Spreading the love, one twitter at a time…
I have recently started my own photo gallery. Setting up the Gallery2 software on my server was pretty quick and easy. Unfortunately, I have not had the time to upload any recent pictures (nothing from the last two years). Sometime within the next week or two I would like to get all my pictures up there.
Feel free to check out the pictures that I have already uploaded at:
http://gallery.jeffreykgibbs.com
That’s right folks. You heard it here first. SPAM blog comments are in fashion this season!
Luckily Akismet is (almost always) effective at catching them. Along with the increased readership has come increased amounts of SPAM.
To all the SPAM bots out there…good riddance!
According to Word Press, the new Word Press version 2.3 sends “your blog URL, plugins, and version info when it checks api.wordpress.org for new and compatible updates”. For some reason this has many users all worked up.
Apparently the “lead developer Matt Mullenweg defends his actions and staunchly refuses to add an opt-in interface, telling users to ‘fork WordPress’ if they aren’t willing to put up with this behavior.” Of course no online argument is complete without some bozo saying “Go Fork Yourself!”
It sounds like the developers know that the users will not fork Word Press. Most of the Word Press users probably wouldn’t be able to modify the PHP code to save their life.
When I decided that I wanted to blog I had intended on developing the web site myself. I am, by profession, more than qualified to develop a blogging web site. But then I heard about Word Press. In my opinion, why would someone duplicate someone else’s work? I decided that if it didn’t do what I wanted I could at least use it as a base and add the functionality I desired.
Good
The built in functionality in Word Press is quite good. It does more things than beginning blogger has ever dreamed off. Word Press also allows changing themes, which is exactly what every noob wants most (see http://www.myspace.com). I have been very happy with how well it works.
Bad
I just recently found out that one of the built-in functionalities of Word Press has never worked for me. Up until recently I was unaware of the automated e-mail notification of reader comments. So, I will have to install sendmail and get that working. My point being that had I developed this by myself, I would have known that it was not functioning properly.
After my graduation the IS department (previously OCIO and previous to that CTS) at University of Portland cut me off from being a web administrator on their server. You would expect them to delete my network account, however this put me in somewhat of a pickle.
During my time at UP, I started the Men’s Water Polo Club. In an effort to raise awareness and support for the club I created a web site. My site was hosted on the university’s server. It seemed as though every year I would completely remake the club’s web site from scratch; and every year the new version was better than the last.
When I first realized that my account was getting deleted I tried to find someone in the club who knew enough to maintain the site. Of course, no one volunteered. So, I dumbed down the site so that it could go on almost indefinitely without needing to be updated. See current site here.
Recently I had time to put up the full version of the UP Men’s Water Polo Site on my own server. So check it out if you have a minute. I started creating it when I was fairly new to PHP. The site uses PHP, CSS, Javascript, RSS, Flash, and graphics created by myself. The only usual thing about the site is that it does not have a back-end database. UP would not allow me access to a DB on their server and I did not have my own server running at the time.
I would be interested to know what you think about the site.
