Header Images

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I’d like to get further into customizing my site later on down the line, but for the moment, I think most of my tweaks will be pretty simple. I have had fun grabbing a selection of images to use for the randomized header image at the top of the page, however. Theoretically, you should see a different image each time the page is loaded.

More may be added to this as time goes by, but for now, here’s a rundown of what you might see (unless you’d prefer to be surprised, in which case, ignore what follows…):

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Pop Culture Disconnect

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This week in my History 101 class (covering everything up to 1500), we’re looking at Ghengis Khan, Kublai Khan, and the Mongols. The professor spent a few minutes talking about the Mongol’s invasion techniques, which were simple but could be fairly ruthless: if armies surrendered they’d be treated fairly well; if they fought, they’d often be razed to the ground and completely destroyed. After summarizing this, he commented, “really, they were pretty close to the Borg.”

I chuckled, and there was a moment of quiet while he took a sip of his tea. Then one of the girls in the class slightly timidly asked, “…what’s ‘the borg’?”

Sigh. I’m getting old.

Back already!

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Well now, that didn’t take long!

As you can see, I’m back…mostly. I haven’t uploaded my old graphics/ directories yet, so many of my old (pre-Flickr) entries will be showing lots of broken images until I get all that taken care of. The most important part, however — getting the words transferred over — has been accomplished. Yay me!

Next steps include getting the images reloaded, taking care of dad’s site, and pfutzing around with the theme so I have something other than the default WordPress themeage going on.

Off and running like a herd of turtles…

Lockdown

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Seeing as I haven’t been writing a whole lot lately, this seems as good a time as any to declare this site on temporary hiatus while I transfer over to the new webhost.

I’ll be turning off comments while I pfutz around with things, and there will likely be some (hopefully small) amount of time where things essentially cease to exist before I get everything transferred over.

Be back soon(ish)…

Vogue No More

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There’ve been rumors about this for a few weeks now, and apparently there’s truth to them after all:

The cat is now out of the bag among the goth community now so it might as well get put out there to the general public. Facts: 1) The Vogue is closing at the end of the year. 2) The new club will be called Blacklight and will be in the upper level of the Capitol Hill Arts Center (CHAC) and opening in the second half of January.

All things change…now I’ll have to figure out where the CHAC is…oh, okay, almost a whole block and a half away from the current location. I can cope with that.

Jumping Ship?

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So…

…if, while moving over to my new digs, I were to take advantage of the one-click WordPress installation offered by Dreamhost and finally dip my toes in waters other than those of Movable Type, are there any pieces of advice I should know about? Plugins I should pay particular attention to? Tips or tricks I should know or avoid?

So far, I’ve managed to track down PHP Markdown and PHP Smartypants, and have activated Akismet, but that’s it (and all this is on a non-public test installation). I’m particularly interested in seeing if there’s a good (easy to implement) ‘tagging’ solution, such as I’m using here in lieu of categories. Googling for ‘wordpress tags‘ tends to bring up lots of information on the formatting tags used in WP templates, which isn’t what I’m aiming for.

Anything else?

iTunes “What Is Life” by Mullins, Shawn from the album Big Daddy (1999, 4:09).

Probable Downtime

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Theoretically, I should be able to move everything from my current server onto Dreamhost’s servers, flip a virtual switch, and have everything work without any interruption in service. However, I’m having some issues figuring out just how to make this work with Dreamhost’s setup (which is making me feel a little on the dumb side, but that’s beside the point).

It’s entirely possible that at some point in the upcoming weeks, there may be a few days (hopefully not much more than that) where this website isn’t accessible. I hope that this won’t last very long, if at all, but it’s a distinct possibility. Consider yourselves warned.

Bowed but not Broken

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Things have been a bit quiet around here lately. Sorry ’bout that (since I know you’re all heartbroken over this turn of events). While I’m not at liberty to divulge details (or even broad hints, for that matter), suffice it to say that the past few weeks have been…stressful. However, it looks like the universe has decided to take a break from throwing curveballs, and I, for one, welcome our new stress free overlords look forward to returning to the usual day-to-day concerns.

Prairie’s birthday was this past Friday, and we had a very pleasant day of relaxing at home, with one short jaunt out to see Flushed Away, which was hilarious and well worth seeing. Here at home, we watched Monster House, which was also extremely good (and wonderfully, surprisingly creepy at times), opened presents, and had a very good strawberry cream birthday cake (with chocolate covered strawberries on top, even). A few pictures have been uploaded.

Thanks to the answers to one of my last posts, and with many thanks to Jer‘s discount code, I’ve created an account with Dreamhost and will be moving my sites over that way…hrm. As soon as I can, actually, given that I’ve got this next month to do it. Oh, for the days of copious free time (whenever those days were, I think it’s been a few years since I had more than one or two such days in a row). Update: After having lain fallow for the past year or so, serving only to redirect to this address, djwudi.com is now up and running as a photography gallery. One domain down, two to go…

And I think that about brings us up to date. School continues, as does work, without much of any great note on either of those fronts. Prairie and I are continuing to work on nailing down the details for a trip to Alaska right around (technically just after) Christmas, and we’re also doing what we can to assist a friend in planning their move to the fair town of Seattle.

So, there we are. Some small amount of actual content. It had to happen at some point, right? ;)

iTunes “Alive Alone” by Chemical Brothers, The from the album Exit Planet Dust (1995, 5:16).

Time to Move

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For the past couple years, this weblog (along with my father’s blog and my Jason Webley bootlegs) has been hosted through the kindness and generosity of Michael at Rain City Story. However, he’s decided it’s time for him to move on to other projects in his life, so it’s time for me to start investigating other hosting options.

At the moment, the two providers I’m looking most seriously at are Media Temple’s (gs) service and Dreamhost.

On the surface, Dreamhost looks like a better deal ($10/mo for 200 Gb of storage and 2 TB of bandwidth vs. $20/mo for 100Gb of storage and 1 TB of bandwidth), but (mt) was Michael’s recommendation. I don’t really know about either company, so I’m open to suggestions.

I thought about simply moving back to Typepad or some such thing, but I’d hate to have to lose the Webley bootlegs page, and between the bootlegs and dad’s site being pretty image heavy, we tend to chew up a good amount of disk space and bandwidth.

Any ideas, suggestions, experiences with either (mt) or Dreamhost, or other recommendations would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks much!

iTunes “My Spine” by Fluke from the album Puppy (2004, 7:22).