Category: Admin

I normally wouldn’t draw attention to such banality, but I’d like you to glance over to the right of the screen at the sidebar over there.

Up near the top…

Have you glanced yet?

Look, just do it and I’ll stop annoying you. Really.

Ok.

The reason I’m pointing them out is because it took me most of today to figure out how to make those little png files. There’s no HTML text, I used The GIMP to make those little suckers. Never having used The GIMP for something like that, it took me a long time to figure out how to create the image size, make layers transparent, add text, position text, blah blah blah. And then, when I thought I was done, I started futzing with layouts and realized I’d made the png‘s incorrectly in order to make it look right. So I had to go and remake all of them again.

But it’s done. And now I can rest easy knowing that you all have seen it, even if you don’t appreciate all the effort it took to make it look just right.

For you.

Ingrates.

To be blunt, I’d grown tired of the previous look. I liked the simplicity, but I thought it was a little hard to read and I wanted to brighten it up a bit. The previous look was the Arclite Theme by Digitalnature that I had tweaked a little to customize the look a bit. Nothing too fancy. Since I generally liked that theme, I figured I’d start my search for a new look with that theme’s designer.

I was immediately drawn to the Mystique theme (there’s a link to load a blog with the out-of-the-box look), but had some quibbles with the stock look thinking it a bit too fancy, so I went elsewhere. After test driving a bunch of other themes on my backup blog here at home, I finally came back to Mystique and started tweaking the CSS sheet. Little things like colors and font sizes. I don’t know if my changes might have mucked up other stuff, so if you pick up on anything glaring, let me know.

Other modifications: I’ve eliminated the header bar and replaced it with the Site Nav menu over yonder on the sidebar. The Site Search has also been moved from the header area to the sidebar.

Lastly, I’ve added a couple of WordPress Widgets to the sidebar- the Calendar and the Tabbed Menu. The Calendar is pretty self-explanatory, but the Tabbed Menu I thought was a slick little way to conserve sidebar area and still provide a bunch of nice features.

The tabs each provide a different means for checking out the blog. The first tab is a Categories tab, followed by Tags, Archives, Popular Posts and Recent Comments. The Tags tab allows you to bring up posts based on tags I’ve assigned to the various posts. The larger the font size over there, the more posts corresponding to that tag. Popular Posts is based on a simple metric of number of comments to a post. The other tabs are self-explanatory.

Another subtle, but nice, feature is noticeable when viewing a single post. In the upper left-hand and right-hand corners of the post, above its title, are links to the previous post and next post, respectively. These links are not visible on the main page since it’s a running list of the past 20 or so posts.

Lastly, I’ve added a favicon which is just a smaller version of the background picture. You might see it pop-up in the address bar, or possibly on the tab in your browser. That picture is from Michael Yon and he’s given permission to use the picture (not just me- anyone who wishes to. See the link.). I thought it only right to give credit where it’s due.

The main goal was to make the site brighter and easier on the eyes; ultimately, making it more readable. I think that’s been accomplished (It’s already been given the Wife’s Official Seal of Approval.) Suggestions for further tweaks are welcome.

And now- back to regularly scheduled blogging…

UPDATE 3/28:
I’ve additionally modified the extend entry “MORE” link for long posts.

UPDATE 3/30:
Prodded by a suggestion in the comments, I’ve changed the “Site Nav” by creating buttons. Before, those links were created using a WordPress widget. I’ve removed the widget and hardcoded the links as the buttons there now. It looks a little more like the old nav bar that was in the header, but the position is now relegated to the sidebar. Also, I’ve subtely modified the site’s favicon.

It was actually colder when I went to get the picture, but I think my handling the thermometer raised the temp.  Negative temperatures aren’t all that common around these parts; though, we’ve been seeing negative temperatures more frequently in the last couple of years than I recall back in the 90’s and early 00’s.

The header picture comes from a photo by Michael Yon, a prominent internet based war reporter who has reported extensively on the Iraq War as well as the War in Afghanistan. He has kindly made the photo available for public use. I recommend checking out the original picture- it’s spectacular. The link is to his personal site, so you can check out his work in general as well.

Michael Yon will be releasing a book on the Iraq War shortly.

(Hattip: Instapundit)

Believe it or not, this site does get spam- comment spam to be specific. I don’t get tons and until today, I’d just dealt with it myself. But as of now I’ve enabled a spam filter for the site. I’ll monitor how it works and then decide if I’ll keep on with it.

If you post a comment and it does not show, it’s likely that the spam filter snagged it so don’t panic. Just let me know and I’ll deal with it.

I was getting a 500 error when checking out the site. So I went to my domain account and checked the error logs. I had the following entries:

PHP Warning: PHP Startup: Unable to load dynamic library ‘/usr/local/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-20060613/pdo.so’ – /usr/local/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-20060613/pdo.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory in Unknown on line 0

PHP Warning: PHP Startup: Unable to load dynamic library ‘/usr/local/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-20060613/pdo_sqlite.so’ – /usr/local/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-20060613/pdo_sqlite.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory in Unknown on line 0

PHP Warning: PHP Startup: Unable to load dynamic library ‘/usr/local/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-20060613/sqlite.so’ – /usr/local/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-20060613/sqlite.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory in Unknown on line 0

PHP Warning: PHP Startup: Unable to load dynamic library ‘/usr/local/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-20060613/pdo_mysql.so’ – /usr/local/lib/php/extensions/no-debug-non-zts-20060613/pdo_mysql.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory in Unknown on line 0

PHP Fatal error: [Zend Optimizer] Extension “Zend Optimizer” cannot be loaded twice in Unknown on line 0

A little googling revealed the possibility that zend was being loaded by 2 different php.ini files. So I commented out the offending line in the php.ini file and the site started working again. I’m putting this here more for my own reference for the next time something screwy happens. I’ll investigate further to get a better understanding of what’s going on.

UPDATE: OK, I’ve uncommented the line and reinstalled the php.ini and everything is still hunky dory, although I’m still getting the warnings. The fatal error related to zend appears to be gone. Still trying to get a better handle on what happened.

LAST UPDATE: These errors had to do with extensions called out in the php.ini file. Looks like in late May, the PDO extensions disappeared from the server since that’s when the warnings started appearing. Fortunately, the blog doesn’t rely on PDO so when I commented out the offending lines in my php.ini file, the errors and warnings disappeared but didn’t crash my site. I’ll keep an eye on this. Interestingly, PDO appears to be enabled on the server. I won’t say the issue is resolved, but I’ve at least gained some understanding about what’s going on.

I’ve added an “armoire” category under the woodworking category. My guess is there are plenty more posts and pic’s to come on this project, so that will be a nice way to pull all the posts up in one shot.

I’ve added a new page to the site related to kidspeak.  Basically, it’s a list of words and mispronunciations the kids use consistently.  Some are more amusing than others.  There’s a link at the top of this page and I’ll provide another one here.

I added a blogroll over there on the right side and moved the WordPress stuff to it’s own set of links. Those are the main blogs I read. All of them are established bloggers who’ve been around a long while, so they hardly need additional links from myself. That being said, I figured I’d put the links there for any curious enough.

They all comment on politics a fair amount, a subject I will continue to avoid for the time being. Megan McArdle provides a lot of economic commentary, while Instapundit links to all sorts of material. Kevin Drum and Mickey Kaus provide political commentary from the left. Eric Raymond is a hacker (meant in the original sense as a good programmer) who offers a lot of interesting commentary on a range of topics. Tony Woodlief is a writer/ author who has a knack for writing pithily about family life.

Check them out… or don’t. The choice is yours.

There’s a bunch of things that have happened over the last couple of days. The first of which I’ll mention is that I’ve gone “live” with this thing. I’ve been writing to it for the past month or so at home, just to see if it was something I’d even keep up with. I’ve not only kept up with it- I’ve actually found that I enjoy it. Coupled with the fact that I’ve had some interest in creating a web domain to tinker with and learn from, it was pretty much a cinch to take that step.

This site is hosted by hostmonster. I signed up on Friday and I was able to transfer all my current posts and settings to the site on Saturday. So I now have a duplicate site here at home. For the time being, I’ll continue to post to both my local site and the online site for further testing and backup. The blog itself is generated using the WordPress publishing platform.

So, to whoever the first visitors might be, welcome. I won’t be posting about politics, at least not to any kind of note worthy degree. I will be posting about things in my life- kids (see the blog title), woodworking, electronics, football, and anything else that I think I have an interesting perspective on.

And with that, time to move on to more interesting topics.

I’ve updated the blog from 2.7.1 to 2.8.3 and it will likely become 2.8.4 since it’s a security update.

The change wasn’t all bad.

Because I’m running with Debian, some of the configuration details were moved to the /etc directory. It took me several minutes to figure out what stuff had to be moved over there from the config file in the blog directory. After that, I logged in and then the software performed some kind of database update- which caused some funny characters to appear in all the posts. It was too unacceptable for me to leave alone, so I went through the posts and corrected that. Now everything is back to normal.

I figured out that the excerpting trick is performed in each blog post, so I’ve updated the longer posts to only show the first paragraph or so and then have a “Read the rest of this entry link.”

I have to admit, I’m feeling kinda stupid for not figuring this out quicker.

Made a couple of site mods- added a category and search widget to the side bar, and rearranged the widgets over there as well.  I removed the search from the title block, or header, or whatever the technical name is.

Also downloaded version 1.5.4 of the Arclite theme, but I won’t be playing with it until later.

I’d like to figure out how to show the first paragraph from a post, and then have a “Read the rest of the entry” link, but I haven’t figured that out yet.

Added the Blogroll widget over there, and changed the Archive widget to use a drop down menu.