I’d like to wish a Happy Birthday to Kelly aka Klingus, my wife.
Since we’re poor I couldn’t buy her anything, so I made her a center-page website-thing linking to her blog, her flickr and picasaweb albums, hopefully she can find other things to use it for as well.
Yesterday I made a personal site using SilverStripe, and it was my first experience with the CMS that worked. I think last time I didn’t follow the instructions or something and problems arose multiple times.
This time however, worked a treat. It’s not your average CMS, where absolutely everything is configured via a web panel and then stored in SQL. SilverStripe has the basics in SQL (Pages) and the rest is left up to the developer. Once again, a piece of software where its greatest asset is its greatest downfall, and proves, once again, that perfect all-around software does not exist. Either it’s simple for the newbies who want a good looking website, or it’s technical for developers and geeks who want a website that will do anything they ask it to with minimal fuss in breaking their entire index.php-based site with a parse error.
SilverStripe doesn’t have dynamic site names/descriptions like WordPress does. I had to go and edit that in the theme itself. Not a problem, I just need to remember to change it if I change themes.
As far as which is ‘better’, I no longer have a preference. They both do an awesome job at what they do, and I may at some point transfer the UCCN Support site to SilverStripe from WordPress. I’ll still keep the LifeCity site running WP, and probably the I-aL site running it too. WordPress is easy to install and configure, SilverStripe will probably prove easier to develop for.
Don’t take my word for it, test them and decide for yourself!
In other news, we took crash to the vet for his first-week checkup, and he’s doing really well. He weighed in at 28.2lb, and no sign (at this stage) of entropion, thus everything is probably good on that front! Going back in a couple of weeks for his shots, that won’t be such a good time for him 😉
We’re kinda hanging in the family room, Crash, Kelly and I. We’re watching Family Feud on TV, the Porter family are playing the final game. Oop, they just lost, getting 159 points (needed 200 to get $20,000).
I’m also talking to a friend who has a DVD of photos of his son, from newborn through the first year that he is trying to recover. It isn’t going well.
Kelly just moved to the other chair beside Crash, and he started trying to chew the blanket she’s wearing to keep warm. She’s not doing too well, has a sore throat. She really enjoys the look on his face when she pats him on the nose with a rope toy and hums a tune. We’re working especially to train him out of mouthing/biting people, and we’ll also be working in the next few days training him to not jump up on people when he’s excited (or at all, really).
Just took him out to ‘potty’ and he peed, but hasn’t pooped for a while. Now he’s kinda ignoring lunch in favour of laying beside the chair and licking himself. So far he has acquired at least 6 names or variations on names, all of them in the first 3 days. Crash, Chase, Crush, Crash Taylor, Chuck, Trash.. as well as the obvious ones like Pup and Puppy.
I’ve given myself a coding project for the afternoon, after I retrieve the power pack for the macbook. It’ll be a whois and status facility for UCCN, which will begin our web-integration with IRC. The first will be a web form that queries whether a nickname is online, and if so returns normal public information about them (their hidden host name, public channels, etc). The second will be a status image that returns ‘online’ or ‘offline’ depending on whether the user is online or not (duh..). Both will be dependent on the SQL database from Denora, and will probably also utilize the SQL database from Anope for Nickserv aliases/groups. It will detect if someone is online but not using their primary nickname.
I also need to work on the web interface for Supportive, and will be developing an improved version of the java.php @ www.unitedchristianchat.net/java/java.php, both in look and in function.
So, I shall stop blogging nothingness and go get my power pack!
Today was the go-live for the new Christian-IRC.com and UnitedChristianChat.net sites. Everything seemed to go fine, and the old UCCN site was re-themed as a support site. In the next few weeks I’ll be writing a bunch of new stuff in PHP/JavaScript to help out with webmasters and such.
I also did a bunch of .htaccess redirect rules, and I was able to delete a bunch of direcories and clean up the public_html folders too!
So, check out the new sites:
And now ends my shameless plugging 😉
I reminded myself yesterday and today how much I enjoy, and how much I hate webdesign.
I guess thats why all my site designs are simple as poop, make it work and then plug it with PHP, and then make it work with the PHP.
This weekend saw two new sites for the United Christian Chat network – one for unitedchristianchat.net, and one for christian-irc.com (a subsidiary).
I did one entirely on my own, and Ed helped us out by doing the C-IRC one, though it was graphiced for UCCN and I’ve updated/changed the wording on the images.
I played around with Gimp doing them, and was pleasantly surprised compared with my previous experiences with anything photoshop-like. In fact, most of my problems were CSS side rather than graphic design.
They aren’t live as yet, we still have a few minor changes to make, but here are some screenshots to wet your appetites:
UCCN on the top, obviously, and C-IRC on the bottom
I’m listening to sermons from my old church, I helped Dad put up a podcast for them and was testing it out.
Anyway, we had a guest speaker, Pastor Tuks, who I haven’t heard of for a long time! Anyway, he had an awesome quote in the first 10 minutes:
I’m a school teacher, I’ve dealt a lot with teenagers. I wanna tell teenagers this morning, you know some teenagers think that without a girlfriend they’ll perish. Get real guys, girlfriends will come and go. You won’t perish without one. I’ve known guys who lived their whole teenage life without one. They’re fine! They never died! They’re still alive today! You know we have girls walking around thinking “If I don’t get a boyfriend I’m gonna perish.” Absolute rubbish! I was standing in a schoolyard one day, these two girls came up to me, one was crying and the other was all sympathetic and stuff, and came up to me and said “Mister, my boyfriend is being mean to me.” So I said “Well, what did he do?” and she said “He ignored me when I wanted to talk with him, he was playing table tennis. Can you go and talk to him?” and I said “I’ve got better news for you. Drop him. If he thinks a game of table tennis is more important than you, kick him into touch, girl!” And she started crying even more! I thought that was wise counsel. And she sad “Mister, you’re mean!” and I said “No, I’m not mean girl, drop him!” and she says “No I can’t!” I said “Why?” she said “Because I love him!” I said “Bollocks, girl! You don’t know what love is!” That was the end of the counseling session..
I recall that earlier today I had an awesome idea for what to post tonight, and now it’s gone. Like yesterday is gone. Like summer break is gone. The world keeps moving on. It’s going, going, gone.
I got up early this morning (I need to do that more often, it hurt…it shouldn’t… not like that…) and went to work with Kelly. I was incredibly tired by 10am, another sign that I need to get up earlier and stay up longer and such. I took a bunch of photos in the parking lot and such when it snowed both times, and had a Wendy’s Baconater for lunch. I love those things…
Read a lot of magazines, from Model Railroader, to Garden Railway, to Trains, through another few on the same ideas and then Mac|Life. Quite the transition.. I’m thinking when Kelly’s power cable comes and I get my laptop stuff back, I’m going to try and build the P4 Dell laptop with Linux and see how much like OS X I can make it look.
I’ve also installed another eggdrop on Rhapsody, installed Icecast2 (need to talk to Mack and make sure it works), need to work through configuring a virtualhosts template and hopefully create a basic web-panel to configure Apache’s virtualhosts. I also still need to design a site for I-aL to sell hosting packages.
BTW, I have 10 eggdrop shells available for US$1/mo (No vHosts, sharing a single IP), and a single IRCd account available, starting at US$4/mo, services and price to be discussed although that price will permit 1 bg process plus the IRCd (so services, or an eggdrop). If you’re in need of customised webhosting, leave me a comment and we can work out pricing for that too. I’ll consider hosting a shoutcast/icecast stream or similar or a teamspeak/ventrilo server on request.
So, for the last month or so my most recent project has been under fairly tight wraps. Partly for fear all the related domain names would be taken, and partly because I feared someone would take the idea as a whole.
No more shall I fear, as I launch a new website: The Daily Serene Image.
To quote myself:
Daily Serenity was an idea conceived by demigail in 2008. Made into a reality by Zeke in October of 2008, the site went public in the following month.Accepting any images from both amateur and professional photographers alike, Daily Serenity survives photographically based on its contributors.
Every day a new image is randomly selected from the list of those available (having been screened and approved by administrators). A brief description provided by the photographer is displayed with the image, along with a link to the photographers website (where applicable).
Published images are also archived indefinitely, with a static link available for each one. All published images are also available for download, both in widescreen and standard versions. These are sized appropriately for use as desktop wallpaper/backgrounds.
What Daily Images will be needing is contributors to provide photos and images for the site. Registration is free, and while no payment is provided for images supplied or used, no payment is required either. The terms and conditions of uploads are available when registering to provide photos, and all photos are checked and approved before they will appear on the site.
Are you a photographer? Consider some free publicity by contributing some of your work to Daily Images. If the Daily Serene Image takes off, it may grow into multiple sites of a similar nature, covering different themes.