i managed to sneak in some quick changes to get my travel blog for the world cup personalized. now it has pictures from flickr associated and a decent look (thanks to bundled tempates in the latest install of World Press). all i need is time to put a custom image up for the front page. i also threw in a second post and hope to post more regularly throughout the rest of the trip…
Postings here have been scarce the past few weeks as I’ve been focusing on an experiment my cell group engaged in over our recent time apart entitled 2weeks. Our goal was to listen intently to the voice of God in a regular and distributed communal fashion. That is, we strove to focus our times of prayer for this committment to the times of noon or 8pm each day, and were conscious of each others’ times in that space of listening. Some folks chose to blog about their experiences. It was a cool way to keep in touch with each other and dialog about what we were hearing even though we didn’t see each other regularly during that time. Though the writings are mostly personal to the group, they are not privately so. If you care to observe, you can visit the temporary site.
I suppose New Year’s is a great time to put things long gone behind you and retire things that are past their prime or utility. It’s time to get a fresh start on things you’ve always wanted to do, to make unrealistic yet hopeful promises to yourself, and to entertain new fancies that might have flirted with you over the course of the recent past.
This isn’t particularly true of my own life this new years – change and new things come according to a season more in tune with the surroundings than the calendar – but this is adage is mostly true for my weblog. Though perhaps a couple weeks late, all of my entries have been safely migrated to a brand new, hi-fi, supercharged hosting and publishing system with all the extra options. Goodbye Movable Type 2.6.3, Hello WordPress. And, I’m not the only one in my neighborhood making the switch. I have to say that I’m incredibly impressed with how far WordPress has come since I first took a look at it 3 years ago. Kudos to all the DHTML ninjas who have been silently contributing to this powerful tool rather than spreading their seed across random public websites seeking visual mojo.
Perhaps more significant than the publishing software is also a move to a new hosting service, DreamHost. (I have to thank Ryan for suggestions on both accounts.) Dreamhost makes it really easy to manage multiple hosts and services on your domain, and I plan to take advantage of this to try out new site concepts and ultimately work towards a solution that helps a small creative collaborative journal and expose their work to a wider audience. More on this coming soon.
For now, enjoy the minor visual changes. Also, the site has search now, which I don’t think MT provided. Yay.
Kiva has reached social enterprise Internet fame. Matt is now blogging regularly on the evolution of the organization and things are happening quickly.
Check out this article on Daily Kos, the second most-popular blog on the net. Thanks to this site, all current Kiva loans were funded within hours. Way to go Kiva.
Though it was never entirely obvious to me, somehow deep down I always knew it was going to happen.
Today I moved the photostream from my blog to flickr. The performance is excellent compared to buzznet. The lack of basic photo management tools or access to common functions like tagging and search is really annoying. (I think this would make more sense if I understood more how the site evolved or what uses it targeted.) Also, for a product which has had so much exposure and hoopla surrounding it – especially on the Y! campus – it sure has a lot of bugs. The most annoying? I can’t set up a photostream badge with a count of 5. Lame!
after taking a look at some of pat’s suggestions on CSS resources, and in addition to feeling guilty to convincing a sickly chris to tweek his site for Safari while my own blog remained unfriendly to his beloved IE… i decided to begin the journey into the wonderful world of CSS seeking inspiration for a new site design.
in the end i only commited to a few modest tweaks, the most important of which is finally removing all traces of puke yellow from the site. another wonderful side effect did come, however; mainly thanks to the fact that david hyatt, a fairly CSS-savvy guy, recently created a new MT-powered blog and amidst the few initial changes he made to his default stylesheet were a few that evidently sqwelch the IE sizing problem, but don’t screw it up for everyone else. thanks, dave.
“Fortune and circumstance smile upon your domain.” – the fortune cookie
so my friends informed me today that my blog has scrolling problems under IE on Windows. that seemed odd because my stylesheet is the standard Movable Type sheet, and one would figure that out of all the people installing MT, someone would notice the issue on IE and fix the distribution.
apparently not. i checked out a couple other blogs by folks using the same setup, and sure enough they’ve got a sizing/scrolling issue just like me on IE.
it seems the only common problem amongst all of these blogs is that none of us actually use IE on a regular basis – but that doesn’t seem like a very bad thing. thus the template and stylesheet will remain the same until MS learns to size their DIVs after positioning elements according to stylesheets – or until, I customize my template in a more original fashion.
slowly throwing all the pieces in to get my new website up and running… here’s what’s going through my mind:
1) i’ve been anonymous on the internet for about six years now. coming out of my shell here is now more daunting than asking out a random cute girl
2) having my own domain is pretty cool. always wanted one. don’t know why i didn’t do it earlier.
3) the initial impetus for doing the site is pretty much to explore the wonders of weblogs. my buddy chris szeto is doing the same. another intent for this site is to provide an online outet for my creative content. we’ll see what happens…
4) movable type is a pretty cool weblog tool. nice interface. like the Perl-based implementation. however, its lack of spell checker is going to kill the integrity of my entries…
ok, champagne bottle breaking on side of server now…