Med-Psych.com

It appears that I am now starting to get a little more traffic, probably due to improved indexing in Google. I'm not sure if it has just been taking a bit of time to get things properly indexed, or if I managed to get an additional site or two to link to mine. Either way, it's always a positive thing to get more traffic.

It also looks like a new version of phpBB3 was released, which means I'll have to update the code on the site. I always worry that any mods I had made will get broken with updates, which is why I generally try to avoid mods. Guess we'll see how it goes. I also forget with time what things I've changed, and what things I didn't. Makes for a big headache if the upgrade path overwrites the mods I made.

While it does appear I'm getting slightly more traffic, I still see that no one is posting messages, and no one new has registered. I'm not sure why that is. Perhaps I should try registering myself again just to make sure there aren't any bugs. I don't think that's it - but you never know.

I did improve the complexity of the captcha option as I started to get spam with the simple captcha. I was surprised I got spam with the simple captcha - I guess some robots really do find a way to "read" the images.

So, feel free to register and post a message, just to say 'hi' if nothing else. I'm still not entirely sure how I'll be using this website over time - as I also have another medical education website. I keep thinking I might post more non-medical stuff here, but I also don't really want to post anything remotely personal, given the kind of work I do.

If you have any comments or feedback, feel free to post or contact me.

Traffic did pick up a little bit. I did manage to find a way to show recent topics on the index page of the forums, which is really all I was using Joomla for, but with Joomla, I couldn't integrate the SEO formatted URL's. Joomla would direct the traffic to the dynamic URL, and then phpBB would redirect them to an SEO friendly URL. Now that I can get the URL's to be nicely formatted on the index page, I don't think I'd have any use for Joomla. I wouldn't be taking advantage of the many other features Joomla has to offer.

So, the next step is to move phpBB to the root level. At the same time I'm doing that, I'll be upgrading to the more recent version of phpBB. The thing I hate is that when I get all of the modifications made I like, it is a pain to upgrade to a newer version. I never know which of my mods will be overwritten and have to be redone, and which mods will choke on the updated version. We'll see, but I think it's important to keep with the updates and also I think my site will be more successful having the recent thread URL's properly displayed on the root / index page. Hopefully I won't break too much stuff in the process of moving.

Things didn't go quite as planned, but I think I got everything working as I had envisioned now. I'm not quite convinced yet that it is working as I intended, but so far so good. And the update process, while not as I had planned, actually could have been a lot worse. And if I knew how it would have gone, I would have gone a more direct route from the start.

Time will tell if the changes were worthwhile.

As I mentioned yesterday, it seemed like things were okay but I wasn't 100% sure. When I went to the website today, the forums sent a message that I didn't have permission to view the forums. It also said there were no forums and no messages. I went ahead and tried re-running the upgrade script, but that didn't make any changes to the files. Ultimately, I went ahead and cleared out the cache files from the phpBB admin interface. Everything seemed to come back to normal after that, so hopefully that is all that it was. The upgrade script does seem pretty slick. I hope it made the proper changes to everything. At this point it actually seems okay. I'll keep my fingers crossed.