Website
#500 |
||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|
||||||||||||||||||
 |
|
|
||||||||||||||||||
![[Hurricane Andrew Relief (circa 1994), Homestead, Florida.]](http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2615/4030267461_7fcc6536a1.jpg)
website: hackers, and my blog, and stuff |
||||||||||||||||||||
|
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. the 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. |
|
||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|
||||||||||||||||||
website: comments |
||||||||||||||||||||
|
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:
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) |
|
||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|
||||||||||||||||||
website: theparkerfamily.org |
|||||||||||||||||||||
|
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
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 “Tasha” 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. |
|
|||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||
(if you are into that sort of thing) or
wedding: ch-ch-ch-changes |
|||||||||||||||||||||
|
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.” |
|
|||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||
![[screenshot]](http://evancparker.com/images/tashaandevan/screenshot.jpg)
website: flickr api |
||||||||||||||||||||
|
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. |
|
||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|
||||||||||||||||||
website: launch, v7 |
||||||||||||||||||||
|
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. |
|
||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|
||||||||||||||||||
website: the great blog migration |
||||||||||||||||||||
|
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. |
|
||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|
||||||||||||||||||
website: electericolson.org |
||||||||||||||||||||
|
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 |
|
||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|
||||||||||||||||||
website: flickr flash |
||||||||||||||||||||
|
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.
|
|
||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|
||||||||||||||||||
i started blogging back in 2004 … i was bored, i was recently single, and i had just survived a near death experience at the hands of a happy young Christian soccer mom driving a hummer.
when i started blogging, i held absolutely no pretense that anybody was reading. i blogged purely for myself, to give my future self something to look back on and remind me of the things i had seen, the places i had been, and the things that i had done.
that still (mostly) holds true even today. i have an absolutely horrific memory, so need to write things down or they are lost for good.
don’t get me wrong, i’m absolutely cheesed that other people are joining in the fun as i chronicle all sorts of embarrassing stories about the lady sparkler, but in the end … i blog because i never want to forget what happened, or the look in her face or what i was thinking at the time.
with that in mind, i apologize for the banalities that are coming down the pike. with baby sparklet, i have doubled the wonderful women in my life, and will certainly be doubling the silly, stupid things that i want to write down so i don’t forget.
here’s hoping that the next 500 will be as much fun as the first.