Midnight Goddess

After several days of tinkering with the Wordpress script as well as dealing with the issues that it had, I thought I had the darn site fixed. And then I started talking to Sean about the site and gave him the web address so he can check it out himself. But he pointed out that it wasn’t showing up correctly. At first I thought it was on his end. He’s using an Apple and viewing the site through safari, which I don’t have. I couldn’t exactly see what he saw. So I dismissed it.

Later he said that the Google ads were covering the sidebar. Now, I knew this was happening for awhile now. I saw it on Marty’s computer but blamed it on the computer. Afterall, the computer has had a ton of problems.

But something told me to change the resolution of my monitor. When I did that, I saw what Marty and Sean were seeing on their computers. And it pissed me! Here I thought I was done with the blog’s issues, only to realize that the layout of the blog was screwed up.

On a hunch, I checked out Customizelife.com. They both run on Wordpress and utilize the same theme. Sure enough, the layout was screwed up there too. Pissed myself off again.

Since Jaz had woken up (really late… it was like 10:30pm), I figured I’d take that time to fix the look of both sites. While she was getting into Memphis’ crafts box, I sat here messing with code.

I didn’t realize until now just how much I hated the old template. It wasn’t even meant for the wordpress version 2.1. It was so outdated. So I search online for a new template that I can just plug into this blog. What you’re seeing is the new look and I love it! It took me a couple hours to work it so that it would look exactly the way I wanted it to look. But it’s perfect now.

I’m still working on Customizelife.com. However, I did fix the layout so that everything should be in their place where they should be.

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The past several days sucked. For several weeks the blog has been slow as molasses… well the admin area anyway. I would go to “publish” a post.. It would show up on the site, but the posting area would not change. That irritated me. So I’ve spent the past few days downgrading, upgrading, fixing errors, having evil thoughts of throwing the computer over the balcony, etc. I think it’s working now. Since this blog is using Wordpress, I wanted to go to 2.3 which is their latest version. But that cause issues that I couldn’t deal with. So it’s now running on 2.13. I’m debating on whether or not I want to go to 2.2. I probably won’t.

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Yesterday I talked about how fed up I was with Coppermine. It wouldn’t let me crop or rotate my photos… anymore! I had all the necessary requirements to make it work but it still wouldn’t do the job. So it was time for a change. Anyone who knows me knows that I welcome change wholeheartedly even if there are a few bumps in the road.

I wasn’t sure how easy it was going to be to find a replacement. I didn’t want to store my photos online because I have a dedicated server so storage wasn’t the issue.

Initially, I had glanced over the Gallery 2 website and wasn’t entirely convinced. So I backed out of it and kept on searching. But after awhile, my gut feeling told me to go back. I downloaded the 18 MB file and uploaded it. Took several hours because I chose the full version, not the standard version that most people would be satisfied with. Granted, I highly doubt I’ll use all the features this script offers. But it’s nice to know that I have them… just in case For a detailed look at the features Gallery 2 has to offer, click here.

After several hours of uploading, it was ready to get installed. After 6+ years of installing scripts to my server, I knew it wasn’t going to be too difficult. I know enough to get things installed and working (for the most part). Usually I come across some sort of problem during the 1st install of any script. Amazingly though, this one installed without a hitch. Great for me!

At first, when I logged in as admin, I was overwhelmed by all the features and things I could do with the script. But I took a deep breath and plunged right in. It took a little while to get through all the admin options, but let me tell you, it was worth it! If I told you everything that you can do with Gallery 2, this post would be way too long. But I can tell you that it organizes albums and photos the way you want, you can add captions, resize and crop, put keywords on them, etc etc etc. One of the best features is that I don’t have to upload my photos via FTP. Instead I can go into Windows Explorer and upload from there. The script is simple and very easy to use.

And because I use wordpress (another great FREE script with an amazingly long list of 3rd party plugins) for my blog, there is a plugin called wp2g that integrates Gallery 2 albums to the blog. It works great! You can see it in action to your left and near the top of the main page. The one on the left represents the latest album that I recently uploaded. The images at the top of the main page are random images pulled from the Gallery 2 database. It’s different everytime you visit the site or reload the page.

I thought it was going to take days if not weeks to reupload my entire collection of photos. But I’m actually just about done. All I have left are the photos of Memphis. I’m so glad I found a great replacement for photo management.

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I’ve had the free coppermine photo album management script for several years now because I have a massive growing collection of family photos that I publish online. Unfortunately, I’ve gotten really irritated with the fact that I can’t crop or rotate the photos from within the script even though it’s one of the features. So I went online and looked for a replacement knowing full well that it’s going to be another daunting task transfering all my photos to the new script. But I’m up for the challenge. Currently, I’m installing a similar script called Gallery 2. I do believe there is a wordpress plugin to integrate the script to the blog. Wish me luck!

*** UPDATE *** Being the eager beaver that I am when it comes to features, I chose to upload the FULL gallery 2 script to my dedicated server. It’s been over 2 hours and I’m still uploading! I’m using Comcast, so it’s not like I’m on an extremely slow dial-up. I guess this script is filled to the rim with features. I’ll let you know how it goes…

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It’s the new year so I decided that this is going to be our best year ever. To do this, we’ve made some very important decisions including but not limited to making us and our kids happy, growing up, being 100% responsible for everything, having a happy positive outlook on everything, not getting mad or stressed, and making things more streamlined. The key is to have a laser-beam calm attitude focusing on achieving our goals. I had opened up homeschooldiaries.com to document my progess with the kids but I decided to close it down and move all the posts to this site. One less thing to stress over. Why stress when you don’t have to?

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