This is not a real post. You are seeing this only because I am trying to figure out why Evil Eyebrow’s feed is weirdly unformatted.
Peace.
I can conclusively say that the theme has nothing to do with it (although I had to edit out the call to the random quote engine.. but I seriously doubt that’s related.)
I discovered today that we’ve somehow gotten off by a month on our Nathan albums in the Gallery. We, of course, managed this months ago (in like the 4th month). Of course, we should be in Nate’s 12th month now… not the 11th (as was previously in place). Age is a zero-based numbering scheme but the cardinal numbers associated with age are one-based. You’re immediately in your first year, which ends by turning one year old. So all of this geekiness aside, I fixed all of the albums and the links in the blog going back all the way to last summer. Unfortunately, this is a complete manual process.
The thumbnails displayed in the blog are interestingly enough permalinks, so the images are still visible after I change they’re albums. The links to the image pages in the gallery are not… they are ‘meaningful links’ like “Nathan/5th+Month/”. Unfortunately, this means that they break when the album hierarchy changes. Bleh.
I’ll probably look into changing this because this doesn’t really scale well into the future. I foresee all of Nate’s first year albums being organized into a new album when we break into his second year in a few weeks. This will require me to manually edit all of the links again. Bleh^2. I think I better figure out something better by then.
It’s been a while since I actually made a post here, so I thought I’d use today’s nap time to do just that. Not a real lot going on here other than just day to day stuff, so it may not be real exciting.
I took Nate to the doctor yesterday. He’s had a cold and a very runny nose for several days now, and after waking up many time screaming on Monday night, I was quite sure that he had an ear infection. He most definitely did, so now he’s on an antibiotic. hopefully it will kick in today, and he’ll be a little less cranky.
Nate and I are taking a Music Together class on Friday mornings. it’s been a lot of fun for both of us. He gets to be around a group of kids his age, and I love to see him interact with them. He’s gotten out of the “babies are for eating” stage into the “I’m going to poke you in the eye” stage. lots of fun. He also seem to be enjoying the music. He gets excited when the jingle bells come out and he gets to play with them. So far a good experience.
Nate’s getting better at walking, and is almost ready to do it on his own. When we’re outside in the lawn, he walks everywhere, just using one hand to hold onto 1 of my fingers. Inside, he still prefers to hold on with both hands. I don’t think it will be long now before he’s walking on his own.
We’ve been spending a lot of time outside since the weather has turned nice. Nate enjoys it, and my gardens are starting to look pretty good because of it. Every time we walk around to look at the flowers, I pause to pull a weed or two. Even managed to trim the hedges the other day. hopefully I’ll be able to keep the weed pulling up all summer.
I’ve been doing more scrapbooking again recently. A couple of the moms I met thru the MOMS Club have been getting together fairly regularly in the evenings to scrap, and I’ve been joining them. I’ve been working on a simple photo album of Nate’s first year pictures. Just a regular 2-up 4×6 album that I’ve been making little 4×6 mini-pages to journal on about the accompanying photo. Goes quite quickly once I get momentum.
Well that’s about all I can think of right now. Gotta get back to the laundry. Maybe more to come soon, but I wouldn’t count on it.
What? You can’t see any difference? Well, you shouldn’t but believe me when I tell you that the code is COMPLETELY different.
I’ve converted our theme into the modern WordPress era by Widget-izing the sidebar. Yeah, I know, you don’t really care, but this will make it easier for us to tailor the site to our whims and change the look from time to time.
I also had to create a brand new WordPress widget to support the Gallery Image Block you see on the left. This will be my first ‘real’ submittal to a project like WordPress, so it will be interesting to see how that process goes. It’s written as a plugin which activates the widget (like most widgets are).
If you care, you can read more about the External Gallery 2 ImageBlock Widget.
With a sweet find from the Gallery 2 forums, I’ve edited some configuration settings for the website. This has forced the Gallery software to use a more modern version of PHP than it was defaulting to. Without any obvious reason why, this has now corrected the server error.
We’ll keep an eye on it, but we’re up and running!
We continue to battle to get our website back up and fully operational. Today we seem to have had a complete breakdown of the SQL database system. Of course, both of the applications we use (WordPress for the blog and Gallery2 for the photos) are dependent on SQL databases to operate. So that pretty much shuts down our website.
Strangely, I had managed to get in just a few minutes ago… but again all is lost.
From what I’ve learned, we are apparently not the only ones to be suffering problems with the gallery software on our web-hosting company. Something that was changed in their server configuration seems to have broken the application.
What’s odd, is only the front page is completely failing to load. If you link directly into the lower level albums, the pages will load. At the moment many of the thumbnails are also broken, but that’s a separate issue.
So as a workaround, to get to Nathan’s pictures just go to the album directly with the following link:
http://www.theschierers.net/gallery/v/Family/Nathan/
from there you can navigate to other albums by using the pull-down menu on the lower part of the left column, or regular thumbnail navigation, just don’t click on the logo or the root album.
Our hosting company upgraded our server yesterday, which means that we’ve been having some issues since then. Mostly with the gallery. We’re working with them to resolve the issues, and hopefully everything will be back to normal soon.
Previously we had allowed only registered users to view the ‘full’ size images on the Gallery. I have now removed this restriction because it seemed to be more annoying than useful. The ‘full’ size images in the Gallery are 1800×1200 which is larger than most people’s monitors, but still significantly reduced from the full resolution image (3504×2336) from the camera.
Speaking of the camera, the corruption issues have continued which is putting a bit of a crimp on my most productive hobby. I’ve come up with a workaround (download images from the camera exclusively with the Canon viewing software which is horribly awkward), but clearly there is some kind of problem that will need to be addressed.
The problem seems to manifest when I remove the card from the camera and place it in any card reader. I can remove the card and replace it in the camera with no issues visible within the camera. Once it touches a card reader, however, the camera and WinXP agree that there are busted files. We have several (two different brands of USB type and one embedded in our printer) and all of them seem to suffer the same problem. I’ve tried multiple CF cards (I bought 2 new ones just a few weeks back when the issue first came up). It doesn’t happen EVERY time, but I’d say it’s higher than 75% that at least one file will get mashed. This is clearly unacceptable. There was even a recent firmware update for the Canon 20D that addressed a compact flash compatibility issue. I’ve upgrade to this firmware, but the problem persists.
The nearest Canon service center is near New York City in Jersey and this is NOT a good time of year to be without your camera for two weeks. I think I’ll muddle through until after the holidays. Yuck.
I’ve added a major new capability to the Gallery which I think is very cool. Here are the details:
Date: 08/10/2008
