Category Archives: Blogging

Committing to Flickr

Posted on by LtL

The past couple of weeks I’ve tried several ways to put up a photo gallery on my site. I started off with hosting them on my site, but then realized that I would have to update those manually and they would only be available for people who visited LtL—and while the quality of my visitors is top-notch, the quantity is not what you might call “large.” Since I have been shooting a lot with my iPhone since I found the photo apps Photogene and CameraBag and can do a good bit of post-processing on the phone itself, and since I can upload straight from the phone to Facebook or Flickr, and since both of those options offer the opportunity for more people to see the pictures I want to share, I decided to look for a WordPress plugin that would display photos hosted from one of those sites.

I have settled on Slickr Gallery and am fairly pleased with how it incorporates into my site. The upshot of all this, however, is that I’m beginning to take my Flickr account more seriously. While I will continue to post the occasional picture directly to Facebook or even in individual posts here, Flickr will become the place where I host the majority of pictures that I take and want to share with others. I’m even considering upgrading to the “Pro” version, which, at $25/year is not a bad price for unlimited uploads and storing.

Check out my “Pictures” page and let me know what you think of my current solution.

500

Posted on by LtL

This is post 500 . . . to be deep or just do a list of favorites looking back at the last 34 47 months?

Favorites it is . . .

Why We Need a Progressive Party Not More Fuzzy Liberalism.

Doctor Who

Seeing Death on the N Train

Geneva Conventions: The Drinking Game

Lars von Trier, Part 1

Blog Break

Posted on by LtL

nps on the holdI’m taking a break from the blog for the month of October. I don’t have a particularly compelling reason, it was just something that came to me when I was contemplating my next entry. Considering I’m approaching 500 entries and have been maintaining LtL, with a decent amount of regularity for a personal blog, for almost three years, I figure a month off won’t kill me or lose me what few regular readers I might have.

My thanks to all of you who take the time to read my blog and I’ll have new thoughts, new ideas, and new words for you in about a month.

iPhone blogging

Posted on by LtL

Writing my first entry on the iPhone in preparation of logging and blogging my upcoming trip. I don’t think I’ll use this for posts of any length, but for short notes of to post a quick snapshot or two, this will be great. Here are a couple of pics from my visit to Maine:

photo

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Of Themes & Frustrations

Posted on by LtL

My current theme doesn’t load properly in IE7. Now, I don’t use IE7 and don’t recommend that anyone use IE7, but I also don’t want to have people visiting my site and seeing it look like crap just because they are using a dumb browser that isn’t standards compliant.

So I’m on the search, for either finding someone to look at the CSS and help me fix it, or for a theme that loads properly across all the browsers.

The search for the perfect theme continues . . .

New – Old Look and the Aesthetics of Blogging

Posted on by LtL

Recently, I’d done a major change to the look of LtL:

Picture 1.png

And I liked it, I really did. I was proud of the background and how it integrated with the header image, and I liked the header image too – the colors really pop and provide a cold luminescence that is both bright but also gives the sense of something gritty. But after only a few days I’ve returned to a very simple and clean look because, in the end, the experience I want to offer on this site is primarily one of reading. I mean, sure, I’ve got my music and sound design pages, and I post YouTube videos on a regular basis to share neat stuff with friends, family and the few strangers who stop by, but the main purpose is to communicate thoughts, ideas, essays, stories, half-baked arguments, crazy theories, daily minutia, etc. I found the new design to be overly aggressive, distracting from the main point.

I’m glad took the time to play around with the CSS to the level that I did, and I may very well clean the theme up and post it on the WordPress themes site for others to use. I’ll probably use the background over at my Sound Design site LtL Sound. For now, at least for Living the Liminal, I’m sticking with an aesthetic that highlights the text and the entries and offers little to no distraction. I’m even going to leave the header sans image for now, until I find something I feel fits the aesthetic that I’m going for.

I want to give Ash Hague a big thanks for his simple and clean designs. I’m actually using them on both LtL and Letters to Lost Friends. I find that I tend to tweak the fonts and font sizes a bit, but other that that, his themes are simple, clean and elegant (and though rounded corners would be cool, my recent experiments with themes over at Letters showed me how tricky those can be).

New Year, New Host, New Look

Posted on by LtL

LtL is back up and running after several days of struggling with some SQL issues as I transferred hosting servers for the site. After a number of years with GoDaddy.com, I decided, for several reasons, to switch to Bluehost.com. I wasn’t planning on changing themes, but happened across this one and really like the simplicity and, after having three-column themes for the last year or so, I am finding that the two-column theme works just as well and feels less cluttered, keeping a bit more focus on the posts themselves. There are a few areas of the theme I may tweak over the next couple of weeks, but I’m glad I found it.

Everything seems to be working except that none of my mp3 files seem to load . . . for some reason the links aren’t linking correctly and I just get 404 errors when clicking on them in posts or on my pages. So, until I update this post, feel free to read my poetry, fiction or scripts, but don’t try to listen to my music or sound design files cause they just ain’t working’.

If you have any thoughts on the new look or why I might be having problems with links only to music files, drop a line and thanks for your patience over the past several days.

[Update: The permissions on the music & sound design folders weren't set properly - they are now fixed and you should have access to the mp3s on the site. However, I've discovered that I don't seem to be able to add or edit books in the "Now Reading" plugin. I've a feeling it's probably a similar issue but am not up to solving it tonight.]

Safari & WordPress, Not Playing Well Together

Posted on by LtL

So it seems that whenever I try to edit static pages with Safari, all the formatting gets messed up. I was at my wits end trying to figure out what was going on until I thought to myself, “Self,” I thought, “Maybe you should try another browser, just on the off-chance that somehow it’s a Safari issue and not a WordPress issue.”

Turns out that I was right, and when editing the Fiction page in Firefox, everything worked just as it should. Which is a bit of a pain simply because I tend to use Safari as my default browser, but I’m certainly glad I figured it out and can get my pages formatted correctly.

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Test of Ecto 3.0 Beta

Posted on by LtL

I have been using Ecto for blogposts since moving to the Mac and have always liked what it offered, especially the easy access to Amazon Associate links, the way that, when you select text and click the “link” button, the program automatically fills in the link address with the last copied http address, and the ease with which I could import images but dragging and dropping them into posts.

The beta looks damn good. On first glance I like the placement of some of the elements much better. Here’s the new entry screen from the 2.4.2 version:

and the new:

Placing the commands such as “link,” “html view” etc., toward the top of the window make much more sense than their previous placement. Also, there seems to be far more, and far easier control, over image uploading when you drop a pic into the entry.

Let’s try inserting a song using the import media button:

Hmm – I step through the selection process, and it looks like it will import and upload the file, but nothing shows up in the post. I wonder what happens when I drag a song from iTunes:

Hmm – nothing really. Weird. Oh well, I guess I’ll go read the forums or the help to see how the music importing is supposed to work and figure out if it’s merely a beta issue.

Let’s check out the Amazon Helper:

“Catfish Rising” (Jethro Tull)

There are simply tons more Amazon categories in the new version, which is helpful if you drop a lot of links to products.

Looks like there is a bunch more features to check out over time, but if you are on a Mac and use an off-line blogging editor to compose your entries, give the beta a try. It’s totally different code, so you can actually try it without getting rid of the 2.4.2 version. Just remember to save often and don’t expect it to be perfect!

 

Site Refresh

Posted on by LtL

I’ve been wanting to make the site a bit cleaner for a while now, and have looked at a number of themes that were close, but not quite there. This one is the closest to what I was thinking and I really need to start designing my own themes if I’m going to want to get any closer.

Anyway, I like the look, but it’s behaving just a tad bid funny on page reloads and after I do admin work, so please let me know if you find any oddities happening with this theme.

Thanks!