Moorland’s Totilas baby from Sherry Smith’s brood. DogwoodSportHorses.com
We have liftoff! Finally got a new design done – yea! HorsesintheSouth.com and AHorseBlog.com are now one source. My associate editor had been adding articles to both the CMS (Contact Management System which ran the home page, event calendar and directory) and to the blog. The blog has all of the articles we have been posting since 2007, but the CMS has the headline, showing/events, horse care and editorial pages and these were posted to the blog, so that was double-duty for him. All of the blog posts have been moved to the new site, so nothing has been lost.
There is still work to be done and more tweaks to be made, but I really like it. This has been a huge undertaking for the size of my site (over 15,000 pages) and the old articles that were in the CMS and the old Article Archive will go away because I went from a Windows server to a Linux server and Linux doesn’t support the asp and aspx pages. But, this will be a lot easier for us to manage and a lot easier for you to navigate.
I also want to say that Horses in the South is a Proud Media Partner of the So8ths/Nikon Three-Day Event in the “Heart of the Carolinas”. It’s their third annual So8ths/Nikon Three-Day Event May 2-5, 2013 in Chesterfield, SC.
We have a new calendar and directory. I have to re-add many directory listings and at this point, the events have to be added by us, but that may change when I upgrade to the paid version of the plugin.
The directory has new features, too, but I’m not yet aware what they all do. I need more training by my designer. I know there will be a paid version that I believe will allow your listing to go to the top to stand out from the others and I think we can add it to the home page, but this is what I still need to work on.
The over 70 business listings that I confirmed that were active are ‘grandfathered-in’ so we will re-add these to the new site’s directory. I copy/pasted the data from the old CMS driven site, plus I had to verify (mostly) and update to current text and contact info. So, if you don’t see your listing, please re-add it.
We are still working on the banner displays and all that it can do, too, so my current Media Guide is not valid. You will have to contact me for details until then. Check the Web Services page for updates, too. We also added Google Checkout (formerly Wallet) for payment and we still take Paypal.
Maybe now I will have more time to do my own blog posts, lol!
One of our resident hawks taking a bath in our birdbath during the heatwave.
As I was going to post a new editorial back on June 15th about not having any rain and it being 100 degrees in the shade and bam, we start getting almost daily thunderstorms! We had been averaging 110 heat index at the first of June, which was very oppressive to go outside to do work, much less ride. I was having to water my garden twice a day which was taking up to 2 hrs or more a day, hence I got behind in web work. My beans (or so I thought) and tomatoes are mostly done until I plant again in August, so I should have a reprieve in the harvesting soon. We have a small pool which has been invaluable to being out in this heat.
I’m in the AC a large part of the day, so my body isn’t accustomed to the heat like it is. I go out in the evening to work usually, but that is when my husband, Jerry, goes to our J-30 sailboat so I don’t have his help then… bummer. My son is here and he is in charge of cleaning paddocks, feeding horses when Jerry isn’t around, watering other plants around house and doing horse’s feet when I haven’t, plus he is my associate editor so he is kept busy much of the day adding articles. This leaves me to the other yard work that I may want done that my husband doesn’t think is necessary (he hates it, other than mowing with the riding mower). Both of them get bothered by flies more than I do – I have darker skin and I guess it helps in repelling them. I did have to spray myself and horses a lot at the beginning of June when the yellow flies were so bad, but they have died off or it’s because we got the fly predators and stepped up using the Natural Pet Vet Bug Check (HorsesintheSouth is an affiliate). The flies aren’t as bad now and I can deal with a couple of yellow flies landing on me as I harvest the garden.
Since the week-long rains at the end of June, I’ve had a second blooming of beans – these are the ones that weren’t doing as well as they were in a shadier area, but that is what probably helped them to reproduce being out of the blaring sun. And, I have a whole bunch of cherry tomatoes blooming and some volunteer tomato plants from last year’s cherry tomatoes that had been plowed under but came back up in different places, are producing. They are so good. I leave them in a bowl next to where I make my yerba-mate tea in the morning and I end up eating a handful while I wait for the tea to steep.
Now my website design work for the redesign for the SuncoastBedding.com site is getting in full swing, so another thing to keep me from riding or working on my own website. It never ends, does it? Plus the grass keeps growing more from all of the rain. I use our weed-whipper and push mower which ends up ‘killing’ my arm the next day. Even using the riding mower gets my left arm that had the shoulder replacement. If I would just do this stuff every day, my muscles wouldn’t atrophy so soon, lol.
I got some cool pictures of our resident hawk taking a bath in our birdbath, plus my husband, Jerry, did a video and put it on YouTube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NHVy0ov1kao (there are evidently a lot of YouTube videos of hawks taking baths…;P). These pictures were taken with my Sony digital camera with a 70-250 macro lens through my husband’s office window through the screen, but I think they still turned out really cool.
We aren’t sure if these are 2 different hawks taking a bath as in the blog gallery, you can see 1 of the hawks ‘screaming’ for the other one maybe? In the gallery you will see a hawk standing on our grapevine pole and we aren’t sure if that is a different hawk or the 1st hawk (if there is 2 of them – can anyone tell by their feathers?)
[nggallery id=23]
Anyway, I will be offering a summer/July 4th birthday (mine :D) special for advertising on our website/newsletter and I have a new sales person, Linda Bourdow to assist me. You may contact her at mktg@horsesinthesouth.com.
Watch for the July newsletter – it’s coming too. We are using a new Email Service Provider (ESP), so I still have to finish designing it; I may just send out something now and let my programmer finish the design. We are using MailChimp and is isn’t as easy to use as Constant Contact (requires that you know some html and design), but it isn’t blocked by spam filters as easily as CC is. Info is on our Sales/Special page. As usual you will get a killer deal.
It’s weird, but we are actually cooler here than in the northern states with them being in the triple digits (bummer for the Queen of England’s visit to the UN since she was last here in 1957). But, it’s starting to heat up again and will be in the usual mid-nineties this week, sigh…
If you are a Farmville addict like I have become, join me at http://www.facebook.com/TeriRehkopf.HorsesintheSouth, then request to be my neighbor on FV. Also be sure to join my Fan page at http://www.facebook.com/HorsesintheSouth. The TeriRehkopf.HorsesintheSouth FB account is a 2nd FB account. My 1st account is already almost at the 5,000 FB friends limit, so I had to start a new account to accept new friends and add new FV neighbors as this one is at the 300 neighbors limit. Geesh, Farmville is such a ‘time-suction’, but it is also very ‘feng shui’ like. I love their graphics. If only web design was this easy! I swear I going to write a blog about my journey to the addiction on Farmville and seeing so many horse people Facebook friends being in the same boat as me or worse! When I get to this, I’ll post some hints on how to get leveled-up. I love the horses that FV adds for us horse fanatics. They really have recognized our market in that respect 😀
