Category: Site News

This website is very old. It’s been with me for many years. There are plenty of articles which are useful both for myself and the rest of the world. Bit by bit, word by word, link by link, image by image, this site was filled and filled over the years. Technologies changed. Some new techniques and concepts came up. Some old ones faded away. Spending as much time as I possible can (after everything else) on this site, sometimes I manage to introduce big changes – like a new bit of functionality or a totally different look. Not to confuse and scare everyone, I try to be open about the changes that were made. When something big is changed I post a description of what it was and why I felt the change was needed. These updates are published in this category.

Giant move to Flickr

Ok, I hope I am writing this for the last time. At least for the next 10 years or so.

I am doing a huge move of my photo gallery. I got bored with trying out all pieces of software, migrating back and forward, configuring this stuff, adding features, backing up, fixing links, etc, etc, etc.

Flickr wins!

I have decided to move my complete photo collection to Flickr. Yup, you heard me right. No, I am sane and in good mind.

Flickr has everything I need from a photo gallery tool – speed, flexibility, tags, permanent links, ratings, social interactions (comments, bookmarks, groups, ratings, etc), and much more. It integrates nicely with a whole bunch of third-party software. There are many third-party services based on Flickr, such as image editing tools, backup to DVD tools, print and ship tools. And Flickr is standard de facto for photo galleries.

I don’t see any good reason NOT to migrate, so let it be. I’ll keep you posted on my progress. Until the move is completely done and everything is uploaded and tagged properly, I’ll keep the local copy of the gallery. All new additions, however, will go directly to Flickr. I’ll also have some sort of sidebar applet with links to recent and random pictures. Stay tuned.

P.S.: This post pointed me towards this utility for batch uploads – very useful. Easy to use too.

P.P.S.: Years 1995 – 2002 are uploaded and somewhat tagged. The rest is coming soon.

Productivity tip

Here is a productivity tip from the you-don’t-want-to-do-this department:

You don’t want to wait for a filesystem check to finish, when it’s working on a 200 GByte partition.

Hopefully, this tip explains the 5-hour downtime that the server experienced from today’s morning and until now.

I still love you

You, my dear readers, might think that I don’t like you anymore. (I don’t publish as often as I used to. My post got shorter. And I tend to talk about obvious things too.)

That’s OK. I understand.

The truth of the matter is that I am extremely busy recently. And my blogging mood has changed significantly. I don’t post one entry a day anymore. But I still think of at least one every day. They accumulate in my brain and I post them later in bunches. I was doing this always to a certain degree.

It got a bit more difficult recently though. You see, I tend to rethink things that are in the pipeline. And with all my busyness lately I have a huge stream of incoming data that changes many aspects of my thinking. So instead of just writing up the post, I rethink it and put it further down the queue tagged “needs more work”. Many posts stay there until they expire.

Expiration feels very bad (like a lot of lost effort), but it is probably a good thing after all (less junk unleashed onto the world).

Anyway, I hope that this is temporary as so many things in the world.

P.S.: If you are too annoyed by this, here is a hint: there are so many good blogs out there…

Plugins cleanup

I have deactived a whole bunch of plugins that weren’t used anymore or weren’t needed anymore for this site. Mostly these were related to statistical reports and text formatting.

This cleanup should make the site a little bit faster, because less database queries and less parsing operations are needed to display pages. Also, it should be easier for me to upgrade to newer versions of WordPress, as less things are likely to break.

I have checked around everything seems working as it used to. If you notice any problems or malfunctions, please let me know either via comments or the contact form (assuming, of course, that either of these works).

Hardware tetris

I try to stay as further away from hardware jobs as I can. But sometimes there is no way around…

I’ve been promising some fixes to Olga for about six month now. No music played in our living room during this time. And Maxim was continiously getting closer to power cables and outlets.

So, today I fixed everything. Appologies for a little downtime, by the way. I had to rearrange my harddisks and move about 80 GBytes of mp3s and oggs. I also had to disconnect power cables in order to properly move all cabling behind the table, so that Maxim won’t reach it. Or at least where he won’t see the cables so often.

Now everything is done and back to normal. I even got a bit of free disk space that I can use to refresh my music collection…