Gary Elsbernd

Elsbernd.com has returned to Joomla. Elsbernd.com started as hand-written HTML, and as my knowledge grew and I looked into content management systems, it moved to Joomla. This was a good fit and I used Joomla for years. After a while, though, a few things bothered me about the platform. Each time there was a major upgrade, I had to migrate things by hand. There were few options for automatically updating the site to the latest version, and a lot of my extenstions and templates broke between the versions, so I had to either sit on obsolete technology or spend a weekend upgrading my site and finding replacements for the parts that no longer worked. I moved to WordPress in 2014, and thought I had the world by the tail. It was an incredibly powerful and popular platform and I was learning a lot of things about their template system. The upgrade paths were good and they had a lot of extensions available. Unfortunately, being the most popular platform makes you the largest target for malicious actors. I was hacked twice in the past two years, with my traffic being redirected and my site being blacklisted from Google and Bing. After the second hack, I decided to come back to the familiar turf of Joomla, while upgrading to the latest version, including things like two factor authentication. I have a nifty new responsive design and was able to preserve the Elsblog archives. I think if I had more time and were more interested in the back end of security and databases, I could have made things work in WordPress, but I now prefer the comfort of a secure, familiar and powerful platform, even if it isn't the largest one out there.