theparkerfamily.org

Tag: Website

  • it’s been a good run…

    it’s been a good run…

    so, it’s been a bit since this site was last updated. the daily updates stopped in early 2016, about 6 months after my father passed away.

    but that’s (mostly) a coincidence. life got busy. i started taking fewer pictures. adobe lightroom, a subscription now instead of a one-time purchase, started seeming really expensive for someone who was taking fewer pictures. it got harder to sort. it got harder to post. trump got elected — i can blame him for everything, right?!? — so posting effectively stopped.

    late in the pandemic, maybe 6 months ago, i resolved to get myself caught back up. i did — yay! — at least in the picture processing department. i swapped over to Apple Photos, which made everything easier. i actually went out and got a negative/slide scanner, and i’ve started running through a bunch of pre-2004 photos too.

    truth be told, Apple Photos made everything easier EXCEPT getting the pictures onto this website. in the last many months, i sorted 8,145 pictures (since 2016) into 447 albums, but there is no easy way to put them into wordpress posts and get them shared out to the public.

    so they’re locked up in my Apple ecosystem and shared only with the people i have email addresses for.

    but i guess that’s okay. the main enjoyment i got out of the blog — remembering wonderful things that my notoriously weak memory can’t keep track of — i now get out of my TV. i figured out how to get these favorites you see on flickr hooked up to our Apple TV as the screensaver, and the whole family will legit sit on the couch for a quarter of an hour or more watching the pictures scroll past.

    it’s lovely.

    i’ll keep up a flickr account, certainly — pulling together my favorite hundred or two photos a year — and I’ll get those photos posted out in the ether. and maybe, someday, Apple will change their sharing function to make easier to share an album towards a blog or a website.

    but until then, we’ll pause at exactly 3,200 posts over the last 17 years and 10 months. hopefully there will be more, but if not … it’s been a good run.

  • #20,000

    []
    Apologies for two consecutive navel-gazing posts, but there are a couple of auspicious milestones that demand attention. I’ve just ticked over 20,000 photos since I relaunched my photography habit back in 2004, and it looks like I’m up to my 2,500th blog post.

    To make things more dramatic/traumatic, I just realized next spring will make it 10 full years of blogging. (I started blogging the same month that I started dating my beloved wife, so a decade of blogging will clearly be the second most important anniversary celebrated that month.)

    It’s stunningly hard to explain the number of things that have changed over the last ten years… and it’s hard to believe that I’m even the same person.

    Speaking of, my kids are yelling at me, so I have to go.

  • web: welcome to 2014

    shuttershot
    After three years, it was about time for a new look and feel for the family blog.

    I launched the last look shortly before sparklet’s first birthday, which means it’s been up and running just over three years. now, one all-nighter later, we’ve got a design that looks like it’s been designed in this decade, which should be quite the upgrade.

    Talk to y’all again in 2017.

  • the abridged version of the last 124 days

    []
    i’m not going to even pretend that i’m a good blogger anymore.mighty quinn is walking, sparklet’s getting ready to go to school, we left the country, had a couple of birthdays, and basically spent the last three months outside. it’s been 124 days since my last blog post, and here is a selection of the 150 posts worth of life i missed over the last four months:

  • midnight run to the apple store

    []
    we suffered the first hard drive failure of my life this weekend. turns out there is a defect with some iMac hard drives that cause them to spin until the burn up. thank god for free warrenty/recall repair, time machine, and regular back-ups.

  • cold snap (#2000)

    []

    as of yesterday, i was nearly two months behind in blogging — the longest cold spell since sparklet was born three-plus years ago.

    good news is that not much happened:

    the mighty quinn is tottering on the edge of crawling (and has been for most of the last two months.) he’s on to baby foods, and just this week started some real food (blackbeans, just like his sister.)

    he’s also officially a beast, off the charts on both height and weight. seriously, however big you think he is — double it. and then double it again.  and then burn whatever you thought you were thinking.

    for her part, sparklet (who just turned three) is having entire conversations now, mostly with herself. she makes up songs from scratch, and they are often are laden with not-so-hidden messages. (“riding on ca-rou-sels is funnnnnn! i’d liiike to riiide on a ca-rou-sel todaaaay.”)

    moreover, she has figured out how to say the two worst words in the world — “no” and “just” (eg. “no, no, no, no, i don’t want to eat lunch, i just want a snack.” and “no, no, no, no, i’m not eating — i’m just checking to see if there are snacks in the bag.”)

    finally, i realized that i have ten tons of unused vacation days that i’m going to lose in December if i don’t start taking them quick — so i’m cobbling together a better-late-than-never paternity leave from random days across the remainder of the year.

    oh, and that election thing happened.  oh, and i got an iphone that takes neat panorama photos.  oh, and halloween happend (sparklet was a fairy, and mighty quinn was yoda, and we picked pumpkins).  and, oh, this is my 2,000th post since 2004.

    back in the saddle, and i hope it lasts.

  • the layoff

    []
    the number one rule of blogging is don’t apologize — not for posting too much, not for posting too little, not for posting “stupid” posts, and not for a long break in between posts.

    no matter what you think you’ve done wrong, chances are (a) people aren’t paying close enough attention to have noticed, and (b) you are being way too self important if you think they care.

    that said, holy crap it’s been a long time since i’ve updated this blogthing.

    seven weeks. 1,689 photos. 45 minutes of video. 9 extra lbs of baby. 441 diapers. but, i think we are starting to come through the other side of the madness.

    the mighty quinn is getting up to 6 hours of sleep at a shot, and — as we have more time for her — sparklet’s terrible twos are receding just a little bit. kinda. sorta.

    so, no apologies for the lack of posting because you probably didn’t notice, and — if you did — i just wrote (and backdated) 76 posts for posterity (and you) in the space of 18 hours.

    that was penance enough.

  • jasonbucy.com

    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/

  • lynnbrook.org

    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.
    The Lynnbrook
    http://www.lynnbrook.org/

  • emergency! emergency!

    []
    i got a text message from the m.o.h. last night:

    What happened to your blog?!?

    what happened is that 1,101 individual, lovingly crafted blog posts had been spontaneously replaced by a single, solitary “sorry, no blog posts matched your criteria” message.

    #$%&$%.

    i logged into the wordpress admin and the dashboard welcomed me to edit my 0 posts.

    #$%&$%, @&#$%^.

    when i logged into the super techie backed (phpmyadmin, which administers that database that powers the blog) it said that the my wp_posts table — the one with the content for all 1,101 posts — was unavailable because it was “in use”.

    #$%&$%, @&#$%^ — #%$&$%.

    suddenly, the notion of replacing the notion of sparklet’s babybook with a happy, communal blog seemed like a pretty stupid idea.

    suddenly, the notion of only backing up said blog twice in the last two years (August 2010, July 2009) seamed like a pretty bad idea.

    at some point in the week hours of the morning — after two support tickets and 45 minutes of googling/panicking — i figured out that the database had “just” become corrupted, and i “just” needed to repair the table. after another 30 minutes of googling to find out how to do such a thing, i did it.

    and it worked.

    and now i’m successfully procrastinating on a plan to backup the website — at least until after the *next* disaster.

  • #1000

    []
    jeez, that was quick. it took me five whole years to get to blog post #500 and now just 12 months later i’m at #1000.

    now, i’m not exactly a linear blogger — i’ve usually got 20 or more drafts posts going at any one time, many of which will eventually be backdated by twelve months or more. just last week I added 40+ posts about our trip to Europe in Spring 2009.

    but, everything i do is in service of my horrific memory — the point of going back and blogging about Europe isn’t so others will read, but so that future me can remember.

    (speaking of, i just spent 15 minutes reading through my posts tracking Sparklet’s “firsts”, and last week i spent what felt like an hour digging through the 50+ “photo of the week” posts tracking her growth. awesome.)

    back at post #500 i joked that:

    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.

    … and that has certainly turned out to be the case. i’ve never had so much material to write about, or so many things i’ve not wanted to forget.

    so, thanks to my 2.7 3.7 loyal readers for tagging along — here’s hoping that the next 1000 will be as much fun as the first.

  • baby’s new web site design

    Screen Shot 2013-11-11 at 4.56.02 PM
    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.

  • the others

    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).

    family thunderhorses cheerleading

    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.

    From the Wayback Machine:
    the other theparkerfamily.org

  • mighty, mighty boigs

    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/

  • erikanortemann

    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/

  • #500

    [Hurricane Andrew Relief (circa 1994), Homestead, Florida.]
    ECPA20070918_x021, originally uploaded by [ecpark].
    it’s hard to believe, but this blog entry brings me to 500 posts over the last five years. so it’s navel gazing time, although i certainly don’t mean to imply that my previous 499 were directed anywhere other than my midsection.

    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.

  • new theme (launch, v11)

    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.

  • 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.

    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.

  • 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:

    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)

  • Website: theparkerfamily.org (launch, v10)

    screenshot2

    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.

  • fostermom

    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/

  • Wedding: Ch-ch-ch-changes (launch, v9)

    [screenshot]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.”

  • 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, v8

    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
    http://www.electEricOlson.org/

  • 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.

  • Website: Host Migration, Part II

    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).

  • Website: Navigation

    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.

  • migration

    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.

  • Macintosh

    IMG_0408.JPG

    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.

  • Website: Yet Another Redesign (launch, v7)

    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.

  • Website: More Wasted Efforts

    Blew four hours on reworking the flash of my front page, and then axed it as lame in the end. Ick. Gotta plan those things out a little better, I guess.

  • Website: Nevermind

    Wow, did I hate that flash thing I created. I axed it, and it’s back to the basic HTML for me.

  • Website, v6.0

    Got inspired, and am going to redesign the site. I went looking for things to scam, but couldn’t find much worthy of appropriation… tho 2 recent Webby recipients are providing with *some* inspiration.

    www.brukoworld.com/home.html
    www.steveandria.com/kynan

    Redesigned and broke out the front page. Added flash navigation, and a really big honkin’ vanity picture. By the best of my limited counting skills, I think this is version 6 of the site.

    Last three designs (v3, v4 and v5 respectively) are here:

    Best as I can recollect, v1 had a similar (tho less polished) tabbed file theme as v3, and v2 was black/yellow with some kind of map of russia with photos inlaid.