H Mueller Design – Page 2 – Keeping Track of Parkinson's

I have been agonizing over what I have to do about the Blog (hmuellerdesign.com) for some time. It was intended as a personal tool where I could record my personal thoughts and experiences of living in a long-term care facility. But it has grown in scope and other people have started using the blog as well.

It was not designed with that in mind, as a consequence people were finding it difficult to navigate. Back to the drawing board I went. My financial situation here is precarious as one of the staff put it, basically I have no money. So I thought I was being quite smart and frugal to put the five topics I wanted to track, in the same blog as if they were the same topic, just different angles of it so I simply allocated them different categories – but as the saying goes “slim vang sy baas!” which translates to “smartly catches his boss” i.e. if you try work arounds by unorthodox means, it is likely to come back and bite you – and this one certainly did.

Restructuring the Blog

I found that you can convert a single WordPress installation into a “multi-site” installation. That meant that I could give each of the topics could be given its own website with its own navigation, and look, without it costing me any money, just labor. But Murphy is alive and well and living in New Westminster…!

I went through steps being extremely careful. Well my site was totally broken after that. The webhost company fixed some of the problems so that one can navigate the site but I still have 294 broken links…

Result of broken link scan.

More Pain

This is a longer story – there was so much to do so I prayed for guidance, what should my priority be. In a dream I was told to focus on the online training, which was a total surprise. In the multitude of council there is safety, so I sent an email to several people who know me and asked if they thought the dream/vision should be taken as the guidance I had asked for. I asked everyone to be frank.

I got many frank answers and several difficult discussions followed from that. But I am glad I did ask for advice and I appreciate all the responses.

Bottom line is have been focusing on the courses. I have gained many valuable insights into what the training should be like. Which brings with it a whole host of challenges. I will explain in another post.

The last week or two have been really hard for me. The Parkies has progressed with continuous struggles with Dyskinesia (click for more details). Suffice it to say when one is physically not well, it can affect one’s mood. So, I’ll admit that I have been blue to the point of hardly being able to get anything done. Clinical depression is one of the symptoms of Parkinson’s – if I had been my physician, I would have diagnosed the clinical depression already, in fact I would consider bipolar disorder – I hope our resident doctor does not read this because he has forever been on my case for resisting medication as a solution for the depression that overwhelms me.

So why not take his advice?

I think one has to tackle the cause of the depression, antidepressant medication basically adjusts the brain chemistry so one is better able to cope. There is a place for that I am sure.

But I am trying to deal with the things that stress me. And the doctor is one of them.

But a bigger problem for me has been what to do with this blog. It has grown over time so people have found it difficult to navigate because the blog deals with several different topics and also within a topic, like Parkinson’s – because I was writing for my own benefit, I did not pay attention to structure – people don’t like reading long blocks of text without the aid of formatting.

I had decided to create separate websites for the different topics by converting the existing WordPress installation into a multi-site installation. It seemed to be good idea and everything was going well at first. But somewhere in the process I must have done something wrong and I got a lot of Page Not Found errors.

I am trying to fix those now. At the same time if I see a page in serious need of structure I attend to that too.