Site News: October 2007 Archives

You may have noticed some changes around here.  Mostly good changes, I hope. 

The first big change is the upgrade to Movable Type 4.  Unfortunately my highly customized MT3 theme would not play nice with the new MT4 templates, so I am using one of the new stylesheets.  The hills and trees are nice.  Next, I brought the color theme over to my Gallery so that they blend together a bit better even though they are completely separate applications.

My favorite new addition to the site is a PhotoMap, a plugin that shows all of my photo albums on a Google map.  I know that there is a cluttered mass of pins along the Sierra Nevada, but the maps lets you zoom in to get finer detail.  I'm still adding to my Gallery and PhotoMap as I finish porting some old photo albums in from Webshots and my old Coppermine photo management, so it will only get more cluttered.  I've got to stop backpacking so much.  Heh, right.

Lastly, I added Google Ads to the page.  My photo collection is growing, and with that growth comes additional server space.  Along with that growth comes traffic.  So I've outgrown my $4 a month hosting plan and have upgraded to a more expensive plan that has the space and bandwidth I need.  It's also more expensive.  If something seems a bit, um, inappropriate, let me know and I'll add it to the ad filter.

I've spent the past three weekends not catching fish in the East Bay regional parks, so this weekend I'm heading back to the mountains while the passes are still open to see if the trout over there like me better.  It shouldn't be too long before the entries here are trip reports and nice pictures once again, instead of this website mumbo jumbo.   Stay tuned.

There are still some bad links I'm coming across from time to time, but for the most part, the port over to Movable Type 4 has been successful.  If you are subscribed to the atom or rss feed and get this post, it means that the feed redirect is working.  If you are subscribed but *don't* get this post through your reader, you might have to resubscribe using the links towards the bottom of the left panel.

This is my new Movable Type 4 installation - welcome!  Don't bookmark anything yet, I'll be changing the paths shortly, once I remove the old MT3 installation.  I'll let you know when everything is working (hopefully), then you can all leave comments telling me it's really not.

A few inches of snow in the Sierra has put a damper on our weekend plans to head over to the East side to check out the fall colors and fish. As of right now, highway 120, 108, and 88/4 are still closed or on chain controls. The Tioga Pass webcam shows the road with a slick layer of ice.

So, we're stuck at home. I'm going to use the unexpected downtime to do some upgrades to the site. My webhost will be upgrading the PHP on their servers in the next few weeks - it *shouldn't* cause a problem with my Movable Type and Gallery installations, but it's a good enough excuse to bring them up to the newer versions.

I also hope to finish porting the links to photo albums in old posts from their old Coppermine albums to the new Gallery albums (unfortunately there is no clean way to simply do a URL redirect). Then I can remove the old Coppermine installation entirely and everything will be in Gallery - and it will also clear up much needed space. I only have room for a few more trips worth of pictures right now.

So, this is just a fair warning - if the website breaks, I'll hopefully have it up again shortly.