Published on
January 29, 2006 in
Internet.
Flickr has a great user interface. It takes some getting used to, but once you find out that you can edit anything by clicking on it — no matter what screen you’re on — the utility increases greatly.
I’m uploading new sets now. This process will probably go on sporadically for a few months until I’m done with all the pictures I took since college — or until I get bored with Flickr.
[EDIT:] Oh yeah — I hit my 20MB monthly upload limit, so I won’t be uploading even a third set until February at the earliest. It’s 25 bucks for a pro account, which gives you 2GB of monthly uploads. There’s no way I’m going to upload that much. But how much will I post? Without knowing, it’s hard to know if the Pro account is worth it.
Also, I’ve been uploading images at their full resolution. I may try resizing them to web-friendly, which I believe is 500 pixels on the wider edge.
Published on
January 16, 2006 in
Film.
So for Christmas — hold it. I must be watching too much Colbert Report, because every time I let it slip that I celebrate Christmas, I feel like I’m alienating prospective readers, or at the very least being politically incorrect. Anyway.
For Christmas I got several DVDs. More or less alphabetically: 8 Mile, The 40 Year Old Virgin, Batman Begins, Star Wars: Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, and War of the Worlds.
Of all the extra DVD features, I’ve looked at two things: Episode III deleted scenes and a documentary on the new Batmobile. Both of those movies are awesome, but I feel like the primary Batmobile sequence didn’t grab me like it did in the theater. Maybe it’s the newness when you see a movie for the first time. I still cringed when Anakin turned to the Dark Side, but this time I knew how he was going to do it. I still enjoy all the parts of War of the Worlds, but it’s still missing a climax. At least when I watch it in my apartment or my parents’ house there isn’t a lady with her three noisy kids sitting 4 seats away. (I shushed them, FYI.)
I think out of them all I want to dig deeper into the Batman stuff. Star Wars is great, but I’ve been watching making ofs of that for six years now. Yoda looks better now than ever, by the way.
Published on
January 16, 2006 in
Internet.
On the last day of 2005, WordPress 2.0 dropped. I believe I actually installed it a couple days before that. I was at home, in Chipmonk, and I had some free time on my hands. It was risky, considering that I was working with a dial-up connection and I often experience zero-notification incomplete FTP uploads, but I was in little A-Town, and I was antsy.
First of all, the dashboard UI is very blue. I like it. It’s flavor where before there was none. I’m a little surprised that there is no option to at least make everything red or green or purple.
The post editor is done up in AJAX now. Before it was pretty simplistic — it offered tools for creating links and basic formatting. The old version also showed you the raw HTML. Now it’s more along the lines of the finished product. Additionally — and this is pretty awesome — the post preview now actually renders the post with your current theme. So you really see exactly what the post will look like. Thumbs up.
Unfortunately, this new editor interface doesn’t work with Google Toolbar’s Spellchecker. I might do a post to show what I mean.
The file upload interface is now a part of the post editor. This works for me.
There are also changes to the user priveleges system, which bores me.
The last thing that really catches my eye is an improved — or at least more visible — import system. I think this might interest someone like Lewis, who has years of content stacked up. The only thing is, WP2′s Import tool supports a pretty narrow range of formats. Still, one of these is RSS, and I think Lewis has the hook up for that. In a worst case scenario, one could write a script to parse the old stuff and make it suitable for import. Hell, that even sounds fun. I would have liked to do it for the posts I had from before I moved to WordPress. Too bad I already imported all of them manually.
So overall I call WP2 an improvement. I think I feel good knowing that at least some work is being done on the product.
Published on
January 16, 2006 in
The Site.
I haven’t posted in a while. It’s been about three weeks.
I mean, of course you’ve got the Christmas holiday — I went home for a week, and Mom and Pop still have dial-up in Chipmonk. Then there’s the busy-ness before the break, the stuff after. And don’t forget New Year’s.
So that only gets me to about January 3rd. I actually started a rather lengthy post. No, let me rephrase that: I wrote a lot for a post. And then I lost it all. PowWeb was having issues with MySQL that day, and I lost the post. Pfft. Gone. Up in smoke.
The post was about IM clients — Gaim and AIM Triton. I wrote a bunch of stuff about features, my experiences trying each out, and why I chose not to use either. I hadn’t gotten to the part about how the crap Triton put on my system has left me considering a format.
That post was also the first time I had tried out WordPress 2.0′s authoring interface. It’s a little bit different, and a little prettier, but I must point out that it doesn’t work well with the Google Toolbar Spellchecker. This leaves me feeling very melancholy. Hopefully I spelled “melancholy” right, because I sure as hell ain’t gonna spellcheck it.
So yes. There’s a post. Happy New Year. If the Colts had managed a miraculous come from behing win today, I would have made a post today with the words “holy crap” involved.