Cyberward.net

I have finished the upgrade to WordPress 2.7. This took awile, as I wanted to make sure that my theme and the plugins I was using would work.

The theme is working fine now. There were a few things I needed to do. First was fix up the comments. The new wordpress supports threaded comments, but my theme did not. Now it does. Also, Pages didn’t allow comments, and didn’t show when the page was created which I wanted. Oh yea, I added gravitars, the little pictures beside the posters post.

I switched the download plugin as noted earlier, and that was a big pain. When I tried to get it running on the updated site, I couldn’t activate the plugin. In the end I found out that it must have been corrupted files in the file transfer. I reinstalled it from a new zip, and reapplied my changes, and now it works.

So… the only thing really missing is the images at the top of the page. I really need to get those updated. With the gap there, it kinda looks like crap.

I found a new plugin that I will use when I move to WordPress 2.7, which should be soon. It is called Drain Hole. This is a pretty spiffy plugin. It allows you to create different “holes” or folders to contain downloads. These folders can have different permissions assigned to them. The individual files can be versioned, although the file name appears to need to be the same. You can then use tags on your page to reference the files. One of the really interesting things is that it makes use of templates for those tags. So you can create a template to display a file, or list of files. You use a different set of tags in these templates that reside inside your own theme folder. I like this idea. I am already trying to think of ways to use it ouside of this plugin.

While playing with this plugin I discovered a bug. I couldn’t update/save the attributes for a file. I was trying to assign a custom icon, and the display name, but nothing would stick. Hunting this down I found out why php debugging, especially ajax calls really sucks. Anyway, I finally discovered what the issue was; a variable that was not initialized. It must be the particular combination of WordPress (2.7), PHP(4.5), and MySql(5.0) that I was playing with, because I can’t belive that this doesn’t work for everyone that uses this plugin.

Turns out that the developer has a tracker, so I created a bug with my solution. I am going to be moving to this from the Download Manager plugin I was using.

I took a SD card (4gig Sandisk Extreme III SDHC) out of my computer, and back into my camera, and I instead of a shot count in the LCD on the top of the camera, I got the letters CHA. What the? I headed to google, and “d90 CHA” brought back a ton of hits. This was not some weird isolated incident. Most were saying it had something to do with the memory card, and that if formated in camera, it would correct it’s self. Since I always format every time I put the card back in, that’s what I tried to do. I usually use the shortcut buttons, but they didn’t work. I then went to the menu, and it the camera seemed to take a long time to format. When it was finished, I still had CHA in the LCD. I took the card out, put it back in, and now the shot count said there were 27 pictures left. Weird. I tried the format again through the menu, and this time it only took a second, and appeared to work. We’ll see how this card holds up. I should mark it so I know which one it is.

Gerbera photo from new gallary

I finally have my pictures up at Christopher Ward Photography. I was hoping to get them up before the end of the year, but a couple of days isn’t too bad. I had thought that I would go with a site at smugmug, and I may later, but I had an idea for some javascript-y-ness that I wanted to try first. The album’s on the left contain pictures that fly out into a collage. I will post more on the Javascript later. I tried something different with the albums too. Annie had the idea to group them by color, instead of landscape, people, etc. I think it worked pretty well. I have some images that I wasn’t able to get in because of it, but the individual collages look better and more cohesive this way.

So I have started a 365 series. This is where you post a picture every day for a year. I imagine that most will have something to do with my kids, as that is what I am dealing with pretty much every day of my life, but who knows, there might be a flower or landscape or two. I am posting it on flickr, at the 365 2009 set.

Not sure when this started shipping. Adorama has it listed now. I had been looking for it. It is the GPS accessory that was announced with the D90. That was quite a while ago. Nice to see that it is shipping, but it is double what I hoped the price would be. At $200+ it is a little rich for me. Maybe some other time. Moose has one and wrote about it a few weeks ago. Also, I now have the Eye-Fi that is supposed to capture your location. I am still trying to figure how that works, or get’s enabled.

So, I started to think about the last year, and what my New Years resolutions might be. So what did I do last year?

• I started up the blog again.
• Got my first full year of DSLR shooting under my belt
• Spent a bazillion (well, to me) on photoshop, but don’t really know how to use it.
• Upgraded my camera to a D90, and promptly stopped taking pictures

Yea, I am not sure what happened. The pre winter blah’s seemed to hit me in November around my birthday. I had finished the Marathon, purchased the D90 that I had been saving for for quite some time (actually before it was announced), and then petered out with no real goals. So what are the goals for the new year?

• Read six new photography books. I was going to say 12, but lets be realistic. New ones to me.
• Find a mentor. I need to find someone to shoot with, someone that can push me, and someone that can tell me why the photos that I take are just not quite there.
• Do a 365 series of the kids. This will at least put the camera in my hands, and hopefully help with the next point.
• Learn about off camera flash. Actually I have been trying to learn for awhile, but not having an off camera flash was a bit of an impediment. I now have a SB800, so I need to start to put this to practice.
• Get more comfortable with Photoshop. I want to finish Scott Kelby’s 7 step progarm, and then do it again.
• Finish the christopherwardphotography.com site. Ok, no one ever “finishes” a site, but I want to finish the new site I am working on. This shouldn’t be too hard to do in the beginning of the new year. I was hoping for Jan 1, but you know…
• Attend a multi-day photography workshop. This one is mostly a cost issue, but I don’t have a big hardware list at the moment for this year.

I suppose I could go on with other little things I want to finish and do, but those are the bigger ones I guess. I didn’t mention anything about vision. I don’t really know how to set a goal for that one. It will just have to sit there in the background hopefully leading the way.