Category Archives: Site News

Music, Site News, Technology

Neglect

Dear Internets, it’s been a one sided relationship for awhile now.  I’ve been taking and not giving much back.  Is that wrong?  Instead of the usual excuses, I’ll just say that I don’t have much I want to write about.  Shall we run down the usual suspects?

Music:  Mumford & Sons concert a month ago was awesome.  Edward Sharpe, not so much.  I haven’t been able to listen to much new music lately.  I only seem to listen to new music while at work and my portable hard drive is broken.  I suppose I could listen to it on my new phone, although I’ve started listening to Pandora a lot more at work.  Here’s something I can give back today: my Mumford & Sons Pandora Radio Station.  Seriously, check it out.  I’ve had everything from Bod Dylan to The Decemberists show up.  Good times.

Phone: Picked up the HTC EVO 4G on launch day.  It’s a welcome replacement for my Instinct.  Now I have a real smart phone, not a “feature” phone posing as one.  As indicated in the name, the EVO has a 4G radio, although it’s really WiMAX and not likely to be the eventual 4G standard.  But I get a good 4G signal at work, not that I can use it much.  Pandora sounds the same and it’s hard to justify watching videos.  Too bad I didn’t know about the 4G availability until after all the World Cup games are over (SprintTV has live ESPN).

WordPress: Updated to the newest WordPress, 3.0.  More of the same?  Perhaps a new theme can kick things up a notch?

Seems like the usual suspects show some promise.  Shall we investigate them some more soon?

Site News

Resurrection

A year and a half seems a bit much, no?  Seeing as how my web host is charging me more per month, it seems only proper that I update this more than once a year. Of course, that is what I said back in July ’08 so we’ll see how that pans out this time.  I have a few ideas but I am not going to mention them now.  All the previous times I mentioned ideas when promising to use the site more have resulted in disappointment. We could all use a little less disappointment, right?

The first thing to do, however, is put up a new theme.  Ooh, fancy! Plenty of shiny things to get distracted with…

Site News

Some Things Never Change

Uh oh.  Almost a week and no posts and no new pictures uploaded.  Falling back into old habits already?  Not that anyone is going to believe me, but I do have plans to update the gallery and add more pictures.  Especially since a review this morning of our picture storage situation has revealed over 20 GBs of pictures with no backup system.  I believe my webhosting plan has more than enough room to store them all so now it is simply a matter of determining the best method for organizing the pictures.  My inclination is to keep it simple and store by date, such as in folders for each month.  Now that we have two children, it would be impractical to store the pictures by category.  So now I just need to find time to sort the pictures and then upload the entire collection.

I’ve found a few more plugins that I’ve installed:

The automatic upgrade plugin was especially handy since a new version of WordPress came out on Monday.  TinyMCE Advanced lets me forget about HTML although I still find myself checking the source to make sure that it’s working correctly.  The sitemap generator and the Super Cache seemed like good plugins to install.  It’s always good to play nice with the search engine sites and reduce the load the site generates on the web server.

Site News

The Search Goes On

I think I’ve found a theme I can live with. I spent far too much time looking around the official theme page without finding much that I really liked. Somehow I found myself at Blog Oh! Blog and chose the theme that you currently see. I hacked up a new logo for the top (in Word of all things), however, both that and the bottom image will have to be replaced or removed.

I promised a list of the plugins that I’m using so here they are:

Of course, looking at that list I realize that my search for a theme is likely not over. Hyperlinks aren’t indicated in the unordered list. And the post looks great when on it’s own page, but the list is all messed up on the main page. Perhaps I can mess with the theme’s CSS and fix it.

Site News

Irony

Let me explain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up. -Inigo Montoya

As mentioned earlier, I decided to install WordPress because I wasn’t really using my site. My primary reason for doing so is to make it easier to create posts quickly, since I don’t have as much time for playing on the Internet as I did several years ago. Another equally important reason, is that I have had many difficulties with my image gallery of choice, Showroom, in loading large images. There were unresolved problems with my web host (1&1) and the image manipulation software installed on the server.

So with that in mind, I had planned on trying new image galleries. While exploring the plugins available for WordPress, I came across one that looked really nice: NextGEN Gallery, which would integrate into WordPress. After the easy install, I tried loading up some large images that failed with Showroom. Needless to say, they didn’t load in this gallery either. I did some searching and quickly found this post by the author of the plugin. The test script failed so I imagined I’d have to spend many quality hours on the phone with 1&1’s tech support. Scrolling through the comments, however, resulted in this gem, which eventually led me to this site. After making the simple change, the test script worked!

On a whim, I decided to try the images again in Showroom and to my chagrin, Showroom now works properly. Oh, cruel intarwebs, how you torment me! Anyways, I think I will stick with Showroom, since I have that setup how I want. You can reach the gallery by clicking on the link in the page list. Now I just have several years worth of pictures to upload…