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… are here. We split them into two albums, which can be accessed via the links on the navigation bar or by clicking here or here.

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More photographic entertainment for my audience. Selection of pictures from Becky’s China trip and our recent excursion to Mini-Europe are now available in the Gallery.

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This sign at a nearby supermarket parking lot kinda symbolizes the speed of my movements this weekend. Aside from seeing friends and watching football on the telly, I devoted the large part of the last two days to cleaning up some loose ends in the Travelog (the most recent articles on Kraków and Budapest are now complete, and the map has been updated to finally show a continuous darkened area stretching across all of Eurasia) and adding a few pictures to the Travelscapes. That’s the extent of the new content. We’ll be back to our regular programming soon.

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The picture album from our recent trip can be found here or by clicking the links on the navigation bar.

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A small selection of shots made during my recent Scottish adventure can be found via the links on the sidebar or directly here.

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I know there is a handful of people out there who subscribe to my RSS feed via FeedBurner (which is where the “Subscribe” button on the navigation bar pointed to until today). FeedBurner was bought by Google some time ago, and they are gradually getting around to migrating their service to a different platform. I’ve heard about occasional problems with that from different blog owners who have already been migrated, and, to be honest, I never really needed the additional bells and whistles that FeedBurner provides, some of which, I understand, are no longer going to be available on the Google platform anyway.

Therefore, the Subscribe button now points back to the original feed. I’m not planning to get rid of FeedBurner altogether, so any of my distinguished subscribers who want to stick with that may not even feel a thing, with luck. But if you notice a disruption in the feed at any point in time, please consider re-subscribing with the original feed.

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For those few who care, I have added pins and annotations to the US destinations on the World Map.

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Oh yeah, I also changed my old boring favicon to a slightly less boring one. If anyone cares to clear their browser cache to have it updated, it would make me happy.

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Don’t worry, you’re in the right place. I decided to redecorate, is all.

Comparatively loud colors and large fonts tired me after a while. So, I chose a more subdued look instead. Because the selected template was seriously different from the old one, it took me somewhat longer than expected to adjust it completely to my liking, which had a nice bonus of being another little programming project. I rarely get to employ my deteriorating skills otherwise.

Anyway. Please let me know what you think. While I am reasonably positive that all major graphical components appear fine in the new template, I certainly did not go over all of my hundreds of posts to check. If you notice something out of whack, I’d me much obliged if you let me know.

Thanks!

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Burlaki.com are happy to announce our newest feature: The very cool annotated World Map. Made possible by the excellent Flash tool by amMap.com, it puts every place in Europe that we have ever graced with our presence onto the interactive map and provides short capsules of visit context and timing for every destination. Further links to available destination overviews within Travelog are provided in synopses.

North America and the Caribbean remain to be annotated next. New destinations will unquestionably be added as we continue our traveling exploits.

We’d love for you to check it out and tell us what you think. Any notes, corrections, suggestions can be left in the comment thread here.

Cheers!

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Sometime before Christmas, Natasha organized an impromptu home photo shoot with our two eager models. We finally got around to publishing some of those shots. They can be found either via the links on the navigation bar or here.

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As I have mentioned elsewhere, for the last few weeks I have been chipping away at our old travel diaries, transcribing the observations about sights, museums, restaurants and hotels into Travelog entries. To my own surprise, I’m actually finished with that now. While I have what I think is a pretty nifty idea of what to do next with the Travelog, for the moment I do not have any outstanding material that needs to be converted into an online post.

I’ve no pretenses of being a travel journalist or, really, of having any talent for reviewing things. While the Travelog was meant to record our personal impressions of things that we’ve seen and tried, I know I err too much on the side of de gustibus non est disputandum to forcefully advise against something that left less than a positive impression on me (except, of course, a horrible meal somewhere). And for the things that I do like, I eventually run out of synonyms to nice/beautiful/outstanding/excellent/remarkable/magnificent/majestic/splendid/striking/stunning/resplendent/lavish/opulent to lay claim to any exceptional quality of my wordsmithing.

But what I started to realize as I drew closer to the completion of that body of work is that I put this together primarily for ourselves, as ready references for our future visits to the places that we’d already been to. Which helps to explain why there are so many passages of “we did not do this, but plan to do it next time” in various articles.

On the other hand, I certainly expect to continue to refer people who come to us with questions about what we liked at such and such destination to the online Travelog. So, anyone interested is more than welcome to look. And if you see anything there that helps you plan your next trip or anything that would trigger a recommendation different from mine, please, by all means, let us know.

Thanks!

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A small collection of photographs taken on our recent getaway to Paris can be found here or via the links on the navigation bar. We only brought our small pocketcam with us, so the quality of some shots is a notch below than usual, but we figured we’d share them nonetheless.

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A selection of pictures taken by Becky on her recent school-trip to Iceland can be found here or via the Picture Gallery on the navigation bar.

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A small album with pictures from a recent day-trip to Rochester can be found either via the links on the navigation bar or here.

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After a relatively sizeable delay – apologies to all! – the pictures from the third and final leg of our grand summer trip have been added to the Picture Gallery (accessible either from the navigation bar or at the link here).

Enjoy!

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