MichaelandChrissy.com

A few years ago, there was a photo-captioning contest at a Transformers web site that I frequent, TFW2005.com.  The idea was to add a funny comment to a number of Transformers pictures that they had selected, mostly screen shots from Transformers The Movie (1986).  I’ve been known to do some neat stuff in Photoshop, so I decided to give it a try.

I didn’t win the contest, but it was fun to look at all of the other entries.  I do remember that the winners weren’t as funny as my own submissions, although there were some really hilarious ones submitted.  Judging came down to a popularity contest, I reckoned, and lurkers like me aren’t all that popular.

But I don’t just want these to be forgotten in my “images” directory, so here they are for your humorous enjoyment.  The Constructicon entry is funny on a couple of different levels, and the Unicron entry is just inspired.  And yes, I understand that only old-school Transformers fans will relate to any of this.

I was playing with an interesting new web toy today.  It’s called “Wordle“, and it makes images of words based on text (or web sites) that you give to it.  Wordle takes all of the words fed to it and jumbles them up into a nice cloud.  This one was created using the words from the “Family” page:

You have a lot of control over the word cloud.  There’s a good selection of fonts to choose from, as well as an array of color options (including a custom palette based on colors that you provide).  You can also determine if words should be horizontal, vertical, or a mixture of both.  It’s easy to get lost in the details, or just click “randomize”.

The second word cloud was made from the RSS feed from our web site.  I deleted the word “Vaseline” from the cloud by right-clicking on it and clicking “delete”.  That was helpful. Wordle is really simple to use, it’s fun to play with all of the options, and it makes some pretty neat images to decorate your blog with.  Give it a try!

When WordPress released version 2.6.0, I decided to wait until the next major patch before I updated our web site.  I never trust the big releases; better to wait until the inevitable bugs and security flaws are patched up first.  The process was relatively easy: back up your database (got a plugin that does that with one click), turn off your plugins (again, one click since 2.5.0), copy over the new files via Filezilla, update database schema (one more click), then restart the plugins.  However, the upgrade was not entirely without problems.

We have been using Gallery2 to store photos on our web site for years.  WPG2, the WordPress plugin that allows us to embed Gallery2 on our site, never wants to work properly after an upgrade.  The “Gallery” link always moves when upgrading WordPress, but that is easily fixed.  The big problem is that image thumbnails won’t build properly now (it’s hit or miss).  I probably should have waited to update WPG2 from 3.0.5 to 3.0.7 until I was happy with the WordPress update.

Thankfully, that’s the only plugin that gave me trouble.  I was worried about my many WordPress extensions not working after the update, but they all started right up, one after another.  A lot of people who jumped on version 2.6.0 as soon as it came out were disappointed when their plugins didn’t work right away.  Plugin authors, not WordPress developers, are responsible for testing the plugins against the latest version of WordPress.  I guess I got lucky, for the most part.

Now that I’ve started using the new version of WordPress, I’m seeing all sorts of new features.  For example, WordPress now saves previous edits of posts, like a built-in concurrent versioning system.  You can return to older versions easily.  Images in posts are now handled differently too, allowing for captions and image boxes.  Unfortunately, my WordPress theme can’t display these properly yet.  I’m going to have to learn how to use these new features to take full advantage of the new update.

Flickr is an online photo management and sharing site. I upload a lot of our family photos in the gallery on our web site, so I had never bought into the Flickr phenomenon before.  However, it turns out that I get a free Pro account because I use AT&T as my internet provider, so it was worth a look. I found that Flickr is also a social media site, allowing users to join photo groups, designate other users as buddies, and comment on interesting photos.

“Project 365” is a gimmick that PhotoJoJo introduced.  To participate, you upload a photo a day for an entire year. Aiden grew up so fast in his first year that I decided to document Gavin’s growth this way.  Aiden will be growing too, so he’s got his own 365 project. For fun, I also joined the “365 Toys” group, and I’m taking a picture of a Transformer a day (in six years, I might have photographed my whole collection if I stick with it). It’s hard to keep to this plan, since it requires taking pictures every day, uploading three of them to Flickr, then adding titles and comments to each one. Too much like work.

All of the Flickr photos are parts of larger photo shoots, but I only upload a single photo per day to Flickr.  I may upload some of the complete sets to our web site gallery, but there are many sets that never make it that far (we’ve got twelve gigabytes of photos of Gavin so far, and he’s only three weeks old).  It will be interesting to look back in a year and see all the changes that our boys have made in that time.  I’ve put a link to our Flickr page on the navigation bar (to the right), so check out our 365 Projects!

I’ve been using Twitter for about nine months, and I probably send out about five tweets a day. Twitter is an interesting animal, in that different people use it in different ways. I think that it was originally meant to be a list of your current doings (”eating breakfast”, “feeding baby”, “out to lunch”), but reading grocery lists like that is like watching grass grow. And I prefer to watch paint drying. Twitter has evolved, though, to be many things to many people.

Personally, I tend to use it as a stream of thought collector. I think of it as supplemental content for my web site, so I don’t reply to others much on it (unless the reply might be interesting to read on the site). I do keep up with a lot of people, however, I just do it via direct message. These do not show up on the public record, but the other person receives them via email or through third-party interfaces like “Twhirl“. I also try to include any links or contextual information from the original tweet in my responses. This ensures that each of my tweets is a stand-alone thought.

I’ve seen some news organizations (including my local paper, “The Northwest Indiana Times“) just post links back to their content. They’re not there to be social, as the term “social media” might imply, but rather to disseminate their products to anyone on Twitter who may be interested. Just don’t expect them to follow you back, since these are often automated bots. The more successful ones have a live person behind them that does follow and engage other users.

Other people may use Twitter as a chat room, sending a series of fragmented replies to several conversations at once.  The problem with this is that Twitter has no threaded discussions.  That’s not a criticism of the way Twitter works, it’s just a fact.  When I read someone’s archive of tweets, I like to be able to understand each one and get a feel for what that person is about.  There is no right way or wrong way to use Twitter, but I still have an opinion on what makes the most sense.  I usually only “follow” people who use the same tweet etiquette I do.

There’s nothing worse than a tweet that reads, “OMG! ME TOO!” What does that even mean? I guess I could go back into the timeline of whoever they were responding to, but if their tweets are just as indecipherable, then it would do little good. How about something like, “You thought that last night’s Doctor Who episode was great? I loved it too! Here’s a link to my thoughts on it: http://is.gd/zIy“. That is easily within Twitter’s 140 character limit, tells everyone what you’re talking about, and provides a link to more information than your short tweet can convey.

The nice thing about Twitter is that the architecture is so open that all of these uses are possible.  Businesses send out links to products via the web interface.  Spammers send out spam through the Twitter API.  Podcasters send out notices of the latest releases with Twhirl.  People talk about their day by cell phone text message.  Short messages, long messages, and bot messages.  It’s all good with Twitter, in whichever way people want to do it.  It’s a very flexible, if sometimes unreliable, system.

Chrissy heard somewhere that it’s important to have a “favicon” on your web site. She noticed that many other sites have little icons next to their URL (and on the page tabs in Internet Explorer 7), but our site did not.  I told her that this was fairly easy to do, but I didn’t know what we would use as a favicon image.  She didn’t have any suggestions, and it’s not like we have a family “Coat of Arms” or logo or mascot or anything, so I left it at that.

Today I decided to try to shrink the header image of our site down to fifty pixels.  The result, a little maroon splotch on a blueish background, is a passable site icon.  The approximation is close enough that you can see the resemblance when held side-by-side.  Adding it to our WordPress template was easy.  I think the icon is cute, even if a heavily bundled Aiden surrounded by snow isn’t very representative of the current summer weather.  Maybe I should update the site header to something less seasonal and match the favicon image to that?

A “gravatar” is an avatar that follows you from site to site, a globally recognized avatar. That way, you don’t have to set up a new avatar image at every blog and message board that you post to. Sites that are set up to recognize gravatars submit your email address to gravatar.com and get your registered avatar back in return. If only all community-based web sites used the gravatar technology.

I have installed the gravatar capability on our web site so that blog comments will automatically include them, but it only works if you have your avatar registered at gravatar.com. It’s quick and easy to do, and it makes consolidating your many site avatars a breeze. And it’s free. Sign up for an account and set up your gravatar today, and be sure to enter your email address when commenting to this site!

I finally got caught up on all the photo galleries that I haven’t bothered to make in the last month or so.  In all, eight new galleries were added to our album tonight.  Lots of Aiden photos in the mix, including galleries of Aiden in his toy box, Aiden with a mohawk, Aiden eating whipped cream straight from the can, and Aiden playing with balloons.  There’s more baby cuteness here than one person can handle in one sitting, so please act responsibly.

I also posted Aiden’s 18 month photos. We try to get professional photos taken of Aiden every six months. We’ve tried a bunch of different photographers (Sears, Olan Mills, etc.), but this time Chrissy decided to try Wal-Mart. Too low brow, you say? Well, they were very professional and took some very good pictures. Aiden was very cooperative and smiled a lot. We bought the CD package with reproduction privileges, so the lower resolution samples are now in our photo gallery.
   

I have finally gotten my Transformers inventory on my web site.  It would have been easy to just upload the Excel spreadsheet to the site, but I wanted to put the content into a database that could be searched.  So now the database that I started last year has been imported into a MySQL database that can be viewed from the new “Transformers” page. 

Eventually, I’d like to add some functionality to this page.  For example, the database contains figures that I own and figures that I don’t own (but would like to own some day).  In fact, the database is a pretty comprehensive listing of almost every Transformer ever made, in both the US and Japan.  I currently only display the ones that I own on the web site, but I could eventually add a choice to display the ones that I don’t own (as sort of a wish list).   

I haven’t been buying many Transformers lately, so the database content will remain static for a while.  I’ll be sure to update it once I start collecting again though (or if I sell some things off).  I’d like to include photos eventually, but I have way too many figures to photograph each one.  I tried to do that while I was building the inventory, but it was enough work just to dust them, check for accessories and put them into the cabinets.

Our web site has finally made the move to WordPress.  Doing so was no easy task, since it meant having to move to a new internet hosting provider.  The worst part of it was transfering all of the blog entries and photo gallery items.  The photo gallery was a total pain because it required so many steps; it was literally a project all by itself.  I also had to make some changes to the WordPress pages, but luckily the learning curve wasn’t too high. 

I had to take a quick crash course in WordPress functionality.  The system is really rather robust.  I’m very impressed with it, and it’s relatively easy to use.  I was able to bend an existing theme to my iron will in a matter of days, including separate templates for the blog and photo gallery.  And the best part is that I can very easily switch themes whenever I want for a change of pace.  I really like the one that I have though.  I’ve also installed a number of helpful plugins, including a CAPTCHA anti-spam plugin and a Twitter output plugin.

The downside is that all of my old blog posts are still on Google.  Although I was able to transfer the blog content to WordPress, all of the links out there still point to pLog.  I’m going to try to set up a redirect that will send all pLog links to my new blog.  At least people won’t end up with a 404 error.  In the meantime, I should probably queue up Google to spider the new site.