I have been catching up with all the events of this summer and I have also updated the pictures page, so now there is actually a 2010. I should be all caught up now and ready for August!
Some Updates
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Category Archives: Blog
Picture Editing
I spent some time working on the website. One of the things that you might have noticed is that the font is a bit bigger. I did not believe that the old font size was really all that readable if you have a larger monitor and use a high resolution. I also got some help adjusting some images and made the page about 100 pixels wider to accommodate not only the larger font, but pictures with frames around them. I really think that the pictures stand out now and look neater. I also spent time resizing all the images for thumbnails on the picture pages, because they weren’t loading all that well. I knew that the images were retaining their original size, but for some reason I never remembered long enough to correct that problem.
There are some more changes that I want to make to this theme, but for now I’m quite happy with how it looks. The other changes I plan to make is either removing or at least reducing the size of the orange bar that appears underneath images when you hover your mouse over them, and I would also like to get an image, instead of the current word art, for the title of this website.
I got Shozu to work with my ftp site, so now I can upload pictures when I take them with my phone directly to the ftp, which should make it far more convenient to post pictures that I take on a daily basis of things I see around town.
Users?
It seems that I lost all the users (people who registered to be able to make comments) so if you could please go ahead and register yourselves again that would be great!
Lightbox [Update]
Lightbox, for those of you that do not know, is the “thing” that allows the pictures to pop up on the website in their own neat little box with the shaded background. It also allows the viewer to go easily, through arrows on the right and left of the picture, to go to the next picture in a set. I use this feature whenever I either post pictures on the front page with a post and also in the pictures section of the website where I keep special holidays and events.
I am happy to say that it is working again, but quite honestly I do not know why it is working again. I know that after the update none of the pictures behaved right with the plugin enabled, and I spent several hours trying different things to get it to work, but all that was to no avail and I left the situation unresolved with a post on the front page. Now everything seems to be working as it should, so that’s good.
Lightbox
I’ve had the lightbox plugin working fine, but as usual someone decided to update their plugin,and now it doesn’t work. I don’t know when I’ll get this working again.
Adding Pictures to Flickr
I need to add pictures to flickr for them to show up in the new little widget I have here, so what I needed was an easy to way to get pictures off my phone and on to flickr. I went to the same place I always go when I have questions about what is and is not possible concerning my phone and that is Krhainos.
He let me know that there is a really simple application that sends my pictures to flickr with relative ease. I can pick pictures off of my phone or send them as soon as I take them. This program is Shozu. Now I can take pictures of the places I go and the things I see and you can all see them as well. I think that’s really cool.
I know Agent2690’s blog is made up almost entirely of pictures with very little, to no actual typing. I always sorted of wanted that reversed for my own blog. Now with a pictures section and this widget I think I’m getting close to that reality.
Sidebar Attraction
I was reading through some of my friends blogs, and I noticed that Rombus added a flickr.com "widget" or whatever you want to call it to the sidebar of his blog. Now I just signed up for the site myself, even though many of my friends have actually had an account for a very long time. I also downloaded a program for my phone that allows me to upload photos directly from my phone to flickr every time I take a picture. It only made sense that I should add something similar to my own site.
I don’t know if wordpress, which is what I’m using to run this site, is dying or maybe just has an extraordinarily bad community, but it actually took quite a lot of work to locate a widget that would work. I know they are still updating wordpress, so someone is still working on this thing and improving it, but the widgets, which are supposed to be a great easy way to add things to the wordpress site, are lacking in almost every way. If you start your search for the flickr widget on the wordpress site you will be confused as it links to a site that hasn’t been updated in several months and actually provides one broken link and a widget that breaks the latest version of wordpress. That means that you should probably start with google.
I do have a warning about google. "Someone" has been spamming sites with a "how to" video on this subject, and I say "someone" because I know exactly who it is since they say so at the beginning of the video, but I have no intention on naming or linking to this rubbish. The problem is that this 10 minute video, and it really is the longest 10 minutes of your life, goes on and on without actually saying anything or helping in the slightest. I know now why you have to go to college and take courses on teaching, and that reason is because otherwise you will do a horrifically bad job at getting a point across and waste everyone’s time.
I finally found a working widget, which I have down to the left now. I made some slight edits to it. I think the author of the widget was being just a tad too prideful, so I removed his name from the bottom of the widget, and I have to say that’s the first time I’ve seen someone put their name on their creation where it is actually going to show up on your site. I intend on taking more pictures, sending them to the site, and then I’ll probably move that widget up so it’s up top for everyone to see when I’ve got a collection of photos that is worth seeing.
Pictures
A big thanks goes out to Rick who fixed a missing page.php file that was needed in order to complete the Pictures section of this website, which you can find the link for at the top right there. I made all the Polaroid looking pictures and basically did it myself, since I was extremely unhappy with all the plugin’s and the widgets that were available.
It’s now complete and you can find all the pictures of my bike rides and the children’s birthday’s from the posts that are unfortunately gone, but thank goodness I still have the pictures. I plan on continuing to put pictures there, but mostly I intend to keep it family and family events only.
Email Fixed!
Everyone thank Rick for helping me out with my website, once it got moved over to his server, and finally getting my email working. Now you can all comment, retrieve your passwords, and generally everything will run the way it was supposed to in the first place.
Thanks Rick!
Moved, Again
I moved again, because Rick has graciously offered to host my server, and I think that would be nice.