The Facebook Page for Ilona’s Garden

I’ve had some very positive feedback from my Facebook page ( Join in if you haven’t yet @ Ilona’s Garden )

I started posting more of my photos, sharing from the homepage and generally trying to participate more. I had two relatives who said that my garden posts “made their day”, and that is incredibly encouraging to hear that. I think they access my site from Facebook.

I have about 206 likes at this time which is an improvement, but not nearly equal to what many other garden sites have. Of course I recently started a newsletter and I hope that gives people the extra benefits of my writing. So, besides tat many rainstorms things are looking brighter for Ilona’s Garden.

Changing Your URL

They say you shouldn’t change your url, especially for an established blog. Well, I did that. In the hopes of creating a better reader experience I signed up for the Google Pagespeed beta. It is a free service while they experiment with it, and then it is unsure how much it will cost. I had been using the free Cloudflare, which I liked, but it kept getting hit with attacks from the spammers and I had outages because of that and sometimes the site was very slow.

The Pagespeed service needs the “www.” in from of the url address and I didn’t have it set up that way. It was a real hassle changing it. Finally the host technicians got it to point to the database, but there were still residual problems. Of course, now I have less cred with Google with a different url which redirects, etc. I hope changing was worth it.

There did seem to be a small benefit from changing, and I hope in the long run that this will prove true.

I have been busy correcting all the linking urls on my site, and related sites (like here). That is a lot of work!

On the whole I think it is advice well taken to think twice before changing an established url. It can be a long climb back.