I was hoping to track down an iPhone tomorrow — I’m hoping that it won’t be too difficult.

Another thing that is troublesome is that Google’s algorithm doesn’t really play nice with Web 2.0 (Ajax, Flash, etc), where the data is no longer displayed in HTML that can be parsed by a bot, but rendered on the client.  I added links to my website so the search engines would find the pages underneath the Ajax navigation.  With more and more sites moving in this direction, I think Google needs to seriously rethink its algorithm

(Or maybe it doesn’t… it will just force web developers to provide and maintain two versions… Bah)

We’re down in Monterey this weekend, Tahoe next weekend, Philadelpha the folowing, moving/wedding in Yuba City the following, GSB events the following… basically we’re booked.  Hopefully things will feel less stressed here once we can settle into a routine.

I know I promised Grand Canyon pictures, but I still haven’t had a chance to even look at them myself, so I’m queuing everything up until September when I finally get a chance to build my new desktop… I’ll actually post the proposed specs later today and see what you think =)

Things are still crazy here… adjusting to a new job, acclimated to a new apartment… you know, the works.

My big new purchase… a “pre-owned” Mesa/Boogie Stiletto Deuce head with a 4×12 Mesa slanted cab. This thing is massive!

I’ve never owned a tube amp before and this one is perfect because you can switch between tubes and solid state silicon diodes for the distortion channels, so you basically get the best of both worlds. This thing sounds incredible (and very, incredibly loud… I haven’t pushed it past 9 o’clock… I don’t think the downstairs neighbors would like me if I did). Its amazing the difference when compared to a shitty practice amp. Took me 5 hours to get it (drive up to Stockton and back) and nearly threw out my back getting it up to the apartment (Daniel had gone up to Lafayette, and we couldn’t find anyone around to help — the head itself, while only 8″x8″x36″ weighs probably 50+lbs… the cab at least 100+lbs), but it was entirely worth it.

Anyway.  I’ve moved hosts, so hopefully things will be nicer now… more responsive and less unknown internal server errors.  The marching band website got a new domain (www.dukeband.org) and a face lift in the process.

Managing your own server (complete with root access) is a lot harder that I thought it was going to be.  I really didn’t appreciate all the complexities in even a standard configuration (Apache is a complex beast!).  I think I have most things “working” now and all things need are some spit and polish.  I managed to move everything over without killing either my blog or gallery, which was a fantastic feat in my book.  If you notice anything different please point it out because it will be a new problem this time around.

And while I was doing that I was woefully delinquent on packing… I have a way-to-early flight tomorrow morning and I’ve only done a cursory pass at the suitcase.  Laundry and errands call now, and then figure out how to pack for 4 weeks in two suitcases.

p.dc:first-letter {
float: left;
font-size: 2.5em;
text-transform: uppercase;
font-weight:bold;
font-family: Georgia, Times, Verdana;
line-height: 0em;
color:#707070;
}

It looks as though IE7 does support the :first-letter pseudo class, but the box model is failing with the float: left. Any suggestions?

Update — Yay!  I got things working.  Now clicking on the image brings up a lightbox version of the image (looks actually quite nice).  Clicking on the title sends you to the gallery.

There are still a few things I need to work on…

• Currently wpg2 only works with one gallery.  I have separated out my pictures into multiple gallery locations (I’m questioning that decision now, but oh well).  I’d love if I can update the image chooser to show images from other galleries, but I believe I can start with modifying the tag with a flag, which will point the logic to different location.  In any case, that’s definitely a future task.
• Formating of the image thumbnails.  I would like to improve the presentation a bit, but for now it will have to do.  I’ve probably already hardcoded more than I should into the plugin, but at this point, whatever works.

Let me know what you think.

FYI, Gallery 2.2.1 was just released, however I haven’t upgraded yet. Things are settled now (even though there are quite a few features I would like to use now), I think I’ll let the release simmer for a before taking the plunge. Ultimately I want to setup a store front where people can buy custom framed prints. However, I have no delusions that will happen any time soon.

The past week I’ve spent most of my time on the Kubuntu side of my laptop, only going over to windows to update Quicken and do some music composition/recording (haven’t done any photography in a while, unfortunately). I have to say, I really wish I could take the full plunge (at least have windows running in a VM), but that will have to wait until this summer =) And by the way, Amarok is a kick-ass piece of software!

Update

Well it turns out I may need to upgrade gallery a bit sooner.  I played around with wpg2 for a few hours last night  and realized the gallery codex documentation was referring to the latest release (2.2) not the one I’m running (2.1) — ARG!  Identified a few more improved features that would be nice to have how… Oh well.  I think I’ll still wait a month or so.

2.1 version tinyMCE will replace <div> by <p> when saving post, you may change this by hacking file: wp-includes/js/tinymce/tiny_mce_config.php
about 24th line, find:
$valid_elements = 'p/-div[*],-strong/-b[*],-em/-i[*],-font[*],-ul[*],-ol[*],-li[*],*[*]';

replace by:
$valid_elements = '-strong/-b[*],-em/-i[*],-font[*],-ul[*],-ol[*],-li[*],*[*]';

This was the main reason why I was using ChenPress as my editor previously. I haven’t yet figured out TinyMCE will handle embedded php in a post… We’ll find out soon I guess.

Anyway, thought I would share.

Update – This hack no longer appears to work in v2.3.1 — I’m still trying to figure out a workaround.

Update Again – I tried mucking with the actual TinyMCE javascript… If you edit tiny_mce.js and comment out lines #4537 and #4540 (exposing the content of the if block, it seems to turn off the verify_html function within TinyMCE which partly causing this problem. I don’t think the valid_elements property is being used correctly, because I tried setting it to the complete HTML spec that I copied from here, but it didn’t work (same behavior). I think the bug is even deeper than that. However, because of all this, I have moved away from the WYSIWYG editor completely for all my posts (both blog and CMS content). So take this update with a grain of salt…

Right now I’m testing out a new plugin (WPG2) to help embed gallery images into posts. It has also forced me to abandon my FCKeditor (Chenpress) for the default TinyMCE editor that comes with WordPress. So far, I can’t say its nearly as reliable, but I’ll give it a chance for a while.

65

In keeping with spirit, there’s a lunar eclipse out tonight. I’m not sure it was visible in North America (I only heard it was going to be visible in Asia), but should be nice regardless.

Two wierd things about this plugin. It seems like the defualt link it shows is an embeded gallery page within wordpress rather than a link to the actual image over in gallery. It might be tweakable, but I’m not sure. At least WPG2 allows wordpress and gallery to be in separate domains, which most plugins I’ve used have always choked on. It has also made me realize I need to clean up the titles in my gallery. Getting sloppy, I think.

So after some tweaking, I think I’ve arrived at something I’m fairly happy with (at least at this late hour). I want to try to work on the CSS a bit more (and clean up the gallery). Hopefully I’ll also get some more images posted soon.

Update — Thanks to Jeff for the update on the WordPress 2.1.1 vulnerability.

Update² — There is a bug in g2image with current versions of TinyMCE.  The function switchClassSticky doesn’t exist in newer versions.  However, it seems if you just comment out references to it in editor_plugin.js, it fixes the issue of the bold, italics (and the rest) not working. The easiest way is to copy editor_plugin_src.js to editor_plugin.js and make the edits (should only be two references as far as I can tell).