Because I simply must yet another electronic umbilical cord strung to my navel, I got myself one of those nifty Twitter accounts. Now I can post instant updates on the site whenever/wherever I am–provided I’ve got my cell and service.
So…you can check into truffin.com to see what I’m up to, or you can get your own Twitter account and FOLLOW ME.
(Just getting the image of the Disciples wandering about, hunched over cell phones, after receiving “the call”.)
Been away from the blog for a while due to the beginning of the semester craziness AND my redesigning of Cindy Morefield’s website. She’s got a bunch of new work on display (and for sale). The site was launched Wednesday in preparation for an art salon at the new home of Dan and Laura Morefield.
So, please take a minute to visit Scratching the Surface Studio.
Ever since last summer, I’ve been enamored with the idea of having random header images on truffin.com. So, now, some 8 or 9 months later, I finally got around to acting on that notion–and it only took 10 minutes. Well, 10 minutes to install the necessary code. Selecting, cropping, and optimizing the images certainly took longer, but that work had been done when I was trying to implement another system.
At any rate, as of this morning, you faithful readers should start seeing different images at the top of the page. If you want to see more, press Ctrl-F5. Repeatedly 
So, yes, I did install Gallery2, and I’ve even got some albums coming together that will be viewable soon. However, to make this at all useful to me, I needed to integrate Gallery2 with WordPress, and the wonderful folks over at wpg2.galleryembedded.com have a nifty tool to do just that: the WPG2 plugin. [BTW, possibly stupid question: anyone know if the WordPress and Gallery2 folks are the same entity or related entities? They seem rather buddy-buddy.]
At any rate, I just installed the WPG2 plugin, and this here’s my initial run at seein’ what it can do.
Hmm, here’s using some advanced options to put the image to the right.
Not sure the worked. Have to check out the CSS. Ok. One more, using a different tag function:
EDIT: Well, it seems that the plug-in is doing a nifty job of displaying the thumbnails on the blog, but clicking the links to the images seems to weird things.
Well, I bit the bullet and made a decision. (wait for appluase)
Thanks to a comment from someone at the Gallery team, I decided to go with the Gallery software for setting up a photo gallery. It was a breeze to install. Now I’ve just got to learn how to use the crazy thing.
I spent all afternoon yesterday processing photos from my 2005 New England Disc Golf Odyssey with Ken so that I could present them in a nice album. Next step is to upload the photos and configure the albums.
I’ll let y’all know when things are available. In the meantime, it’s fun!
So, in tweaking the look and feel of truffin.com I decided to try out a growing usage in the punctuation of cyberspace: the bracketed word instead of the symbol. You can see it in action up near the top of the page and in the title bar of your browser. Yup, there it is, [dot]. We pronounce it “dot” so why not spell it out?
I must say that it looks a tad bit “precious” to me. Not sure I like it. What do you, vast millions of readers, have to say about it?
[dot] or . ?
So, I get home from a somewhat frustrating doubles round of DG. How two guys shooting fairly well can still combine for a +2 is something I’ll be taking up with the DG gods later.
At any rate, my truffin.com project tonight was to install a photo gallery program and get it running. Only, well, I’ve got to pick one. My wonderful new host makes it very easy for me one-click install 3 different programs for sharing photos. Two of them look really good:
Of course, this means making a, gasp, choice. So, I go online trying to find comparison studies between the two. Nada. You know, you folks in the open source movement don’t have to be so gorram nice to each other. A little competitive back stabbing wouldn’t hurt you know.
So, now, after almost two hours of combing the webs in hopes of finding some reason to pick one over the other, here’s what we’ve got.
Coppermine: the installation file for Coppermine is like 1/4th the size of Gallery. Way cool. On the down side, there only seems to be one WordPress plugin to integrate Coppermine with WordPress, and it’s not clear how good or stable it is.
Gallery2 seems to be the choice of more experienced users–and I want to look like an experienced user, so that’s a good thing. And it appears to a very nice integration with WordPress. But, and here’s a big BUT, it’s HUGE. It’s 52 MB compared to Coppermine’s 11. Egads!
Of course, no one wants to say one is better than the other. So I’m just going to have to go and install one of them and hope it’s good. Cuz if it ain’t, well, then I’ll have to uninstall it and do all the work again with the other.
Did I say I had a frustrating round of DG?
Call it the power of advertising. Yesterday, while looking up some info on a gel pen, I noticed Staples was having a crazy sale on flat screen monitors. Now, I’ve been wanting a flat screen monitor for some time. Sure, my 17″ CRT was working fine, but it was like Jabba the Hutt sitting on my desk. Sherry even told me on more than one occasion that I should look into a flat screen. So, trembling with anticipation, I trundled out of the house and to the store. Of course, when we got there, they didn’t have the exact model I saw online. But they did have one for the same price, and they had a Sony for just $20 more. Feeling a bit snobbish, I eschewed the no-name monitor and snagged the last Sony they had in stock. With the $40 rebate, well let’s just say it was an easy choice to make.
So, there it is. The Sony SDM-HS75B. It couldn’t have been easier to install and set up. Truly plug-n-play. And, here’s the great part. My 17″ CRT only gave me about 15.5 inches of actual viewable space, but this, my new 17″ LCD gives me an actual 17″. That’s 1.5″ more real estate in a smaller package. Woo hoo!
So, after about a month of being on our new host and running WordPress, I really, really, really want to modify/create a unique template for truffin.com. Yesterday during a break from GRE scoring, I stumbled upon the UrbanGiraffe who has a very interesting WordPress Theme Guide. Feeling warmhearted towards my fellow man for making such information available, I began perusing the guide after scoring was over and decided that I wanted to try out his disection methods. Doing so would mean installing a web-server, database, and WordPress ON MY OWN COMPUTER. Ack.
UrbanGiraffe makes some good arguments for why you want to do such a thing. Mainly, you can try stuff out without crashing your entire live site. Having worked for a commercial website, I can say that’s a good thing. Having only provided member support for a commerical website, I hadn’t a clue about setting such things up. Fortunately, UrbanGiraffe did. Just use WAMP5; it really does make most of the things simple.
UG’s guide makes the process look very painless. And, actually, if you don’t do anything fancy, it probably is. After 4 hours or so, I gave up trying to set up multiple domains; one will have to do. The famous “5-minute-install” of WordPress took another 2 hours due to a) my wanting to copy over the live site so that any designing I do can be done with my current content in mind and b)PhP weirdnesses having to do with mystery whitespace popping up in out-of-the-way places. After six hours of tinkering, I finally have a fully functioning web-server, database, and WordPress on my local computer.
Yes, I feel proud
Well folks, it looks like I’ve got this crazy thing goin’ and there’s no stopping it now. For them’s that care, here is what’s happened over the last few days:
Why did this happen? Well, basically, it’s all Blogger’s fault. Over the last two months, Blogger’s performance had taken a serious nose-dive. It was taking DAYS to post things, and from what I was reading in the Blogger support forums, my experience was not only not unique, but it didn’t really appear that Blogger was going to do anything about it.
So, I started looking for blogging/CMS solutions and everything I read pointed to WordPress. It didn’t hurt that friend, Sara Zarr, had recently switched over to WordPress, and I really liked her site. However, WordPress required technology that IVC didn’t offer at my current pricepoint. When I started looking at the next price point, I realized there were much better deals out there. What sealed the deal was that IVC’s customer service left basically Everything to be desired.
The migration over to BlueHost hasn’t been without glitches. But I must say, every single glitch has been the fault of IVC and BlueHost’s support people have gotten me solutions in MINUTES. Thus far, they rock!
What’s ahead for Truffin.com?