While I don’t have any new images to present today, aside from “Today’s Image”, nor do I have any real news to discuss, I did want to present some recent changes to various websites I maintain.

First, I finally updated Carmella’s Hang Out [carmshangout.com], months after Carmella asked me to do so. Sure, she just wanted a graphics overhaul, but I wanted to change the entire layout. Because of the holiday/winter season at Ritz, I didn’t have a lot of time to work on her site.

Next, I updated my father’s website, Worthwhile Music [worthwhilemusic.com]. He recently retooled his existing album, Committed, and renamed it to Homeward. I designed his album cover, but then realized his current, overly flowery website didn’t really fit the design I had done on the album cover. I had noticed that other artists had a tendency to have the website remade every time they released a new album, so I figured I’d do the same for my dad’s website.

Finally, I updated my business website [flagmandesign.com] to include the Worthwhile Music website change, as well as the color guard photography work I did, and presented, months ago. Speaking of which, I’ve been asked to take more color guard pictures next month, so perhaps in a year or so I’ll post them, considering my update schedule these days.

I’ve been a little slow these days in updating my site, and a lot of it I blame on the weather. When I started with this new format, the weather was in my favor for taking long walks around the neighborhood. Now, it’s unsafe to stay outside for too long, lest one literally freezes (okay, certain parts of one’s body can freeze). Granted, there are many other areas in the world where it’s colder, but I’m not in those places (and for good reason!). Despite the severity of the weather elsewhere, it often gets bad enough in my neighborhood that it’s not entirely comfortable to take pictures outside. That and it’s snow, snow, snow. I’m sure someone in California is awed by the stuff, but it’s hard to get motivated to take pictures of things that I find mundane. It’s funny that I admit this, considering how I often sit wide-eyed at the computer over pictures from California.

So I’ve been hurting for new “Today’s Image” images to post with each new post I want to make. It’s part of the reason why I’ve taken such long breaks between posts: I convince myself what I wanted to post really wasn’t good enough to make a post and use up an image. That’s not the entire reason, though: a lot of it has to do with me leading a dull life at the moment. The image I decided on for today’s “Today’s Image” is an old picture of clouds I had kicking around. Sorry.

In other sad news, I’m getting close to the end of my vacation images. I’m thinking only one or two more of these “dumps” left, and then I’ll be all out of new vacation pictures.

I almost forgot: my site was down for a while. I also neglected to make a link to my forum where I announced the downtime, as I figured everyone (all three, four of you) who visited it would have had it bookmarked. I assumed, that was wrong of me (and no, I’m not chiding you). What happened to cause the downtime was a simple mistake, one that I have made many times before, and I’m certain I’ll make again. I didn’t read the instructions. WordPress recently updated its system requirements, one of which my webhost didn’t support in the hosting package I had purchased. So, when I updated WordPress, it helpfully let me know that I needed a new version of MySQL. My webhost purposely didn’t update MySQL on my hosting, as the service plan I had purchased was no longer supported, and a forced upgrade was scheduled (which would include me). Unfortunately, I didn’t have the money available to purchase the new hosting plan: even worse, WordPress invalidated my database for downgrading to the previous version of WordPress. I was therefore stuck: I couldn’t run my site, but I couldn’t update it, either.

Fortunately, I was able to get the money to purchase the new hosting plan, and everything worked out rather well. Carmella’s site [carmshangout.com] was down for a bit after the upgrade, because my host missed her site as part of the collection I have. That would explain her two-day downtime.

It was an interesting adventure, and one that could have been avoided had I only read the instructions. The sad thing is, I’ve been told this many times before, yet I continue to ignore the instructions. I’ll read a manual all the way through, aside from the very first page. For some reason, I just seem to think it’s not important. Nevermind the big “READ THIS FIRST” written on the first page. I just skip through to the “meat” of the instructions, which lies somewhere in the middle of the book or page. It’s a bad habit. Now don’t get me wrong, I do eventually read the entire manual, but it usually is after I’ve already taken some course of action on the project, such as updating WordPress before checking the system requirements. In my defense, I’ve updated many times before, and the instructions appeared exactly as they had in the past. Oh well, it’s all back to normal now anyway.

Oh, and one last thing: Katren just updated The Kazette [hepworthouse.com] and would probably be pleased to have you read it.

It’s taken a while for me to finally decide to go with WordPress as the backbone of my blog. In the past, I was always a little worried about depending on a database to display the contents of my site, because I’d seen many sites crumble due to PHP errors. I realized that it was mostly due to the webmasters not knowing much about PHP, but I knew that I didn’t know much about PHP, and definitely less than the aforementioned webmasters. Because maintaining a site running on a database seemed like an arduous task, I figured it was only for the technologically elite, which definitely wasn’t – and isn’t, truth be told – me.

Because of my growth in web design, I’ve been able to better understand databases and how they run, and it’s helped take the fear out of it. I’ve learned that there are definite benefits to using a blog system like WordPress over hand-coding XHTML (but I’ll never stop that). Because of my years spent typing everything out by hand, I’ve come to understand the code more than if I had kept with website design programs like Dreamweaver. It is because of this knowledge of the code that I feel comfortable using a blog system like WordPress, rather than a lack of knowledge.

Basically, the switch is all about convenience. However, because of that convenience, I’ll be able to present a better website to the readers. Despite my aforementioned knowledge about XHTML, I admit I know very little about PHP. I couldn’t design a blogging system like WordPress if my life depended on it: well maybe if it did, but it would be very, very hard, and would likely be terribly ugly. I wasn’t ever able to implement a search system, and I realized that navigating my archives was a bit of a chore because of it (like anyone actually reads those, though). Being able to make a post without having to update a Sitemap, index page, and archive page would mean that I’d be able to post more, and more often. Posting on version six was fun, but it became a chore at times, especially if I forgot to update one of the required pages. Ironically, I switched to version six because version five required too many pages to update!

Anyway, for those of you who were wondering, this update was the biggest reason why I hadn’t updated the site in some time, especially in the area of Canon EOS 30D pictures. I’ve been taking a lot of them (a lot less than I’d like), and have been itching to post them in a way I would find presentable. This site helps fill that need.

I hope you enjoy the new version. For those who weren’t familiar with my last upgrade, I had a period of a few weeks where I tweaked any bugs I may have found. For all my complaints about companies putting out junky products and slapping a BETA sign on it, I find myself hypocritically doing the same thing out of excitement. Granted, I’m not a company – and if I was, I wouldn’t do this – but I do feel a little twinge of guilt putting this up when it may have parts that I eventually feel need to be changed.

Then again, if you knew how long it took me to finally come up with the previous designs for this site and others, you’d realize why I would want to quickly post something to stop my perfectionism from preventing any progress.

For those who would like a bit of nostalgia (or horror, I suppose), I’ve left my older versions of the site up in the Archives. Of course, like in previous versions, it’s still a work in progress, and I haven’t been able to put everything up yet at the time of this writing (I’ve got to hunt on some CDs for the older stuff). I’ll get all the files up on the site eventually: for now, the links are there for the older versions, but aside from the most recent previous version, nothing is in the folders.

In closing, I’d like to remind everyone that this site continues, in part, to be licensed under a

Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License

. There are going to be some works that aren’t listed under the license, so please respect the copyright of such works. It’s an honor system in the end, but I do hope you will show integrity and respect my wishes. It’s a small thing to ask, isn’t it?

Thanks for visiting. Get ready. I’m excited!