A Frustrating Journey
This month's trail log brings updated info about my new MacBook Air, Lion appears on a Mac, there was a quick website redesign again this month and my Windows Home Server finally fits in as a real video hub. In addition to all that my Dropbox replacement has turned into a full grown backup solution. Read the rest »
Apple release some shiny new hardware and software. I'd haven't been eager for Lion, but now that it's out the hype got to me. An upgrade was inevitable so I downloaded Lion the first night and did the first install the next day. Apple also sucked me into a hardware upgrade. Read the rest »
While I don’t have an immediate need for “cloud” syncing, now that I’ve dropped Dropbox I’ve started looking at alternatives. I’ve been using Windows Live Mesh and it’s been working fine, The main benefit to me is that it can sync between computers without involving the internet. This works well for large video files where I don’t want to burn the bandwidth and also for files I just don’t want or need on the internet. It also works in most other cases but I'm sure eventually I'll want cloud sync. Read the rest »
At the beginning of July state (Connecticut) changed their tax law to incorporate an "affiliate tax" (aka Amazon tax). Naturally, most affiliates simply dropped their Connecticut affiliates. While I don't make a lot of money on this site I would like to cover the hosting charges. So it was necessary to find some alternative income sources. Read the rest »
Like clockwork, the first maintenance release after last week’s release of WordPress 3.2 has happened, WordPress 3.2.1 has been released. No info on what’s new as the change log is sill empty. The update is available through the admin panel (although I updated through svn). I already updated this site and my others. No database changes were made and a simple update to the files was all that was needed. Read the rest »
With the site redesign I figure it’s a good time to run through the WordPress plugins that I use. Previously I had kept the number of plugins to a minimum, looking for simplicity. Even though I've added some new plugins, I also eliminated some so I'm still at 15 plugins after the site redesign. Here's the 15 plugins I use. Read the rest »
Dropbox has been in the news quit a bit lately, first a minor rewording of their policies to clarify that they could access files when needed generated some buzz. Then they screwed up an upgraded and completely remove password protection for about 4 hours. Then they again reworded their policies and tweaked them after a backlash. So it's time to say enough is enough. Read the rest »
Well, my weekend redesign/server move seemed to go well. But then I did a couple posts and tried to implement a few tweaks and things began to go downhill. My main problem was I picked the wrong theme for how I wanted to maintain this site. I used WP-Clear by Solostream which was a theme I liked the look of and it had some nice features. It wasn’t a bad theme and it actually suited the reason I picked it. The problem was – I had the wrong priorities. I’d [...] Read the rest »
WordPress 3.2 has been released. Promoted as improving performance and streamlining WordPress. The update closed 402 tickets in the WordPress trac database. Read the rest »
Along with the site redesign I also added support for tablets and phones. If you access the site from a mobile device you should see the site optimized for the device, although you can switch to the standard view anytime by click on the “Switch to…” link at the bottom of each page. Less than 5% of visitors come from mobile devices, but that’s only going to grow. There were some caching problems early on but those seem to have been resolved Read the rest »