turns out that i know funny people.

another side project — this time for a really funny guy (and brother to the couple of the century) who does stand up in L.A. if you do nothing else, visit the site and watch the “jesus chrysler dodge and suburu” clip up top. (oh, and “like” him on facebook while you’re there, too.)

funny stuff.

Jason Bucy
http://jasonbucy.com/

as part of the sale, i’ve created a brochure-ware site for our building — i doubt i can get it onto the first page of google results for us, but it’s worth a shot.

happy (early) birthday, sparklet!

daddy doesn’t do much, be he does do web sites — so he spent the last couple of days designing and building out an new look in honor of your first birthday.

the last design was great, but it was mostly someone else’s work, and i threw it up literally overnight when bad people started doing bad things to our website.

so happy birthday, baby sparklet.

someday you’ll be able to read — and when you can, you’ll finally understand why daddy’s been sticking that camera in your face for the last 12 months.

as shocking as it is to my fragile, miopic worldview — we aren’t the first theparkerfamily.org.

turns out, according to the internet archive “wayback machine” there was another parker family who had the domain back in 2001.

i don’t have much on who they were — scott was the dad and wasn’t up for “programmer of the year”, jordan was the daughter and created a fan site for horses (called “thunder horses” no less) and a cheerleading page (featuring nearly impenetrable cheerleading trivia).

unfortunately, 2 minutes of googling didn’t lead to any “where are they now” stories, and that’s just about the sum total of my attention span these days.

in other news, the new owners of evanandtasha.com — our wedding domain from a few years back — got married, went on a cruise, and if splash pages are to be believed may be thinking about babies.

more bulletins as warranted.

i really, honestly can take no credit for this one — but that doesn’t mean i’m not going to try.

good friends of ours bought a domain (mightymightyboigs.com) to migrate their old blogspot blog, and never made it past the content migration. after 10 minutes of setup, 12 minutes of page migration, and one pre-made wordpress theme (yup, it’s too nice to be mine) and we’re good to go.

Mighty, Mighty Boigs
http://mightymightyboigs.com/

a friend was looking at a couple $30+ a month web providers to feature her photography, and i talked her off that ledge — and promptly ended up tricking out WordPress for her instead, in exchange for free professional baby photos from her forward.

i think i may have gotten the better end of the deal, so long as sparklet isn’t already going to be the most photographed baby on the planet.

Erika Nortemann, Documentary Photographer:
http://erikanortemann.com/

well, while i was rebuilding the site anyway i figured it was about time to ditch the old three column format. it’s not my design, but that may actually be the point — i find i like designs longer when i have nothing to do with them.

it’s the 11th design i’ve had since my first site in may of 2002, and i can’t think of one that lasted longer than 18 months.

i feel so violated.

early this week, i was making a quick change to the blog, when i discovered hundreds of files filled with all sorts of obvious porn keywords (khandi-alexander-nude-pics.html) and some more with not so obvious porn keywords (blue-lotus-tea-recipe.html).

now, i would have been fine if was making porn-star money for hosting the files … but no one appeared to be sending me my cut of the proceeds.

for three days, i tried everything from deleting the files to figuring out where the security hole was that needed to be plugged. i had the latest version of the operating system, the latest version of WordPress, i deleted “extra” logins to the system, and i changed to a new WordPress theme (hense the new design) to make sure one of my “upgrades” wasn’t at fault.

but each night at 12:04 am, the porn files mysteriously reappeared. out of desperation, i finally contacted my web host — i did that last because i knew they were going to be useless — and sure enough all they could manage was “sorry we can’t help you, but try resetting your passwords.”

oops. hadn’t thought of that …

sure enough, i reset all the passwords, and the site hasn’t been hacked since. hard to believe it was something so simple (and stupid, and obvious).

i think there is some sort of life lesson in here somewhere, if i only knew where to look.

In what is sure to be a freak storm never to be repeated again, I had three people complain to me that the blog didn’t accept comments. Here is what was *easily* my favorite complaint:

I have thoughts and opinions. I need to be able to express them on your blog.

Frankly, I had comments turned off because I assumed that no one actually read my ramblings, or cared to comment if they did. However, after about 15 minutes of hard labour, you, the adoring public, can now comment to your hearts content.

(cue the sound of crickets chirping)

Now that the wedding is over, we have to figure out what to do with tashaandevan.com … do we hold it in perpetuity as a last memento of the glory days of our engagement?

Sitting on the domain just seems unfair to the legions of Evanses and Tashas sure to follow (especially as evanandtasha.com appears to taken as well).

Instead, we have decided to take merge my web site (evancparker.com) with the engagement site, to form a brand-spanking new site called theparkerfamily.org. I had bought that domain for my parents for a Christmas almost five years ago (hi mom!) but sadly, nothing came of it (sorry mom!) and my mom ended up with a computer instead.

Anyway, if you want to keep track of the Sparklers from this point forward, you have come to the right place. You might want to grab our RSS Feed (if you are into that sort of thing) or sign-up to be notified by email when we post something new.

p.s. If you are wondering about the picture, for the last decade — dating back to when my vanity web site was unclevanya.com — my site has featured the same picture of my face on Karl Marx’ body that you see here. The new addition is the lady sparkler’s face gracing the body of Catherine the Great, who was arguably the most powerful female ruler of the last half millenium (it seemed fitting).

UPDATE: Karl Marx and Catherine the Great are growing to be a little too obscure, even for us. I just swapped them out for The Great Gonzo (needs no explanation) and Abby Cadabby, the newish girly-girl-fairy-princess Muppet on Sesame Street (which seems to resonate the lady sparkler all over the place). I was also thinking about Shaggy and Velma — which would be funny beyond all possible understanding — so maybe that will come next.

a friend of ours is getting ready to become a foster parent, and is @#$%ed off about the process enough that she wants to vent. publicly. not my design (i don’t really do purple — or butterflies) but i setup the nastiness on the technical backend.

Foster Mom
http://fostermom.miramir.org/

Well, if you are one of our three loyal readers, you will notice we have changed things up a bit. The big impetus is that we have to get “save the date” notes out to our adoring masses, and being a good marketer I want to (a) have everything looking pretty when people are looking, and (b) want to have continuity between what you get on the web and what you get in the mail.

Of course, the funny thing here isn’t that I am a slave to online engagement best-practices, but that we have *so* much done … but haven’t done the guest list, which is usually a pre-requisit to both save-the-date cards and, well, wedding planning. We have a church, a reception, a hotel, a dress, attendants, bridesmaids dresses, a band, a photographer, as well as solid leads on a florist, a cake, an after-party, a honeymoon and the rehearsal dinner … but don’t know who is going to see any of it.

In other news, over the weekend we did our very first cake testing. We went up to Custom Cake Designs (in Gaithersburg, Maryland) who did the cake for our foodie-friends Sue and Jeremy’s wedding. It was about what you would expect — histrionic brides as far as the eye could see — but it was interesting to talk about cake decoration as if it were an art form up there with “ballet” and “lying to White House reporters.”

It’s too cold to take pictures where I am (blustery Washington DC) so I integrated the Flickr API into my site over the weekend, and used the new tools (and momentum that came with them) to plow through a whole list of things I had been pushing off.

The front page is now a fully functioning part of the blog, which is good because it provides about 80% of the updated content on the site. Also, all pages on the [Random Musings] blog now pull their wrapper images dynamically from my “favorites” photo set on Flickr, which means I can stop rotating them by hand.

Finally, the [Photography] section now has — GASP! — photographs, including a run down of my most recent photoblog posts, my most recent Flickr sets, and a few more images pulled from my “favorites” photo set on Flickr.

Oh, and I did a bunch of design work on the blog too. New headers, new formatting. Everything (should) look much cleaner now.

FWIW, I highly recommend the Flickr API, though integrating it into your site is probably not for the weak of heart. I did most of the work through phpFlickr, but even that needed a lot of customization to get it to do what I wanted.

yet another, another redesign.

this weekend it hit me that, for a site centered around a photoblog, my web site was pretty devoid of pictures. after three nights of little sleep, vioa-la! each page has 3-5 photographs by your’s truely, and a much more dignified color palatte.

done, aaand done.

Had a free weekend (“free” being a relative term, of course) so I migrated my faux-blog to my own hosted server. I’m feeling progressively crappier, but I think that is sinus related as opposed to coding related.

I had no idea that my hosting provider (lunarpages, not as evil as most hosts) actually provides its clients with as many instances of WordPress as we can handle. Now, I’m not a blog snob but I do like having the ability to categorize posts. How has blogger lasted so long without categories?

Anyway, it was a weekend’s worth of work, but 99.8% of that was formatting the display template. The default was “pretty,” but I wanted the look and feel to merged seamlessly with my main site.

A friend of mine is running for County Council in Prince George’s, Maryland. I’m serving as his Online Communications Director for the campaign. It’s nothing outrageously good, but he now has his very own campaign web site:

Eric Olson for Prince George’s County Council
http://www.electEricOlson.org/

Being a new Flickr apostle, I redid my front page to have a flash slideshow which automatically pulls from my favorite shots posted on Flickr. Used SlideshowPro, and it seems to work very well.

Turns out the Exabytes isn’t just passively evil, they are actively evil. After months of crappy service (long waits, broken english) their server started going up and down like a ping-pong ball. Well no more. I have swapped over to equally cheap ($7.95/mo) and infinitely better regarded (have 1 friend who doesn’t hate them) Lunarpages hosting.

Spent the entire weekend moving everything over, but most moved pretty easily (mySQL databases, files, etc). The only real problem is that I decided to recode the entire site from ASP (8 years experience) to PHP (6 months experience) because it appears that ASP is a dying language (not the reason) and that PHP is $1/mo. cheaper (the reason).

I redid the bulk of the navigation. The far right column used to be just pictures, but now it’s pictures and words. I suddenly remembered that navigation was supposed to help people navigate. It’s a stunning notion, when you pause to think about it.

I just (today) left my job at a small, progressive little online communication firm for hippies — and in four years, i did a lot of good stuff.

I was responsible for online presences for a number of political offices including House Leader Nancy Pelosi, House Whip Steny Hoyer, Rep. Dick Gephardt, Rep. John Lewis, and Rep. Nick Lampson.

i launched over 75 efforts for progressive non-profit causes, including campaigns for the Planned Parenthood, Campaign For America’s Future, True Majority, US Soccer Foundation, National Parks and Conservation Association, Common Sense about Kids and Guns, and the Communication Workers of America.

but, one of the great perks of the job was being allowed to host my personal web servers on a company IP address.

God, I love hippies.

Now that I am leaving (to join a progressive non-profit cause no less) however, I am screwed.

Way back, when I used to have a house and a reliable internet connection (versus living in a 500 sq ft basement apartment) I served up pages from a server in my house.

Now, I have to sign contracts with scary hosting companies whose websites make them seem like fronts for the Russian mob.

So, I chose blindly. I think mt stab in the dark was called Exabytes. They have servers in Texas … and Banglore (India, not Maine) so I am guessing I won’t get a lick of support that isn’t in Hindi.

wonder if they have conservationists in India.

This blog is now brought to you by the Apple Powerbook G4, which replaces a decade old G3 that just couldn’t take it any more.

Took another stab at the site design, but this time I am pretty please … and think it might stick for the long haul. LOVELY color schema this time through (IMHO), and I have managed to keep the vast majority of the site architecture intact.