Our web diary

canaca

Web updates

I have updated the camera section by adding a lens grouping. This makes the main entry less cluttered.

I have also added photographs from the Southeasten Home and Garden show. Marlene will write more about that later.

Usage Stats

Usage Stats for February:

• 2694 Hits
• 1767 Unique Sites
• Total Bandwidth Usage was 3.8 gb

Top 5 Search Strings

• Columbia Zoo
• Quantaray 28-200
• Cabin with Hot Tub Vancouver Island
• Charlotte NC pictures
• Canon 50mm 1.8

Sorry no hits for the Kermit Cake Topper this month. Maybe next month. The top referrer for the month was google. :) So we appear to have been properly googlized.

News

Now this is one way to get rise out of your membership

Web Busking

I caught this term from Photodude's site. You learn something new everyday. I had never heard of the term "web-busking" before reading his blog. Always good to learn new things while surfing the web.

I have learned, and am learning, a lot by reading Photodude's blog.Or course, that is not his real name. His real name is Reid Scott, but I came from the type of upbringing that means I will call him Photodude until he tells me otherwise. It was quite amusing that he is looking to get the same lens that I hope to get by the end of this year. I really have no REAL use for the 'L' lens, but since when I have ever bought things I need vs. want? He also is using an Epson 2200 printer which is another item I would like to have in the house. He can print his photos and send them direct whereas I have to use an external service to get my enlargements done for my photography site.

Anyway, I am just babbling. Thanks dude for the new word. Keep up the good work.

Yahoo RSS Beta

I was doing my morning search with Google to see how rivinus.com ranked in the listings. I have been quite happily noticing that google is indexing me everday day vs. once a week. I ranked first on Google. Now Yahoo is somewhat powered by Google so I checked Yahoo and was ranked 7th. There is nothing unusual in the difference because Yahoo is working on it's own internal search engine. I also noticed that it shows: RSS: View as XML - Add to My Yahoo!

Wow! Yahoo has added an RSS reeder to the MyYahoo page. It even shows up if you are not a MyYahoo user. The reader is configurable to give you just the headline or a short summary of the article. I'm a big MyYahoo user so this is a big plus to me.

The Mirror Project

We have our submission approved for The Mirror Project

RSS 2.0 Feed for MT

I started my photography blog here last week. MT has the ability to automatically generate an RSS feed. My friend Jason mentioned that the feed only sent the title and description, but not the images.

Here is a cheat to let you send images from a Photoblog in an RSS feed. It is not RSS valid, but it works. My particular Photoblog feed is a hack intself of MT. Detailed information on how the blog was done can be found at Quixotic Pixels-QP

QP has you take the URL and concatenate it from the Entry Body frame and put it into the Extended Entry frame. ie. img src="http://www.rivinus.com/test.jpg" would be shortened to just http://www.rivinus.com/test. The HTML main entry archive adds the ".jpg" when it forms the pages. Your entry body is actually used as the description of the photograph.

To get the images to show up in an RSS feed, you simply take the original URL and put it in the Except frame. In the above example you would place img src='http://www.rivinus.com/test.jpg" in the Excerpt frame. You need to add < before IMG and > after the last parentheses " I took them out because MT was converting them to links

Now go to your TEMPLATES page. You want to edit the RSS 2.0 Feed . You should have something that looks like this:

description><$MTEntryExcerpt remove_html="1" encode_xml="1"$> /description

Replace this with this:

source> <$MTEntryExcerpt encode_xml="1"$>/source

description><$MTEntryBody encode_xml="1"$>/description

Note: Again I had to remove the forward and ending bracks <> for MT to be able to do this article

Source will display in your RSS feed at an image hyperlink and the desciption will display above the image

You can download the text file I used at the RSS file here Right click and "save as" to your computer.

I know this is cheating and the source should be a URL. This is the best I could figure out how to make this work. I'll take other suggestions.

You can subscribe to my Photoblog feed here

Google

I was indexed 5 times by google last week. Google surprised me this week by moving my commercial photography site to the top of the search results for 'Rivinus'. That site is pretty static so I was surprised when it moved up from 8th to first. This weblog moved down into the 8th spot.

I have also noticed that google is not following the links to other stuff on the site since I made MT the main entry page. So here are two links that google has yet to pick up that I am adding in hopes it snares then next time. The first is a link to some pictures of Pineville, NC The second link is to someting about McMullen Creek Greenway.

Not sure if any of this will help, but it was worth a shot.

On a different note. I loaning another photographer from Toronto some space on this website to host some pictures. I get 5 gigs with Canaca so it seemed a charitable thing to do to let her borrow a 100 meg for her project of posting 1 picture a day for a year.

Firefox

This link is a prime example of how Firefox does not render some pages correctly.

Time

I found these from Photomemes Photomeme's is dedicated to photography with a theme. The best one I found was humanclock.com

Pictures for every minute of the day. Congrats on someone taking so much time and energy for a photo composition.

Fixes

I have notices that I have gotten quite a few errors on my website. One is for the Favicon Icon. This is the little image that appears in the address bar if you have bookedmarked our website. That is not fixed. You should see a maroon "R" if you have us marked as a favorite. This came from a free icon editor form favicon.co.uk

The second fix was to add Robots.txt so search engines will know what to look for in the website. It also denies them access to some directory. You can find a tutorial on this here.

I registered my Photoblog at Photoblogs and have seen a dramitic increase in site traffic. I had 63 unique URLs before 9am this morning. Not too shabby.

Mozilla Firebird/Firefox

I should probably preface this by saying that I am not a tecky. I am somewhere in that group between total idiot and 10 year old genius at Harvard. I can usually figure out what someone has coded or get the jist of what they were trying to get done with the code. The “jist” is fine with me. I don’t need to know what underlying “do-dat” makes something work. When I use a piece of software, hardware, camera, etc I expect it to work. The best way to qualify me would be to say, “I am on the low-end of tecky and the high end of neophyte” when it comes to technology and computers.

Ok, with the above of the way I am going to shock some people by saying that the Mozilla stuff is not the hottest stuff on the planet. Phoenix, Firebird, and now Firefox offer some interesting toys to play with for some people. They are not the browsers for the bulk of the computer users in the world today. They are an interesting alternative for those willing to take the time to get them customized for their own little quirks.

I first download Phoenix last year. I had never heard of a tabbed browser until Jason mentioned it one day. Jason and I have been friends for years. I don’t understand everything he says or blogs, but I at least look at most of it. So I grabbed Phoenix, I loved the tab browsing. I didn’t invest too much time in customizing it. I am from the genre that still thinks software should be complete for release to the public. I later heard that Firebird was a much better experience than Phoenix, so January 29th I ended up downloading it an installing it on both my home and work computers. I also had to download all of the little tricks and plug-ins to make it work like IE does now.

Today I learned that I have to download it again to get the newest version. I understand the reasoning behind the change, but it means I spent another 2 hours customizing another browser to work like the one that has already worked like a champ for me for 7 years.

I am not sure, and I am sure someone will tell me, but I think it is because it does not read HTML the same way IE 5 does. One example is frame pages. I use online banking for my bill payments. The Mozilla browsers consistently render the pages with the frames over-enlarged or spaced in an inconvenient way. Another example is that it takes FOREVER for Firebird/Fox to load graphics on a page. I have a cable modem at home that downloaded the new Firefox build in 12 seconds. I should not have to wait 10 seconds for Firebird/Fox to load a 4k gif files. I could see if it was on the first reading of a page to cache the images, but not after the 4th time the same day. I use movable type as my blog software. I cannot use Firebird/Fox because they do not recognize the text editing buttons in the New Entry Panel. Lastly, make an icon that is the same size as the other icons on the Windows Quick Launch bar.

However, I do love tabbed pages. This means I will continue to use Firefox to surf the web and IE to fall back to when web pages do not display correctly. However, I doubt many of the everyday computer users will take the time to learn the quirks. I could be wrong. I never thought Jason would own a Powerbook.

Pictures

I have added two pages to the website. These pages will have monthly portrait pictures of me and Marlene. Its a good way to document how we change over the years.

Usage Stats January

January was a good month for our website.  Here are some statistics for
those who are interested:

• 1258 hits
• 789 unique URLS
• Total Bandwidth usage was 1.8 gig

The top 5 search strings were:

• quantaray 28-200
• sigma 28-80 review
• columbia zoo
• canon 75-300 review
• renassiance festival

It appears that there are quite a few people interested in the camera stuff on the website.

We also had quite a few for our honeymoon and wedding
pictures. It seems there a number of folks interested in the Point no Point
resort. The funniest search string was for the
Kermit Cake topper used at our wedding

Updates

The webog is not the main entry point to rivinus.com I have added two new sets of pictures under January. There is a bit on focal points under the photography section.

There is now a border around the main body of the weblog. I think this make it stand out a little better.

I hope you enjoy the new website

Redesigning

I have made some changes to the weblog. First. I ditched the icon link to the other rivinus.com. I added it to the links set. I also added links to some other sites. Some for me and a few for Marlene.

I then moved on to getting the categories section working. It was a good lesson in learning how Movabletype handles template tags.

Then I edited the picture of Marlene and I from the main website. I shrunk and combined both images in PhotoShop Elements. Then changed the links so it goes back to the "about us". I added the XML image to the syndication link. I rearranged the different modules so search is further down the page.

Lastly, I went into the style sheet and moved things around to get around the spanning problem. Previously,the entries would extend to 1024 pixels. It was ok, but meant that you had to scroll right to read anything. I have it running at 720 pixels which should fit most screens without resizing. There is still a problem with having to refresh if you resize your screen. I will probably end up changing the main index template to a more tabular format. Movabletype uses floating tables in their CSS and it's a bit of a chore. I am thinking that maybe we will use this as the front end for the other website data.

Movable Type

I have decided to move the weblog into the 21st century and have subsequently upgraded to Movable Type This was not without some pain.

I am currently hosting with Canaca. They have hosting plans starting at $3.95 per month with 5GIG, yes that is GIG, of space. Throw in with that is the ability to have 5 subdomains. I already have one in my Photography Website. The subdomains support CGI scripts, so I decided to install MT into a new subdomain. I figured this would allow me to test getting it working before deleting the Greymatter weblog.

The installation had some hiccups. I had some initial problems getting the pathing correct. Then I had to figure out how they had strung together the templates. I finally got it running. Jason at Jclark helped with a few bugs. The navigation is still kind of funky. I may end up changing our site around to accommodate the changes.

Lastly here is a picture of the snow in Charlotte. This will be a pain for me with the trucking business.