Okay folks - here's some great news! In the past you may have visited my blog 20,000 Free Wallpapers to downloads lots of free wallpapers of your favourite celebrities and other subjects such as scenery & space. Well, the past couple of months I have been having lots of problems with the host, Blogger, and it's parent company, Google. Apparently they have a computer system that picks up when blogs have more than a certain number of outgoing links. It then automatically either takes your blog offline, or locks the owner out from posting to it. It looks like my 20,000 Wallpapers blog has failed the test due to the number of wallpaper thumbnails I have on it. It was suspended 6 months or so ago, and then manually okayed by the Blogger team after they saw it definitely was not spam. I thought that was the end of the matter, but 11 days ago I got a notification that their computers had again classed it as spam, and although it was left online, I was locked out from posting updates to it. Despite my immediate request for it to be reviewed (supposed to be done within 4 days), and then another request after more than a week had passed, I still can't post. So I have worked very hard the past couple of days in finding an alternative which is more reliable than Blogger.
I looked at setting up a proper content management system for my wallpapers to host on my ISP's server, but most free software required PHP and SQL, which doesn't come included in my basic Internet account. I couldn't find any alternative automated content systems that would do the job I wanted - a simple site that requires a minimum of effort to add new galleries to.
But I do have 50 megs of web space with my ISP account, so I really wanted to take advantage of that. So I found some templates for framed HTML sites, and I have actually found that the one I chose does the job very simply. Although it will take me a week or 2 (maybe more) to get all of my galleries online, I have already got all of my female celebrities who start with "A" now uploaded. Setting up the template to look right was the hardest part of the job, and it now only takes me a few minutes to add a new gallery to the site. And the site is faster and easier than a blog to navigate through.
Although I will keep 20,000 Free Wallpapers going on Blogger (if they ever resume my access), I have also decided to use a simple text-based blog hosted on my ISP's server to provide updates. It runs on Linux, is open-source, doesn't require any database, and it is very easy to create entries. The software I am using is called Chronicle : The Blog Compiler, and creating a new entry is as simple as typing it at the top of a single text file. Having all posts stored in one text file will also make it very easy to edit older entries (I anticipate the link for my new site will change as I am considering forking out the money for a shorter domain name) - to fix all links in entries on my blog will be as simple as opening the text file & using the text replace function to change the old link to the new.
Anyway, enough of my rambling. I'm sure you want to check out my new wallpapers site. Please remember that it is only in the early stages (just like this blog), but it would be well worth bookmarking as in a few weeks you should find it to be great resource to get free wallpapers for your desktop. Just go to 50,000 FREE WALLPAPERS
