Garazon’s Den

Site best viewed in 1024 x 768 to prevent side scrolling, apologies to those with less, I finally got this site working the way I want… again…  and I’m not changing it ;)
You can contact me here:
garazon@gmail.com

This is the personal site of Chester Weikel. Garazon’s Den started as an html learning experience on MSN Communities, now MSN Groups. Even in its earliest form it was a social gathering place for family and firneds.  it has been on this domain now since August 13, 2003. It has been through sevral incarnations and several periods where nothing at all happened. When my wife Gretchen passed in 2004 I lost all interest in the site and in the shock of her passing I had left some security holes to a few web apps open that were soon discovered by wanna be hackers. well nothing major was lost except for a few posts from the early years. it wasn’t until a couple of years later that I began to take an interest again in getting the site back in shape, well technically it never was in shape to begin with! ;) Anyway I experimented for a few months with several CMS applications, Mambo, PHP-Fusion, PHP-Nuke, Postnuke, etc… well most every decent php CMS app out there, they were all just a bit too much in the end to set up and maintain and I wasn’t really happy with any of them each seemed to lack something in one way or another. I finally narrowed it down to two, Typepad and Wordpress. I fiddled back and forth with them for about a year, mostly all behind the scenes and not so much concerned to publish a site right away anyway since I have been using our blogger site, http://garazon.blogspot.com, for most of the news that I wanted to share, my engagement to Alison Michelle :) Anyway I tested both of them pretty good behind the scenes; the major difference being that with typepad I could manage several different blogs at once and Worpress was for a single blog (yes I am aware of Wordpress mu, just found out about it AFTER i got this version up and running right! ). In the end this latest release of Wordpress (2.5) impressed me with its ease of use and overall usability for my needs. So for the last month or so I have been slowly working on having a decent site again. I was a bit excited when first getting my own domain, and had way too many things going on here trying to build a super site all at once. well now it is streamlined and more or less self contained. I still have the Coppermine photo app running as its a good secure program and I’m sure at some point there will be a plugin for it to use with Wordpress. And perchance one isnt ever available I will still keep coppermine as its serving my purposes very well thank you. I am toying with the idea of adding a forum, but I’m not sure whether its practical or not to try that again. It was a great board I had before. It just took too much time to take care of all the spam attacks and auotregisters out there. I did recently open up a forum to try and test out with our engagement site, Candyfloss and Garazon. It’s not been in much use yet just for lack of time from getting this up and running, but I also ran across another forum program just recently which was developed by the same ones who do Wordpress, it’s called bbPress and the working forum is here. It is already set up to use the same login info, username and password, as this site, so if you are registered here you already have access to it ;) I really am leaning to use that instead of the one running now on our engagement site. I just need to figure out how to change the look to blend it in to this site layout. Well that’s something for the future as my hands are full now with just this. I am still working mostly behind the scenes, trying out different plugins and learning to fine tune the various parts of Wordpress. But I am very happy with the progress so far.

Well there’s the history of the place in a nutshell. As far as the content.. well that’s at the whim of your webmaster, that would be me too :) I have what is called a hodgepodge, a jumble if you will. of things collected and written over the years. some are personal posts from the old forum, some from the other blogs I’ve had running and many are actually new! WOW!! even i am impressed! :) Well if I ever develop something out of this world I will make this a site for that, but for now its just a gathering place on the web for a few family members and friends to keep up with me and stay in touch, and my own persoanl soapbox if I feel to speak on something, so feel free to browse around and comment on anything you feel. keep it nice though, semi nice anyway ;)  thanks for visiting and take care. Remember too the most important thing in this world… Love IS all you need!   love you baby xxxxx <3 always