Meandering Out Loud » Announcements

New Photos Page and WP-SmugMug

Don Thorp — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 05:56:55 +0000

As part of my site re-organization and update, I discovered a new plugin, WP-SmugMug written by Adam Tow, that allows me to show recent photos from my SmugMug account on the site. Previously, the Photos menu item just took you directly to my photos, http://photos.donthorp.net, on SmugMug. Now the link takes you to a local page that displays some recent photos and provides a link to all photos.

I had a couple of small issues with the plugin, version 2.0.3 and WordPress 2.7, but that didn’t stop me from working around it for photos.

The “Send to Editor” button didn’t work for me so I had to enter the short code by hand (FireFox 3.0 and Safari on OS X Leopard)
When using the RSS feed for recently updated galleries, it didn’t find the gallery images to display so I took that feature out.

Updated to Wordpress 2.7

Don Thorp — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 00:43:27 +0000

This is a just a quick post to note that I’ve finished porting the site to Wordpress 2.7 and taking it into production. I haven’t made any of the organizational changes that I want yet, but now that it’s moved I may post some of the content that I’ve been saving up a lot faster.

If you notice anything wrong with the site, please leave a comment on this post.

Upgrading the Site

Don Thorp — Sat, 24 May 2008 19:37:00 +0000

Just a quick note to let you know that parts of the site will be missing, mostly pictures, as I upgrade to the latest WordPress. I seem to have gotten everything updated except for Gallery. I’ve always had a love hate relationship with it and I think the hate side has won. I’m going to be galleries up to smugmug, and probably putting post graphics locally. This is going to be a little painful, mostly for me.

Pardon the dust.

Welcome to the New donthorp.net

Don Thorp — Sat, 12 Jan 2008 23:12:24 +0000

It took quite a while to get all the pieces put together, mostly because I couldn’t figure out how to disable the new canonical URL stuff in Wordpress. Once I located the section of code to comment out, it started coming together pretty rapidly. As part of the conversion process, I also had to upgrade Gallery to Gallery2.

The impetus for the rewrite was a desire to aggregate all of my flotsam and jetsam. I wanted to hopefully drive more traffic to the site so that I can generate a small amount of revenue from ads, books, etc. At a minimum, it’ll help offset the cost of my toys.

What I’ve discovered is that it’s pretty easy to start pulling in the bits and pieces from Twitter, Magnolia, LibraryThing, et al. to make a semi-coherent website using the best of breed tools sprinkled around the net.

I’m keeping www.donthorp.net – Version 1 up and running for the time being, as well as my blog on wordpress blog.donthorp.net.

LOL.com is taking shape

Don Thorp — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 01:51:19 +0000

Ages and ages ago some friends and I were able to get the lol.com domain and have kept it all these years. A couple of years ago, when advertising started coming back, my business partner John Munsch and I started talking about how we could make it more than just a dead site and an email trap.

A little over a year ago, we brought up a very simple site with a very limited set of jokes. We opened up a gmail account to accept jokes to place on the site, but it was too hard to keep up with the submissions, format them all, and get them live on the site. After the site had been up for a while, it became apparent that there was growth potential and it was worth getting an interactive site up and running.

So for the last year or so John and I have been working to bring our initial vision to life. John has done most of the development for this site, I’ve done most of the IT. We have released version 2.0 of LOL.

We’re proud of our baby. If you have some time stop by and give it a look.

Moved…Again

Don Thorp — Sat, 05 May 2007 17:08:57 +0000

It’s been ages since I’ve posted anything to the blog on my site, because I just got fed up with the data entry. Today, on a whim, I decided to see how much effort it would be to take my old blog from www.donthorp.net and move it to a wordpress blog.

The export from Moveable Type and import into WordPress went smoothly. It took me a moment to figure out why my posts weren’t showing up. It’s because a WordPress import brings the articles in as drafts. Once I figured that out, I went through and published each post.

It wasn’t completely flawless, because I still need to fix up some URLs that used root relative URLs from my original site (e.g. /gallery instead of http://www.donthorp.net/gallery). I may also install WordPress on my system and then it’ll be less of an issue.

Photo Gallery Added

Don Thorp — Wed, 24 Jul 2002 16:25:54 +0000

I’ve been fairly motivated lately to start getting some of our pictures online. To
that end, I installed Photo Gallery
an open source tool for managing and displaying collections of photos.

Note to friends and family. An account is required to view some albums.
If you remember it, it is the same username and password that you use to access
the friends and family link. If you’ve forgotten it, email me and I’ll send it to you
again.

Site update – Archives Added

Don Thorp — Fri, 19 Apr 2002 04:05:36 +0000

I’ve added archives of past articles to the site. It will take me a while to get the templates configured like I want them, but I noticed that some information was dropping out google so I wanted to get it back in.

Converted to Moveable Type

Don Thorp — Thu, 07 Mar 2002 18:20:26 +0000

Believe it or not, I’ve finally converted to Moveable Type. It only to a couple of hours and now I have it spitting out the xml format I was using before. It is impressive how easy it was to convert. I still have a lot more work todo to incorporate archives and categories, but it will be much easier to add entries than it was before.

Update to What’s Happening

Don Thorp — Thu, 14 Feb 2002 03:00:00 +0000

As you can tell from the time difference between now and the last
entry, I’ve been busy.

The other problem is the effort it takes to update the site. I’m
considering using
Moveable Type for web log entries. John has been using it for a while,
and it seemed to make it easier for him to add updates. If I can wade
through the documentation and figure out how to convert my information
easily, I’ll probably do it to.

I’m still here

Don Thorp — Mon, 13 Aug 2001 17:30:00 +0000

Believe it or not, the lack of updates does not signal my demise. Life has
been really hectic lately and getting updates to the website has just been
close to impossible.

I have ton of resource links that I need to get added, but I’m going to
hold off for a little while, until John finished is experiment with OPML.
I already keep my resource list in xml form, but I’m open to using a standard
that has tools available.

XML-RPC

Today I was reading on Meerkat and found an interesting topic on using
XML-RPC to manage your weblog on Blogger and another product called
Free Conversant.
I haven’t read through it, but first glance seems to indicate that it comes
in a open form that we could run on our own servers.

I also happened upon this XML-RPC accessible spell checker. This might make
it simple to provide spell checking on a website or with other tools.

The reason I found these interesting is that the main reason I don’t update
my page more is that it takes time to modify the source and publish it.
I would prefer an easier method of “posting” entries. John is tackling this
with a tools that he is specing out now, but it will be a while before
something big comes out of it.

Hotsheet

Don Thorp — Fri, 25 May 2001 13:40:00 +0000

John posted a file for
HotSheet while we are
waiting on sourceforge to get shell access working again.

I’ve started a patterns section under links in resources.

…In the Beginning

Don Thorp — Thu, 03 May 2001 22:00:00 +0000

I’ve moved the items off the original site and into this new web log format.
This format is the first step in the new weblog tool John and I are working
on.

Welcome

This is going to be my scratch pad for various things that interest me.
As any new site, this one is going to be light on content for a while. In
fact most of the content here is going to focus on Job Hunt 2001.

Current Notions

It took a little while, but the site is now in a state where I can add content
more quickly. I have temporarily given up on XInclude and just created a helper
class to do the merging for me. The site is now running under Tomcat, it is
built and published using Ant, and all of the content is now XML based!

I’ve started a resources page, but there is much to be done. I’ll add entries
and annotate it shortly. The next step I think will be to add an about the site
page that describes the techniques I’m using for this site.

Job Hunt 2001

As many of you know, my last employer Vast Solutions decided to go
out of business without any warning. I guess that is always a risk with a
startup, but John
and I thought we had done better research on this one. We were told that
they had revenue, a burn rate that would last through Q3 or early Q4, and
they were a spin-off of a larger corporation. I guess you never really know.

I’m reworking my online resume. After review by several folks, I expanded it
to add more detailed information about what I’ve done over the years. It is
sometimes difficult to capture all of the little things, but I think I cover
the important ones. In the mean time, you can pull the
Word/RTF version.