Site migration in the future…
…I’m working on a new version of the site, the problem is I have built so much into this site, with tens of categories and hundreds of posts, I don’t want to loose anything that I have written. I know some of what I have built already will be lost but I am just getting tired of Drupal. It’s a great system, don’t get me wrong, but I am in need of something that is more user friendly and built for smaller blogs and not a HUGE content management system like Drupal.
I LOVE Drupal, so this will be hard for me to do even though I know it needs to be done. I can’t spend the time managing the site in it’s current form any longer and WordPress (yes, my previously most hated system) has grown to the point where it’s exactly fitting the bill of what I need. It’s easy to install new modules and keep your system up to date. It already has Askimet (actually Askimet was written for WordPress) so I won’t have to deal with SPAM and I will be able to do the multimedia presentations that I want to be able to out of the box without having to add many modules that don’t always play well with each other and install them from scratch as with Drupal.
I will keep the new site in azbay.net/azbay for now, when it’s ready to go live I will move it to the base azbay.net (I’m posting this if you want to take a look). Once I have the categories and posts moved, I’ll probably archive the old site and drop it.
So what can you look for in the new site that the old one doesn’t have? Pictures in RSS feeds, as well as audio, in other words podcasts. I haven’t had a large want or need for podcasting previous to this but I would like to be able to put together an easy way to distribute movies of Sean and things like that, so a podcast an iTunes is a perfect way to get movies out there if people want to watch (yes I know about youtube, I also know youtube doesn’t allow HD content!)
So keep your eyes on the site. It’s going to change greatly in the next few weeks. And don’t be surprised if it drops off the face of the earth now and then.
What’s new?
So what’s new? Nothing much, getting used to baby, and that’s a hard one. Not that I would give him up for the world, but he’s definitely needy. I feel like I’ve really been neglecting contacting people and whatnot but it’s hard when you have a newborn, work and life in the way of everything. So if I haven’t e-mailed in a while or given you a call it’s not hate in my heart, just missing the free time I had before.
Other than that not much is going on. I have a few more pictures up at our fam site http://azbay.net but not a lot of recent ones yet (bad daddy). I hope to have some more this weekend, really all I’ve added to Sean’s pictures now are the ones I’ve received from Ben and Mom and Dad from around his birth. More to come I promise.
Other than that, not much to report. I guess I’ve found a new love for Twitter, it’s kinda like SMS messaging because it’s only 140 characters, and kinda like IM, but also like blogging. You can post little tidbits about yourself and your friends and watch what they’re saying as well, it’s pretty cool. So check it out and you can find me using the name nochiefs, as I do with many sites.
L8r 
One more ultrasound…
…well Jen and I are going in on April 3 for the final ultrasound for the baby. At this point I’m really wondering why they’re having us do so many. The excuse this time is a followup on our Level 2 ultrasound that we did a couple weeks ago to take one more look at the heart. I am starting to question the need for all these looks, and have come to the conclusion that because the people doing the work know our insurance will cover every penny of the cost of prenatal care, well why not help pay for their pretty new machine that does 3D ultrasounds, blah, blah.
I just want to know if it will have any effect on the child at all. I’ve been reading about Autism lately and one of the hypothesized causes is ultrasounds. In fact the lack of actual lack of studies between ultrasounds and their effects on unborn children has been described as “appalling”. Something utilized so much by the doctors tasked with the care of our unborn children as unstudied enough to be described as appalling by anyone, let alone a Dr. in the field, is scary to say the least. I still think medicine is much more art and luck than science.
Hopefully nothing wrong with the ultrasound, hopefully nothing they show is out of the ordinary, hopefully I’m just being paranoid again. I guess time will tell.
Blackberry Pearl 8130…
…I recently upgraded my Blackberry from the 8703e to the 8130 Pearl. I’ve been a huge fan of the Blackberry since I first received my 8703e a couple years ago, and I really liked the 8703e because of it’s large screen and full QWERTY keyboard, so when the opportunity to upgrade came about I wasn’t sure if I should go with the straight upgrade to my 8703e which is the 8830 or the smaller and more media oriented 8130. There were two downsides to the 8130 which I’ll address one at a time; first the smaller screen, and this issue was definitely a big one. I really liked the large screen that the 8703 sported but when I started checking into the specs for the Pearl I found that though the screen is smaller in size the resolution is still fairly high. Yes you’re still giving up some screen real estate but because of the high resolution the screen is extremely easy to read, and there’s still a lot of info there at one time.
The second issue is caused again by the Pearl’s small size, to save on space RIM went with a QWERTY layout but two letters per key. So you loose some of the ease in typing… or so you would think. To help out with the obvious problems presented by adding two letters to one key, RIM came up with a system called SureType to help out with figuring out what you’re intending to type. The system is remarkably intelligent, it comes with a dictionary that will work for most people out of the box, and for those in law or medicine there are addible dictionaries for specific terms to those areas (as well as many languages other than english). Not only does the system support this static dictionary but it also learns from words you type that it doesn’t know already, names in your address book, and text from all your messages (or messages from specific lists of senders if you get spam on your Blackberry). I was not at all looking forward to learning a new typing system, let alone working with the smaller keyboard. I was, to put it lightly, highly impressed with the keyboard and how quickly you could type. After about a day or two typing on the SureType I was able to enter text faster than on my full QWERTY 8703, yes I was actually able to type faster. It seems that the predictive text and my thumbs being much closer together actually makes it easier to type quickly than with the full QWERTY keyboard, go figure. Read more »
Oh man what a day…
…sitting here enjoying CSI, glad to be home from work. What a day. Anyway, I did make a new discovery today with a little help from one of my brother’s-in-law. It’s a site called Pulse. It’s a really awesome site that aggregates all those various social networking sites (aka LinkedIn, MySpace, Facebook) as well as personal blogs, Twitter, picture sites (flickr, picasa) all in one spot. You can keep in touch with your friends in any of those areas as well as Pulse connections from a single spot instead of having to use multiple sites.
I’ve heard tell that Yahoo! is going to have something similar coming out soon, the only difference is Yahoo! will be a software program, not a web page. The nice thing is Yahoo! is rumored to have a version that will run on my Blackberry. So I guess the day wasn’t a total loss 
One last complaint…
…and I’m done for the day. So you’re aware I’m working with the beta ecto and I have a complaint to voice. Guess what? It’s nothing to do with ecto (I think?) but Drupal. So here’s a blog flogging for Drupal’s Technorati module. Why when I post with ecto does some technorati tag called array always pop up? I haven’t figured it out yet. I have no freaking idea actually.
I never add tags aside from the categories that I choose so maybe I need to reconfigure. We’ll check.
More test posts to come.
Yea, it works.
So as you can see below it actually worked. You really have no idea how long I’ve wanted the functionality of adding images to my posts. It’s not really that hard either (I used to do it with my old geeklog powered blog, now we’re talking oldschool).
Anyway, enough of the really useless posting. Although I must say I’m pretty proud to have an ultrasound of my son flipping me off. How many of you out there can say that you have a picture of your child doing something like that in the womb? LOL!
Peace… …out!
First try with flickr.com integration…
…ok, so ecto 3 has integration with flikr.com. What does this mean? It means that I should be able to include photo’s in my posts like I’ve wanted to for sooooo long. So without adieu, here’s my son, giving us the bird in the womb (yes, we now know he’s a Chandler!).
That tiny little arm is indeed in a tiny fist with “The Finger” up. Now how’s that for learning quick how to let people know you’re not photo ready?
ecto 3
Finally, a new version of ecto, well a beta at least. I’m currently typing this on the new beta 3 of ecto. Some of the new features? 3rd party add-ons which should allow for highly customized posting. A new Leopard UI that really follows the Apple human interface guidelines, or at least attempts to (the older versions didn’t at all).
There are already some cool tools out for it as well, that I’ve been wanting for a while in my blogging experience. One example is the ease with which you can add flickr.com content to posts. I suppose I could setup something that would allow me to add pictures from my own gallery to the posts, which I will work on, I just don’t feel like coding right now and this works. I would really like drag and drop image addition to my blog posts but that never seems to work for me with ecto (I believe it’s the Drupal implementation of the xml-rpc, basically the method by which ecto posts the stories to Drupal). I’m not sure Drupal uses a fully complaint version of the xml-rpc, but who knows.
Anyway, here’s the first post with ecto 3. More to come!
Why I hate Internet Explorer…
…wow, let me count the ways! I could actually go on and on all day about IE and why I hate it. The lack of features is enough to really turn me off the product, but when I was admiring the new theme for the site today, using Safari 3 of course, I noticed how really nice the site looks. The theme itself validates XHTML 1.0 Strict, although my site doesn’t because of some poor programming in a few of the modules I use (I hope to rectify this soon). So it should look basically the same on all browsers, but of course it doesn’t. Why does it look good in Safari? I’m no web expert but it would have to do with the rendering engine that Safari uses (based on KDE’s Konquerer I believe). I know my site looks fine on Safari, Firefox, and the large number of Linux browsers (like Konquerer) but really looks like crap on IE. One thing I’ve noticed is that IE apparently doesn’t do any font anti-aliasing. The edges of the font’s in the page title and whatnot are all choppy on IE and again perfectly smooth in Safari. It’s really annoying as I’m trying to make the site viewable on mobile devices (and not Opera Mini, just the Blackberry Browser) and rather than using multiple logo images I really wanted to stick with CSS and a nice rendered font on the top, and that’s what I’m going to do, IE be damned. So I guess if you’re using IE and you don’t like the way my site looks (or for the poor web developers out there who have to code sites umpteen different ways just so they look good in IE and other COMPLIANT browsers) switch to Firefox, maybe when IE looses market share to the point that it should (it’s a piece of crap people), they’ll re-code and make it a quick, standards compliant browser instead of the slow featureless behemoth it is now. </rant> (End rant for non geeks!)
