Tag: WordPress

WP has released version 1.5.1 and I’m finally going to upgrade CoffeeBear.net. You may notice this site looking/acting very oddly during this process. If this happens to you, please try back later.

[2005-05-09 17:48 (GMT-06:00)] Update: I’ve completed updating my installation of WordPress to 1.5.1 and have turned on the new theme for WP that I’ve been working on for a while. The gallery is still styled like CoffeeBear’s old theme, but I’ll see about updating that later. I wanted to go ahead and use the new theme once I upgraded and I wanted to go ahead and update to avoid some of the massive amounts of trackback/pingback spam that I’ve been getting hit with.

I took a moment to update my Portal today, as I realized that I’d started classifying some of my links in WP as things that the page wasn’t setup to display. After doing that, I noticed blogs that I’d not read for a while and took a quite trip over to Uncommon Woman‘s site. After catching up on her recent posts, I looked over her blogroll and just clicked a bunch to take a look at what she reads. I thought Feministe had a nice design, so I took a closer look at her posts and that lead me to Cat Town.

For the record, laughing so hard you snort your hot tea will clear your sinuses up (at least a little bit) but it’s bloody painful. Also, I’m pretty sure I’m going to burn in heck for laughing at it.

I just noticed that my contact form is currently busted, but as I’m at my day job; there’s nothing I can do about it for now. I’ll try to get it fixed either over my lunch hour or later tonight. In the meantime, if you absolutely must contact me the easiest way will be to post a comment to this entry. Thanks!

Update: I’m home for lunch and just tried to fix this but didn’t have any luck and it’s about time for me to head back to work. I’ll try working on this some more later tonight.

Update (08 April 2005, 1:47pm: I did try last night to get the contact form up and running again but didn’t have any luck; so that page is down until further notice. Currently, I’m looking at a different solution for having the page when I upgrade to WP 1.5 which shouldn’t be too far off.

I’ve not been posting around here in a while and mostly it’s been do to a lack of *umpf*. The way work’s been going of late has strongly discouraged my creative urges and since I have no desire to get dooced I can’t really talk about that much. I’ve been doing some job hunting but that’s slow going as there aren’t too many jobs around here that I’m qualified for and that wouldn’t totally suck (e.g. 2nd shift & a pay-cut).

Still, life isn’t all bad. Ariesna and I are getting married in a little over a month from now1 and I’ve got all the parts of my outfit. That’s right no simple tux for me but rather a modern kilt with a formal jacket and all the trimmings. I’ve tried the lot on and you’ll have to forgive me but I think it looks rather sharp. 🙂

Also, I’ve been secretly working on a theme for WP 1.5 so when I upgrade this site; it’ll be all shiny and new. I’m holding off on the upgrade currently while I wait for some WP plugin developers make 1.5 versions of their stuff, though I’ve also started looking at alternative plugins as well.

Other than that, the only vaguely interesting thing to report is my iPod appears to have gone insane. For a while there, I couldn’t get it to work properly with iTunes and a quick peek through the Apple support forums convinced me to try an Adaptec Fireconnect 4300 PCI firewire card. That worked for a while but then Windows started blue-screening when I connected the iPod though occasionally it would work if the iPod was connected when I booted into Windows. Eventually, that stopped working but I was able to get it work with gtkpod under Linux but now even that seems to no longer work. I’ve not found anybody else with the exact same problems as I from some rather intense googling. During my last test, it looks like my Linux system got stuck in a loop trying to access the iPod; so I’ll be digging through my old receipts and seeing precisely how long ago I bought it as I did buy the extended warranty on it from Best Buy when I picked it up. I’m crossing my figures that I’m still w/in the warranty period and they’ll replace it for me. That would be pretty schweet if it happens. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see for now.

1 If you feel up to the whole gift-giving thing; we’re registered at Dillard’s, Kohl’s, Target, Walmart and Amazon.com.

ICON is a local science-fiction convention that is run by some people I know. In previous years, their website has been a monstrosity built using M$’s Frontpage (similar to their parent org’s1 current website). However for the next ICON2, the comittee (con-com) running the con includes people I personally know and who I was able to con persuade into doing something a bit different. You see, I had this vision of a website that the con-com could log into and update themselves. This would free up their web person to simply cook up a pleasant3 design and allow the site to be updated whenever the con-com needed it vs. whenever the web person could get around to it. Since I know the main man of the con-com for ICON 30; I proposed the idea to him and he seemed interested in the idea. So I cooked up a site that I ran on my little home server to give him something to look at. Later he stopped by for an evening and said that the site looked good to him. Shortly thereafter, I got the site posted and now ICON30 is running WP to keep people informed about the con. There are a few customizations and plugins that have been added onto the site to make it work the way we wanted, but overall I’m very pleased with it.

What my next step? Why to redo the parent org’s website of course! Though, I’m thinking that they might want/need something a bit more involved than what I cooked up for ICON.

1The parent org is Mindbridge
2ICON 30, Slaying the Dragon of Tradition! October 28 – 30, 2005 in Cedar Rapids, IA
3Naturally said design would need to be based on valid XHTML & CSS.