MichaelandChrissy.com

I’ve been uploading a photo a day (actually three photos per day) to Flickr for the last 31 days.  It hasn’t become an abominable chore yet, but I have found it difficult to make time for new pictures every day.   It’s also a bit of a pain to edit every photo once they’re sent, since Picnik takes forever and a day to load, but the results are well worth it.  In fact, you can already see how Aiden and Gavin have changed over the last month.  The long term results should be very gratifying.

I learned of a 3D photo gallery tool called FotoViewr from a friend on Twitter.  You just pop in your Flickr handle, select a subset of pictures to display (by set name or by tag word) and then choose a 3D format.  FotoViewr then creates an interactive photo gallery of your last thirty photos.  I really like the “wall” format, shown above, but the “floor” format is also very cool.  There are also links to each photo on Flickr and a full-screen mode (although my monitor resolution is too high to make this work well).

The best part is that you can embed a FotoViewr gallery in any blog post.  This would come in handy if I uploaded lots of pictures to Flickr, but I’m only using it for my 365 projects now.  There’s even a WordPress plugin to show a FotoViewr gallery on your blog sidebar, but it might be too small to see clearly.  I’ve downloaded it and will play with the settings on our blog later.  Expect more FotoViewr galleries from us in the future!

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.

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?

I signed up for Twitter a few months back, and I’m hopelessly addicted now.  I find myself checking my Twitter feed about ten times a day: reading replies from friends to people I don’t know, checking those people’s feeds, adding them to my own friends list if they look interesting.  I don’t mind the jones, since I enjoy it, but does anybody outside of the “Twitterverse” read my entries (”tweets”, as they’re called)?

Well, now you have to.  I found a WordPress plugin that will post my tweets as a daily blog post.  I’m not going to use it though, because I don’t want my blog to be filled up with Twitter digests (I saw a site like that recently, and it wasn’t pretty).  However, I might post a “best of” list as I see fit.  Below is the first installment.  Redundant data or a poignant look into my psyche?

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. 

I’m still in the process of moving our web site to a new hosting provider.  I wanted to keep my photo gallery pages intact, but to do so I need to migrate the database and all of the image files to their new home.  Getting the Gallery2 software updated on the old site was like pulling teeth, however, thanks to the world’s least supportive technical support team. 

For some reason, it took them a whole week to run a single “chmod -r” command.  A whole week to do something that should have taken five minutes!  The Gallery practically updates itself, all you have to do is ensure that the data directory is writable by the update script.  Well, mine wasn’t.  All permissions were 644 — safe and secure, but the script wanted 777 across the board.  The technical support people first refused to do it, then escalated the task to their admins, then ran the code non-recursively, and finally got it right on the fourth try.

The fun part came once the permissions issue was resolved: I had to update the version of Gallery2 on both sites, clear out the caches on both sites, then back up the MySQL database in the old instance and reload it into the new instance.  Several bits of trial and error later, the new site had a working database that properly linked all of the files.  Once it was running, I was amazed with myself.  I was afraid that I would have to go back and reload each photo gallery manually, which would have messed up all of the image ID numbers.  

To finish things up, I then set up a redirect on the new server that would send all of the old gallery links to the new gallery instead.  This would keep me from having to update every image link that I’ve ever set.  Now that the photo galleries are done, I just need to add some photos to the static web pages and then we’ll be done.

Welcome to MichaelandChrissy.com, the web site for the Wilson Family.  Michael and Chrissy live in Indiana, within commuting distance of Chicago, with their two sons and three cats.  This is where they keep their blog (”Blog”) and their family photos (”Gallery”).  Information about each family member can be found on the “Family” page, and details about their three cats can be found on the “Cats” page.

About Us

Chrissy and Michael met online about nine years ago.  We started chatting on ICQ, but found out that we lived close by each other.  We started dating in the fall of 1999 and moved in together after Chrissy finished college.  We got married in the summer of 2004 and bought a house together shortly after that.

We spent several years remodeling the house, but eventually decided that it was time to start a family.  Aiden Michael was born in July of 2006.  His little brother, Gavin James, was born in August of 2008.  Family complete, now we need to get our house in order.

Web Site

Michael used to design web sites for a living, but that was a long time ago.  Now it’s easier to apply a pre-fabricated design to a content management site.  We use WordPress because it’s easy to administrate.  We also use Gallery2 on our site to display our photo albums.  It integrates well with WordPress.  The current design is called “SeaShore” and was done by Sadish Bala, a talented WordPress theme designer.  Michael made some changes to the theme, but it’s mostly Sadish.

Contact Us

I’ve been keeping my web site at eDataRack for the last five years. It’s a pretty cheap hosting plan, only $40 a year, but there are tradeoffs in service. Up until last year, I was content with static pages and the occasional uploaded photo set. When I finally decided to set up some automation, getting the photo gallery and blog features installed was like pulling teeth. I was at a loss without direct access to the server, and there is only so much that you can do without proper support. Things that I could do in ten minutes with a telnet session were dragged out to week-long email conversations with their server admins. We eventually got them running, but just barely.

Now I’m interested in running some other open source software, like WordPress, and the latest version of Gallery. Unfortunately, eDataRack won’t help me upgrade either one. I’ve decided to let my account lapse in February. Last year, they didn’t even send a bill to remind me, they just killed off my web site on February 1st. It came back up after I paid for the year. I plan to set up a new account with AN Hosting, a Chicago-based web hosting company. I learned about them from a student of mine at IUN in a “Hosting Company Roundup” term paper. The idea is to set up the new account, build up a new site on the new servers, and then switch the domain name to AN before eDataRack pulls the plug on me again.