Stoney's Zone » Blogging

The Concord Women’s Chorus

stoney — Sat, 06 Jan 2007 04:13:21 +0000

Sara (my wife) mentioned that the Concord Women’s Chorus web site isn’t listed by Google. The CWC (formerly the Concord Madrigals) is a top-notch choral group. They have performances in the Spring and in December. I’ve created their graphics (poster, tickets, etc.) and recorded them since 1994.

sb.org is moving

stoney — Sat, 30 Jul 2005 20:13:37 +0000

Over the next week or two, all of sb.org will move from a server in my house to Dreamhost. This is happening because I’m dropping my Savvis T1 and switching to Comcast for internet access.

The first part that’s moving is this blog. You may see broken bits for a while as the DNS changes. Since Dreamhost supports WordPress, and Movable Type is rumored to be hard to install there, I’m changing to WordPress as well. It’ll be a while before I come up with a theme that I like, so meanwhile, I’m using the default theme.

My son Kevin tried to convince me to move to Typo, but it’s too immature to be practical for me. Nice support of AJAX via Ruby on Rails, though. I’ll probably move to Typo when I’m comfortable with it.

Moving to DreamHost

stoney — Mon, 25 Apr 2005 01:31:46 +0000

After nine years with Pair, I’m moving to DreamHost.

Their sale (ending April 24) was too good to pass up. Over 7 GB of on-line storage for $16/month! I can put my Gallery photo albums there.

This is all necessary because I’m dropping my T1 from Savvis this summer when the contract expires. When I started it, Comcast had just shown up in Concord, and couldn’t give me the service I needed. There are many more alternatives now, and I can’t justify keeping a T1 and paying 10x Comcast’s fee.

Over the next few months, I’ll be migrating my web sites and those I manage to DreamHost. I’ve spent the last few days exploring it, and am quite satisfied with what I found. They have a much better “control panel” than Pair, and their policies are very flexible. Since they’ve been around since 1997, I hope that means they’re stable. The reviews I’ve found on the ‘net are quite good.

New Photo Gallery

stoney — Wed, 20 Apr 2005 16:01:37 +0000

I’m trying out Flickr as my on-line photo gallery. There’s a new Photo Gallery link in the left side bar that goes to my photo area there.

Currently, I’m using Gallery on my server, but I need to find some other way to manage photos, since I’m dropping my T1 this summer. Flickr is easy to use, and the price is right, especially after the recent price drop.

The main question is whether I want to upload the full-size pictures, which run about 3.3MB, to Flickr. They encourage that, but it’s unnecessary unless you’re printing them. However, with 2GB/month upload bandwidth, that’s about 600 large photos/month. It’s unlikely that I can keep up with that.

One of the really interesting features of Flickr is the ability of visitors to annotate parts of pictures, e.g. by drawing a rectangle around someone’s head in a group photo and naming them. I’m going to put my collection of old family photos up and try to link to them from my genealogy pages, so visitors can identify the people in these photos.

Feel free to visit my photo gallery and add your own comments. Use the “Add Note” feature to annotate part of a picture.

MT 3.1 Upgrade

stoney — Sun, 05 Sep 2004 17:52:07 +0000

I’ve just upgraded my blog to MT 3.1. The update went fairly smoothly, but I found some pages used the wrong css file name. That may have been there before, so I can’t blame the upgrade for that.

I’ve also found that the “Recent Entries” menu no longer shows all the items. It cuts off anything after the one selected. Looks like a bug in MT, since it happens only with dynamically-generated archives.

The main reason I upgraded was to get the new MT-Blacklist plugin. Comment spam is truly annoying, and this promises to keep it out.