It’s been a while since our site has had any major changes to it other than the blog here, so I to mention a few things I have recently updated. If only I had the time to work on more of these sooner, a problem I’m sure many of you reading this share for sure.

Trip Details

While the full gamut of updates from our latest February trip our still being worked on (Details and Itineraries), I did update the Trip Details page with a quick note on our next trip, added a few notes to the previous ones, and updated our little fun facts at the bottom with travel info from this year. In terms of more details for our fourth trip, I’m looking to put together the same Details and Itineraries pages that I did for Trip 3 last year. To see what I mean, take a look at the Trip 3 Details page and the Trip 3 Itineraries section as an example.

In the meantime, if you’re still new here and weren’t following along with me on Twitter and our blog during our February trip, the Trip Journal page has links to all those blog entries for those two magical weeks on Maui this year. The Trip Journal page itself will be getting a makeover soon, but for now, you can still click your way down memory lane.

Future Plans

We have a running joke with one of our friends (and fellow Maui-loving couple) that we don’t get to talk to very often. When ever we do meet up, Cindy and I are either talking about a recent Maui trip or about an upcoming one. Well, that’s what the Future Plans page is for. I also just updated that with notes on our proposed trip this September for the Maui Photo Festival and Workshops, as well as sneaking in a possible week next February to revisit our favorite 40-ton mammals again.

At the moment, we have our plans tentatively sketched out until 2011, but things are always changing.

Blog Archives and Categories

The next two updates are related towards our blog, which believe it or not is closing in on 300 posts. That’s a lot of content and talking story, and certainly more than I could have dreamed about when I first started this site.

First up is an easier way to navigate through our Blog Archives. Instead of the default list of links to each month/year archive in the right sidebar, I have replaced that with it’s own, cleaner page and navigation. The new Blog Archives page breaks down each month and year a little cleaner (in my opinion), and by selecting a month to view, you get a faster and easier way to browse articles from that month. For example, take the March 2009 archive page. Here, you’ll see a list of articles with the date it was posted, and by selecting one of the articles, you can see a preview of it right there on the page with the option to read the entire post if you’d like or to leave a comment.

Easy, eh? I hope so, because the next update is the Blog Categories section with follows the same design. Here, you can see all the different categories (or labels or tags, depending on your naming preference) that our posts are filed under. So, if you wanted to see all of our posts for Aloha Friday or our Sunday Photos, you can do so quickly and easily. Maybe you want to see which posts where we’ve mentioned our favorite West Maui resort, the Sheraton Maui Resort, or when we’re talking about Heavenly Hana or those lovable whales. It’s all there now, just a click away.

Wider is Better

Maybe you’ve been reading our site for awhile now, or maybe you’re still new. Did you notice things got a little more roomier here last week? As a pre-cursor to a larger site redesign this summer, I decided to expand all the pages on the site and the blog by an extra 200 pixels (geek talk, I know). Just suffice it to say I know have more room to add larger photos and various features throughout the site that previously weren’t possible. Hopefully it makes the site easier to use and the extra little images of Maui everywhere will help bring that ocean breeze closer to your senses wherever you are.

More to Come

As always, this site and blog are a labour of love for the Valley Isle, and as I get more time to work on changes, I race through them as fast as I can. I’m still hoping to get back into a happy groove here with more frequent posts to the blog, but also to finish our Trip 4 details as mentioned earlier, expand our Music section with even more great artists that I’ve been listening to in the past year, as well as that site redesign I was mentioning for this summer.

If it sounds ambitious to you, you probably still only know that half of it. But alas, if it wasn’t for the magical grip that Maui has over Cindy’s and my heart, it wouldn’t be worth doing.

Aloha for now, and mahalo for stopping by.
- Kris

Just a word of caution that I’m finally moving the site to a new set of servers, so you may see a delay in some updates. It has been something I’ve been planning to do all the way back in December, but just hadn’t had the time to do anything with it. Seems like a common theme nowadays after coming back from vacation.

It takes about a day or two for the updated server info to make it’s away across the Internet, so if you see any error pages or otherwise strange behavior anywhere on the site, please let me know either via the Contact Us page or on Twitter (@webnelly).

What will be better?
I’ve been starting to see issues, as well as a few others that have brought it to my attention, some slowness in different parts of the site, as well as with comments publishing to the blog.  These new servers are a lot faster and more powerful than the last ones, as I have had other sites running on these since Decemeber without the same issues.

Keep you fingers crossed that things start getting better from here.

Mahalo.

Well, I’m still not exactly sure what happened to cause the comments to stop working here at the blog, but I went through an updated about 60 posts that were not allowing comments. Please feel free to revisit some of the recent posts and leave your comments on them if you had tried doing so previously. I will continue to monitor the situation, and hopefully find some additional details online as to what went wrong.

Mahalo again for your patience, and I hope to see that great feedback and discussion from our readers again real soon.

After thinking things seemed a little quiet around here lately, I took a look and noticed many of my recent blog posts were missing the Post Comment form. Well, that will certainly keep folks from adding their comments!

I’m still doing testing to find out just what’s wrong, and have had some success at least temporarily updating the more recent posts with a fix. I haven’t found the source of the problem yet, but will keep working on this issue as time allows.

Your Comments
Your comments are a very important part of this blog, so I’m working hard to get this resolved as soon as possible. Should you want to post a comment and notice there is an issue, please let me know. Be sure to mention which post you were trying to comment on, too.

Mahalo for your patience and understanding, and be sure to look for good news on this issue soon.