This may be a long newsletter but what else are you going to do while visiting the in laws? And for the more computer/network technical folks who don’t care to read this whole thing feel free to scroll down to the “Technical Section”.
Farmish News
Farming in the 21st century has a lot more challenges than in previous centuries. Sure in the distant past we had to resort to hunting and gathering to meet our daily caloric intake. It was challenging to say the least but I suspect that usually there was something to find — otherwise they wouldn’t be our ancestors. We eventually became a less nomadic people and entered a the age of agriculture. This agricultural age has evolved past the beasts of burden era into the more modern age of mechanical farming. And this evolution of agriculture is evolving at an ever increasing rate. Some farmers embraced the hope and dream presented by the chemical industry. Not us. We are still farming like its 1929. But we have embraced a more recent evolution in agriculture. What I consider a far more difficult age – like the toddler stage or maybe even as difficult as the teenage years. An age filled with potholes and minefields. An age littered with — in the words of Don Rumsfeld — unknown unknowns. An age where even being even the slightest bit off can lead to catastrophic consequences. The age we farmers have entered is the information age.
Realistically we have been in the information age for quite awhile. Some could say it started as far back as when radio began broadcasting crop reports. But as this age evolved it began to evolve more quickly. You could say it is keeping up or perhaps surpassing climate change in its relentless march forward. And that is where the main difficulty lies. We farmers can no longer stand still when it comes to the information age. And Fresh Earth Farms is no exception.
In the 19 year history of our farm we have had two version of our web presence with a number of incremental releases of new features in between. We started back in 2003 with a pure html website. No frills. Order through the mail. Emailing of newsletters. And of course no social media. It was a far simpler time to say the least. A time our elders look fondly back on.
The second iteration of our website was built on a content management system — WordPress. It was a bit clunky and cumbersome. It used significantly more resources but resources that became significantly cheaper. It provided an easier way to distribute important information as well as unimportant information — which seems to be primarily the main type of information we provide. It also made it easier to refer to past information and link to additional resources outside the farm. And with one of our incremental website releases we added on an online store with online purchases, a feature I’m sure many of you have embraced.
This winter we embarked on major project to create version 3.0 of our farm website. With the last ten years of website evolution we figured it was time to move into the 2020’s and leave to 2000’s behind. We weren’t looking for anything too fancy, just something more inviting and modern. We figured with the new tools out in the marketplace this should be a simple, straightforward project that, with time for tweaking and finishing touches, would take no more than a week. Surely the web has now figured out how to make it easy to store and deliver content!
Boy were we wrong. Did you know that there is a whole segment of the economy dedicated to just designing new fonts and that some fonts have to be delivered with your content? That content deliver systems still can’t automatically compress images to make them the right image and file size for the requesting rendering apparatus? That not only does one need to know html but also php, css, xml, server level scripting language, javascript, java and other coffee related code stuff? And to top it all off, there is render blocking. Who knew? It seems like this whole web business is built on a house of cards ready to collapse with just the slightest push. I think we’d all be better off if everything was just written in C.
But I’m not going to change the online world. I’m just trying to make a living in the real world utilizing the abilities of the online world to make it happen. So after somewhere around a month of trial and error, cursing and screaming, tweaking and twerking (well, maybe not twerking though I think it should be related to tweaking somehow), I now announce the release of our 3.0 website. It is actually more of a beta release in my opinion but if there is one thing I’ve learned in this web development process it is that software companies no longer concern themselves with the quality of their releases since to make changes after release is no longer a costly proposition — at least for web base services.
Now for both of you who have read through to this point there are a few things you can do to help in the QA process. First, go buy something from our store. We have everything listed with new pricing — except for FruitShare. If you do buy something send me a quick email so I can check that it actually worked. You can also just click around and see what breaks or looks funny. Try different devices with different connection speeds. Our website is supposedly responsive but I question that. I also know it is slower than I prefer but I’m still figuring out how to speed things up (that darn render blocking!) Anyway, give it a spin and let me know what you think.
Technical Section
And finally, for all the technical folks — especially anyone knowledgeable about WordPress on an Apache server and all you DNS experts — who want to help with the final few problems I have been unable to solve. Here they are:
1 – While trying to “Import” the media files from the old website into the new one I get the following WordPress error: “Failed to import Media “FruitShare_image003”: Request failed due to an error: cURL error 60: SSL certificate problem: certificate has expired (http_request_failed)” for every file. The SSL certificate has not expired contrary to the error message. I was able to copy the files to the new website directory but of course they are not accessible in the WordPress media library. However in doing so at least the newsletters don’t have missing links.
2 – I’m trying to get the old website accessible again to export the recipes stored there. It seemed to work fine for awhile after I went live with the new website but now it just “301 redirects” to the new site. I’m sure I put some code somewhere I don’t recall and now it is lost in the ether. You can give it a try at blog.freshearthfarms.com. The subdomain is still pointing to the directory where the old files reside.
3 – And while we are at it, and this may be related but I’m not sure, I’m just a farmer. When logging in and looking at Facebook, all my devices are unable to get Facebook to load images. It seems to NS_ERROR_NET_TIMEOUT while trying to access Facebook’s CDN. Using my cell phone and the cell phone service has no problem. But using the cell phone or any computer over our wifi fails. Instagram as you’d suspect has the same problem. Centurylink says it is a Facebook problem, then they mysteriously drop the call — twice. You’d think a telecommunication company would have more reliable phone service! Anyway, I think it is a DNS configuration problem but as I said, I’m a farmer.
Anyway, this is far longer than I expected but if you average it over the time since the last newsletter it is a smaller than average newsletter. As always, do not hesitate to contact me with questions, comments, suggestions, website issues, DNS server solutions and any other relevant information!