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Site updates and anything else related to the technology of blogging and my site(s).

12:34:56 7/8/9

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Just a fun little numerical oddity: at the time of this posting (more or less, as WordPress doesn’t let me schedule a post time down to the second), the combined date and time (if you drop the leading zero from the two-digit abbreviation for the year) becomes 123456789.

Or, if you prefer not to worry about those silly leading zeros, wait until five minutes and six seconds after four o’clock, at which time it will be 04:05:06 07/08/09.

That’s all, nothing to see here, move along, go about your business….

Introducing my Photoblog

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I think the time has come to formally introduce my latest endeavor to the world: Photography by Michael Hanscom.

My new photoblog.

As anyone who’s been paying any amount of attention to my ramblings for long knows, I occasionally pick up a camera, snap off a few shots, and hope that I’ve got something worth showing off. While I have the usual overdeveloped sense of criticism for my own work, enough people seem to think that I’ve got a worthwhile eye that I’ve finally decided to move forward on a project that’s been rattling around in the back of my head for a while, and I’m going to see if I might actually be able to sell the occasional print.

To that end, the photoblog. I’m opening things up with a small selection of some of my favorite shots from the past few years, though more shots will be added as I take the time to dig back through my archives to find more possibilities. Right now I don’t have much in the way of people, as I want to do a little research to make sure I’m on the right side of any legal considerations (that is, making sure I can sell photos taken at public events or festivals if there are identifiable people but no model releases — I think I’m in the clear, as I’m selling prints as art and not as product, promotional, or stock photography, but it’s good to be clear on things like this), but I’m hoping to get a broader range of photos up as time goes by.

In the meantime, please feel free to stop by the new site, poke around, and — should the spirit move you — pick up a print or two. If you’ve got any constructive criticism, questions, comments or words of wisdom regarding the site, let me know. And of course, as some of you have been watching my Flickr stream, if there are any particular shots you think should be featured, or that you’d like a print of, feel free to let me know…suggestions are always appreciated!

Lastly…wish me luck! I have no idea if this little project will be worthwhile in the long run, or just a fun distraction that won’t go anywhere, but I’m keeping my fingers crossed. We’ll see what happens!

Dreamhost Does Good

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Since I’ve occasionally groused about the hosting service I get with Dreamhost, I wanted to be sure to mention when things go right, instead of only when things go wrong.

For a few months, the server that my account was set up on, and which hosts all three domains under my control, was being tweaky, resulting in sporadic downtime. I’d been building up a small library of downtime reports in my support page with Dreamhost, when last month, things took a turn for the worse…and then, soon afterward, for the better. Of course, I didn’t really know about the “for the worse” part until I got the news of the “for the better” side of things.

The last time my site went down, when I submitted the support request notifying Dreamhost of the downtime, they replied relatively quickly, letting me know that the server I was on had become “unresponsive,” and they were working on getting this back up and running. About half an hour later, my sites came back up, and I didn’t think much more of it. Until the next day, when I got the following…

This is just a note to let you know that we’ve moved your account to a new server! We apologize for the lack of notice, but this was an emergency move as a perfomance and stability measure.

Apparently the server I’d been on had gone seriously downhill, and had to be replaced, necessitating moving my account to new hardware (and hopefully all the other occasional downtime I’d had was due to the developing hardware issues, and I won’t get those again). Most of the rest of the message was covering anything I might need to do to ensure that everything worked as it should, and as it turns out, I didn’t really need to do much of anything, as the transition was seamless. Then, at the end of the note…

…again, we really apologize for the abrupt nature of this move! To try and make up for it a bit, we’ve also set your account to now have unlimited disk and bandwidth, forever!

Ooooh. See those last few words? That’s nice to see. “Unlimited disk and bandwidth, forever!” No worries about storing large files (not that I tend to do that), no worries about surcharges on the (very) off chance that I get Slashdotted or Dugg. Just keep paying my yearly bill, and I’m set.

Dreamhost, I’ve had issues with you from time to time, but this? This is good. Thanks!

Vinylicious

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Introducing a new blog: Vinylicious! I’m no hardcore vinyl collector, but I do keep an eye out for fun oddities to add to the collection I do have (which itself owes a large debt of gratitude to my dad), and I’m planning on using Vinylicious to share some of the goodies I’ve found.

The plan is to update weekly on Sundays with another album. We’ll see how long I can stick to that schedule. ;) For now, I have two albums to get started: Discotheque for Polka Lovers and It Happened in Sun Valley.

Print Stylesheets Return

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One of my website pet peeves is the lack of attention to how a site behaves when printed. All too often, there’s either an assumption that we live in a truly online-only world, or simply a lack of thought about how any given page will look when printed. Consequently, there are a lot of websites that look like crud when printed: navigation links and ads all over the page taking up unnecessary space, content crammed into a narrow column, an extra half page of junk after the actual content ends, etc.

Some sites give a ‘print view’ link that produces a print-optimized version of the page, but I’d be willing to bet that a lot of people never see that — especially given the number of times I’ve had to actively hunt for such a link, and found it shoved off in some corner, not obviously tied to the content at all. Besides, having a specialized page seems like unnecessary overhead on the server when better solutions exist.

To that end — and this is a project that I’ve been meaning to do for a while (I never even got around to it with my last design) — I’ve resurrected the print stylesheet for my site. Admittedly, I have no idea how often people print something they find here (and I would guess that it’s not very often at all), but at least now I know that if they do, they’ll get something useful.

There’s an older, but still relevant, more detailed look at the techniques I use in this post from 2003, but here’s a rundown of the results:

  1. No navigation links below the website title.
  2. No sidebar at all.
  3. No comment entry form.
  4. No Google ads.
  5. The content fills the page, with a wider left-hand margin to allow room for binding.
  6. Rather than coloring links (useless on a printed page), the URLs display after the linked text, using Markdown style formatting.

The only issue I’m having is the same issue I had the first time I set up a print stylesheet: the code that inserts URLs after linked items borks up the clean display of inline images (for an example, try printing this post). I’m (still) stumped on how to exclude images from the link insertion code, though, so for now, I’m just going with what I’ve got.

The New Me

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Last week sometime, I was brainstorming with ways to personalize the design of my site a bit while still working within my limited artistic and design sensibilities. On a whim, I emailed Shari, a comic artist whose blog I’ve been reading and whose artwork I enjoy, to see if she might be willing to sketch a version of me that I’d be able to work into the design somehow.

Shari was kind enough to agree, and since I didn’t have a particular image or pose in mind beyond knowing that I wanted to be wearing a Utilikilt, I directed her to my Narcissism set on Flickr and let her go to town.

A day or so later, Shari sent me a first set of preliminary sketches. There were a number of versions of ‘me’ that looked very promising, but down in the middle of the page was a funny little very anime-style version that she’d dubbed the ‘Valiant Camera Warrior’ which I got a big kick out of. When I wrote back to confirm that I liked the direction she was heading with the sketches, I also mentioned how much I enjoyed the Valiant Camera Warrior.

A couple days later she sent me the final artwork…and I was floored! Not only has Shari come up with an incredible comic version of ‘me,’ but she went ahead and inked the Valiant Camera Warrior as a bonus! I’ve worked the artwork into a few different places into the site design now, but under the cut are larger versions of her work.

Read more

Postalicious Excerpts

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For some time now I’ve been using the Postalicious WordPress plug-in to automatically create the link posts aggregating stuff that I toss into my delicous account. As I’ve been tweaking and fine-tuning the templates for the new version of the site, though, I (re-)discovered one minor annoyance.

I like to use post excerpts for my archive pages (more detail than simply listing the title, easier to skim through archives using the full body for every post), but Postalicious didn’t have a way to set an excerpt. Each Postalicious post would then end up with an autogenerated excerpt, which tend to trail away in the middle of the first link in the post, leaving something like this:

Links for January 15th through January 16th
Sometime between January 15th and January 16th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!
no news is bad news: An expression of the value of local news, especially in Seattle, especially in these uncertain times. Cool Stuff: Olly Moss’s Poster Remakes: 21-year old UK artist Olly Moss is probably best known for his […]

It works, but it’s not pretty.

A couple days ago I dropped a line to Postalicious’ creator, asking it might be possible to add excerpt templates in a future revision. He wrote back to say that he’d work on that when he got a chance…and just one day later, version 2.6 of Postalicous was posted with support for excerpt templates!

Nicely done, and very quick response. I’m impressed! Postalicious is all updated, and from here on out, link posts shouldn’t look so cluttered in my archive pages. Now to see about tweaking the excerpts on all those earlier posts….

Minor Weblog Redesign

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A new year is (almost) here, and along with that, it was time for a bit of a refresh to the design. It’s not a huge change — generally speaking, all the bits are in the same basic places — just a little fine-tuned and tweaked.

  • I’ve switched the theme to a mostly-stock installation of Carrington, with just a few tweaks here and there to suit my tastes.
  • Tweets are now a little more visually separated from each other and from longer posts, and are now linked back to the original entry on Twitter.
  • I’ve been adding tags to my entries for a little while, but they’re just now starting to be exposed via the new sidebar. Most entries don’t have tags, but I’m slowly adding them as I go back to work with older posts…that’s going to be a long, slow process that I’m not devoting a whole lot of time to. New posts will be tagged as they appear.
  • Google Adsense banners have been tweaked so that they’ll now appear underneath the first two non-Tweet posts on the main page. I’ve been trying to have some variation on that for a while (keeps them visible, but not super intrusive), but it’s been buggy. I think I’ve finally got it working properly.

And that about covers it.

This Weblog is ESTP

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According to Typealyzer, which analyzes the content of a weblog and places it within the Myers-Briggs personality matrix, this weblog classifies as ESTP (Extroverted Sensing Thinking Perceiving), “The Doers.”

The active and play-ful type. They are especially attuned to people and things around them and often full of energy, talking, joking and engaging in physical out-door activities.

The Doers are happiest with action-filled work which craves their full attention and focus. They might be very impulsive and more keen on starting something new than following it through. They might have a problem with sitting still or remaining inactive for any period of time.

For the record, the last time I took an online version of the MBTI, I tested as ISFP (Introverted Sensing Feeling Perceiving). The Star Trek version of the MBTI also pegged me as ISFP, which apparently correlates with DS9’s Bareil or VOY’s Doctor.

(via Metafilter)

Breadcrummy

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I’m all for giving attribution for the goodies people find on the ‘net, letting readers know where the information comes from, acknowledging that links to cool stuff don’t just spontaneously appear, but are usually passed on from person to person and website to website.

Unfortunately, sometimes the process of tracing those breadcrumbs back when you actually want to get a little more information is an exercise in frustration.

For instance:

  1. Boing Boing posts about a silly little photography gadget that they saw over at…

  2. LikeCool, who have a tiny little “via” link (that I almost missed as it was buried under a stack of Google ads) that links to…

  3. Gizmodo, who finally link back to…

  4. Photojojo, who actually sell the silly thing, and have things like tech specs, adapter info, and so on.

In LikeCool’s defense, they did link directly to Photojojo’s page in the text of their post, but I missed that link on my first readthrough (the forest green link text wasn’t enough of a contrast difference to the black body text to catch my eye on the first skim).

Would it be too much trouble to say “I read about this here, and you can buy it or get more info here,” instead of forcing your readers to jump through multiple hoops? By the time I found my way to the source page, I’d pretty much lost interest in it. Besides, it looks more creepy than amusing or useful.