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.

Back. Forth. And back again.

I am screwing around with my picture gallery yet again. It’s been through a lot of permutations and it’ll still have to see some more.

I am moving off the Gallery and back to Dave’s album. This time though Dave’s album will have some heavy weight support from KimDaBa.

By now I am convinced that there is just no software package which works the same way I do. Each assumes a different workflow, but it’s never mine. So instead of moving back and forth, I should use the combination of programs that solves my needs.

KimDaBa is an outstanding image manipulation software. It’s just what I need for sorting pictures, tagging them, identifying people and locations, slideshows, etc. It supports exporting to HTML, but not the way I want it to. Dave’s album on the other hand is perfect for web albums. At least to the level that I need. It doesn’t do much of the rest though.

The good thing is that both KimDaBa and Dave’s album support plugins, have extensive documentation, and are Open Source. That means that customizing either one of them will be much easier than it could have been in other cases.

So, things will be shaky for the next few days, but I hope that you won’t notice any major evil.

Server misconfiguration occured

That’s right. I’ve been reconfiguring my server to support a couple of new things that I am working at and I made a mistake that I haven’t noticed. As a result all hosted sites, except one were displaying an error that was complainging about SSL something.

It stayed like this for a few hours and even managed to get into few search engines.

My appologies for any inconvenience.

Full URLs from now on

Whenever I was linking to my own site, I’ve been using relative URLs. Relative URLs are shorter and they don’t need to be changed when site moves to a new domain. But, it seems, there are numerous problems with RSS feeds and software that aggregates them. The main issue is that most RSS aggregators are rather stupid and don’t know how to convert relative URLs in RSS feed items to absolute ones. This causes far too many people to swear far too much. So I decided to switch to absolute (full) URLs from now on.

Changes of my domain changing are too slim too.

Mobile version is up and running

I came across a simply, but really useful plugin WP Mobile. It provides a much lighter version of WordPress blog for users of mobile devices such as cell phones and PDAs. Since I am a rather often guest of my own, and on many of this occasions I use my smartphone, I decided to install this plugin and link to the mobile version of the site from the navigation menu at the top. Feel free to bookmark it too.

Signed up for Google Analytics

Everyone and their brother is talking about the new Google service – Google Analytics. Basically, this is a smart way of getting website statistics. Instead of installing and configuring a local web log analyzer, you just sign up for the Analytics, insert some JavaScript code into your website and have the best stats ever made ready for you. Or not.

Google Analytics is called the biggests failer release by many. Things didn’t work as they were supposed to. Instead of fast and dynamic stats, people wait in queue for their statistics. Lots of bugs and lots of misbehaviors. I signed up myself and I had to wait for alsmost 12 hours for the site to be accepted. And now I have to wait for another 12 hours (or so I am promised) to get the first reports.

For me the idea of having stats done by Google is a pleasant one. If I think Google can do one thing right that wold be data aggregation. The paranoids all around us make lots of noise about privacy concerns and Big Brother is watching you conspiracies. Well, I simply don’t care.

Those of you who do care and want to avoid being tracked by Google can easily do so. All you need to do is block your browser from doing HTTP requests to “www.google-analytics.com”. Read this good article on the subject.