Glass Panes That Separate

Today marks four years since my first blog post. That is all. I do have more to write, but that’ll have to wait for a bit.

One more geeky feature for my website. Look to the right and see the beautiful ‘Now Playing’ section. Courtesy of tijs via last.fm, audioscrobbler.net, and rhythmbox.

For those who are interested in the gory details, please continue. The faint of heart should close their eyes and walk away (please open your eyes again once you are walking away). Rhythmbox is a music player for linux. It has a nifty plugin that reports the songs you are playing to audioscrobbler.net. Last.fm allows you to view this information online, and gives you recommendations, etc. The last piece of the puzzle is a plugin made by the above mentioned author which fetches that information and drops it into the sidebar on my website. It’s probably pretty trivial, as last.fm makes the information available in about 50 different formats (I may have exaggerated slightly), but I’m glad someone else did the coding instead.

You may now move about the country (hope that’s not trademarked…).

I’ve added something new to my website. It might be interesting, or you might roll your eyes and think I’m crazy for adding yet more clutter. If you look to your right, you will see the new section titled ‘Of Note…’.

I’ve been subscribed to several sites via RSS (really simple syndication) on Google Reader, and I usually star anything that is particularly interesting. I just noticed today that you can share items as well. So now you can see those items too. Enjoy!

This is actually like version 3 or 4 of my site, but 2 seemed fitting since I am using version 2 of wordpress, and version 2 of gallery. Some of the links in the gallery won’t work properly, so you may have to hit the back button if you want to navigate back to a previous album. Hopefully I can get this straightened out shortly.

Also, I need to get the ‘really cool sites’ section working as well, but that should be pretty easy.

If you have no interest whatsoever in web design and hosting, you can just move right along. If you’re looking for a web host, I recommend dreamhost. I’ve been using them for about 5 months now, and I am continually impressed by the amazing things they do for their customers. I signed up when the base account was already pretty good. And then they quadrupled their storage limits, and octupled the bandwidth restrictions. I hadn’t really paid any attention to it before, but their referral system is incredible. They give you $97 for every person that signs up under you. If you are generous, you can pass some of this money on to the people that you refer. So here comes the gratuitous discount code: shane90. If you enter that in, you get $90 off of a 1-year or 2-year plan. If you just want to go monthly, you can enter in ’shanemonthly’ to get a pretty significant discount.

If you are looking for hosting for a church, I would recommend checking out dream3. They offer free design and hosting if your church qualifies. Otherwise, you have to email them for pricing plans. If you don’t know much about websites and such, that’s the way to go. That’s all I have to say about that.

I’m writing this so that I don’t have to guess next time.

1. Go into ‘themes\wordpressembedded\templates’
2. Create a directory called ‘local’
3. Copy theme.tpl into ‘local’, and open up the copy for editing
4. Find the line that has
5. Add a space right after
6. You could optionally put a separator or something else in there (I use a dash, surrounded by spaces, so it looks like ‘Blog Title - Gallery Album Title’)

The gallery is all transferred over, all links will be updated shortly. So I was going to take pictures of all the flowers and such around the house, but we got rained out. The mosquitoes will be out in force again. Just when I was hoping that they would start to disappear, we get more rain. This is quite possibly the rainiest June I’ve ever seen. Well, it’s almost over. Maybe we’ll have a rainy July too. At least it stays cool that way.

Had the family over this weekend. It was crazy, and fun, and tiring, and after it was all said and done, I’m glad we did it. Got a lot done, got a new mower, realized I’m still not perfect, and ate lots of food. The yard looks amazing, thanks to Mandy’s parents. I’ll have to take some pictures and upload them. The first thing I need to do is completely revamp the gallery. Sad day, but it has to happen. I was using an unstable version of Gallery, and it finally caught up to me. So I’m going to start that as soon as i finish here.

Ok, it’s been way too long since I’ve updated, and I’ve had lots of thoughts that I can no longer remember. Just thought you should know.

This is a work in progress. It will probably be in various working states between now and tomorrow (Thursday). Hopefully I can get this fully implemented throughout my website. That would be the coolest. It might take a bit of work though. Yikes!