In WordPress, you can write either posts or pages. When you’re writing a regular blog entry, you write a post. Posts automatically appear in reverse chronological order on your blog’s home page. Pages, on the other hand, are for content such as “About Me,” “Contact Me,” etc. Pages live outside of the normal blog chronology, and are often used to present information about yourself or your site that is somehow timeless — information that is always applicable. You can use Pages to organize and manage any amount of content.

- http://codex.wordpress.org/Pages

I need pages for the different initiatives of the club – for example, the Pray for our Priests car magnets or the Monthly Prayer Request for Priests. I don’t want people visiting the site to see “Pray for our Priests” magnets as a blog post that happened in May 2008; I want them to see that it’s an ongoing initiative from the club.

• Custom CSS for multiple page types – monthly archives, tag archives, pages, and so on.
• A search box that appears in the upper right of every page, not to mention customized search results using WordPress’ search engines. An interesting exercise in information architecture (to think about what users want to see in search results), PHP coding, and CSS.
• Search Engine Optimization through Google sitemaps and Feedburner. When I write new content on the site, the site actively pushes the content out to various news feeds on the Internet.
• Web traffic analysis through Google Analytics.
• I’m still getting the hang of the WordPress engine that powers the site, but so far it’s suitable for my content management needs.
• An About the Site page to track meta-information about the site, such as upgrades or the site’s purpose in fulfilling the mission of Serra Boston. I took the idea from the MoMA site, which collects all the site’s information (awards, credits, etc) in a single link at the bottom.
• Setting up a development environment (as a sandbox to play around in) and a staging environment (to preview the site before it’s pushed live), so that edits have minimal impact on the live site.
• To be released soon: category and archive listings in the right sidebar. The picture of Blessed Junipero Serra was put there to fill in the white space, but could be replaced by more useful content.

The site is shaping up nicely, but is due for an overhaul. I’ve been patching on different elements as necessary (for example, the CSS used to control the search box) but there have been enough updates to warrant

My workspace seemed kind of quiet, and I debated bringing my laptop upstairs to finish watching the movie. Usually I have the TV going in the background, and sit in front of it with my laptop while coding and checking e-mail.

It then occurred to me that with my new Mac and new Mac screen, there was space enough to pop in the DVD and tuck it into a corner of the workspace.

Marketers have come up with the idea of a “third screen” – the idea that movies are the first, TV is the second, and other screens (like cell phones and other mobile devices) are the third. With much more real estate for my computer screen, it’s easy to fill with multiple media – admin screens for WordPress, the actual site, coding in Dreamweaver.

I actually started using it with YouTube, catching up on the full seasons of “Spaced” via the Internet. Seems like a logical extension to pull shows and movies off of NBC.com, iTunes, and Bittorrent.

We’ll see how the third screen affects my productivity.

Prior to owning a GPS, I would think through a trip, print out dozens of Google Maps with directions, and read the printouts in the car while driving to my destination.  Now, instead of relying on potentially inaccurate or hard-to-interpret Google Maps, I can just type the address in Garmin and let it call out directions.

Best of all, if I go slightly off-track, Garmin starts directing me back towards my destination.  One wrong turn results in a slight detour, rather than a disastrous series of U-turns and three-points.  It also calculates the arrival time, giving me a clear (and pretty accurate) sense of when I’m going to arrive.

The 260W seems to be the best model. The more recent models have MP3 players and FM traffic updates, but why would I want a MP3 player in my GPS when I have an iPod?

The best thing about the Garmin is that anywhere I am (well, in North America) I know where I am and where I’m going.   There’s a certain peace of mind to never feeling lost while driving again.

The odd thing was that I hadn’t enabled this feature or added an app. Fandango and Facebook had taken the initiative and chosen to talk to each other without my permission. It was also a bit odd to think that my online activities were being tracked to the piont where my Facebook friends could see what movies I’d purchased tickets to.

I investigated on Facebook, and found that you can change the privacy settings of this feature to have Facebook notify you before posting your purchase to your news feed. I chose to OK it, just to see what the posting would look like.

Strange to think that my various online profiles are sharing information about my behind my back.

After a while it’s not even research or stuff I have to do – there becomes something comforting in typing, clicking of the keyboard, pointing with the mouse, and seeing various colored pixels wash over the screen.  Flickr and YouTube for visuals, MySpace and Facebook for brief snippets of friends’ lives and photos.  It’s like drinking a coffee with a lot of sugar; I know it’s not substantial or necessarily good for me, but it gives me a little rush during the day.

For a while there, I had gotten into the habit of reading a book in the evenings, so that my rush of information wouldn’t keep me up at night.  Even now I’m typing this a bit late at night; I’ll get back to my book after finishing up with a few blog posts and YouTube searches.

I can see it’s Alfred Molina, and I can see it’s not a human, but I’m not as creeped out by his face. I do think the eye twitches and blinks help sell the reality of the face.

It looks like the Uncanny Valley (the idea that at a certain point, a fully lifelike robot gets incredibly creepy) is getting shallower.

What’s next – Today’s Special? Tranzor Z? Starblazers?

This opens up whole new possibilities for iTunes – selling classic TV for nostalgic Gen X’ers and beyond. Relive the Saturday Mornings of your childhood, at only $2 a download.

Late this evening my mom pointed out that you could only see a small square image if you clicked on a photo.  So instead of seeing the big photo (shown at bottom), you’d see the small photo (shown below).

  

Not good, and Gallery offers little support for small problems like this.  I found a solution so I figured I’d share it here.

I began by Googling “gallery menalto thumbnail” and came up with this page:

Not sure if this is a feature or a bug, so I’m posting here

If you set the permissions on a gallery such that guests can only see the resized images, and the original image is smaller than the resize limit, then when the guest clicks on the thumbnail, they only get to see the thumbnail again, rather than the larger image. E.g. if the resized file is max 800 x 800, and the original image is 640 x 480, then the 640×480 image can never be seen by the guest – only the thumbnail.

http://gallery.menalto.com/node/42042

So, I knew it had to do something with the “resized images.”  I now thought, “WTF are resized images???”  There’s little to no documentation on what they are, but playing around with the Gallery admin form showed that you could see the original image was still there, but “guests” (i.e. people not logged in) could only see the thumbnail view.  So clearly there had to be some setting that would let guests see the original image.

With Gallery, you can set permissions on individual images or on an album.  As it turns out, you need to follow a ridiculously non-intuitive series of clicks to fix the problem.  The steps I took were:

1. Log in and go to the album with the “thumbnail” issue.
2. Click on “Edit Permissions.”
3. Click on “Remove” to the right of “View resized version(s).”
4. Scroll down below ‘New Group Permissions.”  Click in the text box, type “Everybody,” and select “[core] View original version”.  Click “Add Permission” to add this permission to the album

Basically what this does is let “Everyone” (i.e. all guests, who aren’t logged in) to view the original image.  For some reason, this fixes the problem.

I’m really liking Drupal. It started as a way for me to organize my portfolio, but now I’d like to convert my whole site (including this WordPress blog) over.  Best to convert things now, before I get so many posts on WordPress that the conversion becomes a big project.

Next big step: picking a theme.  Foundation seems to be the easiest to set up and modify, although it requires the most work to design.  Still, I think a somewhat original design helps sell my design skills more than a prebuilt theme.

For now, I’m going to focus on the content of the site – at this point, having actual content that explains my projects is more important than worrying about the style.  The content can always be styled later.