Sorry for the sporadic updates without much content - I’ve been working on the wedding blog! It’s been a royal pain, but it seems to be running pretty well now. Originally it was a question of implementation - I wanted to keep the blog on my domain instead of doing a cookie-cutter thing on the myriad of websites out there. I checked out a bunch of stuff, but nothing seemed to want to cooperate. In the end, I went with another WP installation.
Teresa had some requirements for the blog - and considering her patience in waiting for me to figure out how exactly to implement it, they really weren’t any big deals. For one, she wanted a password-protected domain. Of course, she didn’t really know how to phrase exactly what she wanted, so I managed to work up an entire scheme for how people would register, etc. Her response to that was… well, it wasn’t one of being impressed. We finally figured out what exactly she wanted (something that can’t be seen without having a master login & password), and my hosting company came through with a simple “press this button” solution for that.
I got to stretch my creativity a little, playing with CSS’s z-index to layer bits on top of other bits as well as some other things. She really liked the overall look of this blog, so we changed the overall color scheme from blue to orange and cut the sidebars down from two to one. So, while it’s not wildly different from this blog (not my fault), there was enough difference in there for it to be a learning experience.
It’s been interesting the little things that have popped up in designing the new site. For one, I was designing it from scratch for WP 2.x - this blog was a 1.x design that I had to migrate over… which happened to break some functionality that I need to fix (as I had mentioned in an earlier post). Initially going through all the WP user registration stuff was pretty interesting too, although I’m not sure if I would ever have a need to implement it.
The latest head-scratcher though is for some odd reason, writing “Union” (as in Union Square) in the text of a post using the WP editor caused the whole thing to seize (”you don’t have permissions to …/post.php” or some such). It was very bizarre and extremely frustrating in trying to track down. Further, if I tried to cheat and write it using the numeric codes for each letter, it would still throw that same error! Curiously, if I posted the word in question using Ecto (my offline blog authoring client thingy), it would successfully post! I never figured it out, but managed to get around the whole issue by changing “Union Square” to “downtown”.
As far as the future of this blog is concerned, I want to keep it running - and will, somehow. The reality of the situation is that ever since I got officially engaged, all free time seems to have evaporated. And it’s not like I’m ceaselessly working on wedding stuff either! I want to do a redesign of this site and get back to posting on a regular basis, but please be patient with me (all two of you) as I try to squeeze a posting in here and there while the redesign waits until some free time miraculously materializes.
Gotta go - 2 wedding posts wait to be written!
« OK, I’m done
I’ve tried Twitter twice to see what all the fussin’ is about. Both times Firefox would hang. Sounds dumb anyway.
As for the home automation - oh, my head. I’d become an obsessive, paranoid freak in no time. “Someone’s at the door!” Huh? Why?! What are they doing there?!! I’m calling the cops!!!
Only thing I am keeping an eye on in terms of future needs/networking is my iTunes library. I’ve got it set up on a dedicated RAID (with DVD backups just in case), but I don’t want to push those drive into an early grave because I’m playing back hours of music from them all the time. Seems to me that I need the RAID for long-term storage and an “active” drive that I copy everything to and use for actual playback, because in the long run I would like to see my future home be wired in every useful room for iTunes sharing. Just add cheap old computers, and off you go. Networked music bliss in every room, all feeding off one server.
It’s funny how we moved from mainframe/terminal to home computer, and now seem to be inching back towards that old model. In fact one of the hightlights, for me, of this iTunes sharing thing would be digging up machines to run iTunes in various rooms. A laptop here, an old iMac there. There’s articles out there regarding new uses for old VT100 terminals…
hmmm….
Comment by Jim — 3/26/2007 @ 9:46 am
Yeah, I hear you Jim - the potential for paranoid freakout is there. After having been broken into at my last place though, I like the thought of knowing that you can use home automation to at least turn the lights on automatically, if not just be able to have photo captures of whoever is at the door.
It’s not like I’m going to be getting into it anytime soon, but I like the concepts that this guy has been building out of Twitter. The only potential use that I can see getting out of the service - unless some other enterprising parties think other things up - that’s for sure.
As for media server(s), that’s something I’d like to get into as well. Our one bedroom apartment pretty much precludes playing around with that anytime soon on that too though.
Comment by Brian — 4/8/2007 @ 12:20 pm