About the Site

Lisa and I have been online for years. We met on Compuserve back in 1989. The internet is a big part of our plans for making the farm a viable means of support.

We have gone back to satellite internet, because rural America gets the same high quality internet service available in Congo, so the site is hosted at iCertified.net.

We’re using Wordpress for a Content Management System (CMS), as well as for the journal. Wordpress 2.x is a very well-designed and implemented application. I’ve had very minimal need to actually hack the PHP, and when I need to, the documentation and organization make it straightforward, if not actually easy, to do. I started the site design witha theme by Andreas Viklund. We’ve now moved on to Thesis albeit tweaked to look like the original. Thesis makes administration much simpler, and with the Thesis Openhook plugin which largely ends the need to run emacs over ssh.

We used Gallery to serve our images for many years, but have moved to Flickr. Gallery just never quite kept up: It’s worth the $25/year for Flickr pro.

Our e-commerce solution is still somwhat in the air. We’ve used Zen Cart in the past and may again. The real issue was accepting payment. Internet credit card processing is hideously expensive and a pain. Amazon or Google checkout look pretty good compared to the alternatives, and of course then we need to look at the companion storefront applications. For the moment we use direct paypal and an Etsy store.