Site Stuff


This blog is run with Word Press 2.8.1 since July 13, 2009 (parts of page edited and information also added, some thing put into blockquote to denote older information that I want to keep on the page, also a few “edit-update” tagged things I put at the bottom, but that’s not the only added stuff. I need to overhaul this page and split things up into historical, story, software/hardware currently running, etc.)

Some of the Plugins I use are:

WP-Picasa-Gallery
Countdown

I use Adobe Photoshop Elements with pictures from my Canon Rebel film camera which I scan in with an Epson all in one scanner, or pictures from my Olympus D-520 Digital which I load via my Epson all in one printer card reader.

I now [since July 2005] also have a Canon Digital Rebel 6.3 megapixel camera. It’s my primary picture taking device currently. (As of today, September 14, 2012, it’s still my main camera. I had a P&S but I gave it to my son for his birthday yesterday, I hardly used it, found it too tedious for what I wanted it for Canon Powershot, horrible on Auto and inside the house for the most part, great as a video camera, but I have a nice Sony one, next paragraph details that.)

For Christmas 2008 I got a Sony Handycam HD AVCHD HDR-SR11. I use it for video, which I don’t have on this site, but do put some on YouTube, and need to upgrade some program in my computer so I can really edit my HD files into movie-like videos with titles, music, etc. my COMPUTER … I have programs for editing video now, but hate using my laptop (Toshiba piece of junk, it’s ok but it’s NOT any good for what I wanted it for and the BB sales guy steared me wrong. I’m still mad about that.) so much that I am using a bluetooth keyboard and mouse and my 23″ Playstation monitor in a pseudo desktop experience. I have no space on my laptop harddrive to work with HD video anymore, so … I am at a standstill for processing years of video and adding to it … that stays on my camera for now. Bad, bad, and worse. My laptop should have been an i7 with bluetooth and blu-ray but it wasn’t doable in that configuration and I didn’t get ANY of that, stuck with an i3 and no blue … and it’s limiting to the nth degree for me. I hate it. i3 is a light photo, gaming, browsing, social media, music listening, video viewing computer. My HTC EVO View tablet can do all that for goodness sake! This has been going on for a long time, and the super desktop I have wanted/needed to build is still not built. I have only a case and it’s about to be thrown out, yes, that’s my sentiment about it. Stuck with a freakin’ dinosaur laptop and the battery is worse than one would imagine, so I leave the unhealthy thing plugged in all the time, never hardly move it, if I do, I bring the charge cord with me, it got 2 hours max. watching a movie or browsing the web. It’s a backup from A/C power loss, nothing more.)

I was using Google’s “Picasa” so that I could see all the pictures on my computer in one spot and use it to generate XML pages that I could use with “WP-Picusa-gallery” to display in blog posts easily. I may look into this again, to implement a more “photo friendly” blog here. I have been using FLICKR since 2005, but don’t always put every photo on FLICKR that I would use here …) though I usually now only put select photos on this blog, and might just upload to the media section since WP does have better features for media now.

I used to use the “Exhibit” plugin for images in posts. It’s still in use for some past posts, but I don’t use it anymore, and so some post images may be broken for that reason. I hope to look into that and fix those in the future.

I used to have a photo blog on this site. It was on another domain connected with this blog, but no longer available. I do have a Flickr account, as I said above, and on my other blog I have a plugin that brings everything from Flickr onto a Page.

This is what I had said before, but it’s only for historical purposes that I leave it here. So I’m blockquoting it so it doesn’t look like I’m nuts.

I upload pictures and have customized Kubrick in 1.5 so that it reads my thumbs and full size photos in the blog pages by just inputting the path to the picture name in the excerpt space … thumbs have a “-thumb” on the end of the name … so I can pull up what I want to show on different pages due to the new features in 1.5 to use custom templates. Prior to this, in WP 1.2 I didn’t have my photo log in WP. I had used MT previous to WP and just had stopped updating my photo blog and left it in MT for archive purposes.

I have many more photos to upload for a photo log and I will do that eventually. I like having some pictures on my weblog though, so will use “wp-picasa-gallery” sometimes. I customized it to use a javascript popup, but since changing hosts that popup isn’t working, so I got rid of it and have to retool it to work, I have pictures in posts that may be missing as well, still on my old host, which is not accessible right now.

Countdown is on my sidebar. It’s a nice little plugin to show upcoming dates that are totally customizable.

I have a bunch of plugins installed and am re-tooling this site to reduce and refirm-up everything. Therefore I will not list what I am using other than what’s above.

This site runs on Dreamhost.

My ‘puter at home used to be a Sony Vaio PCG-GRV550, it’s what I used to usually do all my posting and configuring of this site on. It died recently [not so recent anymore], Juice Spray Incident, by four-year-old boy [3+ years ago, sometime in 2004]. Otherwise I used to use the desktop that I built, has an ABIT motherboard, I upgraded the memory recently and it was great, still need a new video card, but since DH got a new laptop and I got the desktop back full-time, something went wrong and it won’t POST, and nothing is reviving BIOS, so it may be the processor that died. One day I’ll get it figured out and get it going. Then I‘ll have my Blue Baby back to work on, that’s the desktop’s name. Has blue lights inside, more than one thing is blue, it’s this and that and the other thing. The case is an Antec Super Lan Boy. It was on sale and I liked the silvery look of it and it is nice to move around, it’s meant for gamers to plop around with. That’s no stopper for a non-gamer who just likes silver and blue and platinum and light weight cool thingies. I have to post from DH’s laptop now, it’s the only functioning computer at present for us. I got a new Abit board and processor, and a new power supply. It’s what constitutes the Blue Baby now, not as blue due to the different power supply now. My processor is an Athlon 64 3000+ (… much better than the old XP 2100+)

I’m on my second HP laptop since writing the above paragraph (a few times in the last few years) … I got the first one, and thanks be to God we bought it at Best Buy and bought a warranty that covered ANYTHING at all. I had put my laptop somewhere different one time and when I left it, it was opened. When I went back to it something wasn’t right. It was fritzing out almost. I picked it up, and liquid dripped from it. Sniff, ugh. Cat pee. URG!

I took the hard drive out and it was fine, I saved my data externally and dried off the ruined computer best as I could. Best Buy took it back, and sent it to HP for consideration, and just a short time later I was called on the phone and told to come on in pick out a new laptop. 🙂

The above quote was correct at the time, with this change: in addition to that HP laptop that I picked out new as replacement I now have an HP tx2513cl tablet (touch screen) laptop. The HP laptop is older and had the screen replaced in the last year, still in BB warranty. The current one I use, the HP tablet laptop was new in September from Costco.

[Edit-UPDATE July 14, 2009 2:08pm] I did away with my customized Sandbox theme and implemented the VeryPlainText theme today which I have in use on my hyperthinking blog and my oldtimesummer blog. I had liked my previous theme, but not fully, and liked it more when the browser wasn’t maximized. It was very fluid, but I didn’t like how wide it was when max. and didn’t want to put white space around it since I did like it when the window was smaller. So I caved and went to what I actually have liked a lot better, VeryPlainText.

I have other plugins now, and am re-assessing what I will keep and what to throw out. I really do want to fix old posts with pictures, and I have done some of that spot by spot if I ran into into it for some reason.[/Edit-UPDATE]

[Edit-UPDATE Dec. 5, 2007 11:37pm] I’m reconfiguring categories and getting TAGS set up to be the majority categorical way to sort my archives, that means I’m struggling to get my categories wittled down to what needs to be just the basics, and to have the right amount of tags, not too few, not too many.[/Edit-UPDATE]

This is a rough draft. I am just slapping words into a new page and will configure it to look nicer and read easier later. Don’t hold thy breathe waiting for that though! 🙂

April 11, 2022: Started using Twenty Twenty-Two theme, Full site editor version of Word Press.