Tag Archives: 1and1

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?

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…