Tag: Blog Posts

I haven’t really had much to say on here in a while. Other than maybe a camping trip this weekend, and WordCamp San Francisco at the end of the month, the next six weeks or so are pretty booked up solid with some client projects. After that I’m going to take a bit of a break for the summer and do some camping or maybe even head over to Europe to visit some friends. So on that note, I’m going to take a break from traditional blog posts and do a week or so worth of photo entries. Comment if you like, don’t comment if you like 🙂 But enjoy!

As you can see, I changed my theme around a bit tonight. I actually had something different going a few days ago, but decided to abandon it and go a slightly different route. I’m still tweaking the colors a bit and going through my old content and cleaning it up, but most of the functionality is here now. If you hit anything that’s broken, please let me know.

Raul *finally* moved off of WordPress.com, and has a shiny new self-hosted one up at HummingBird604.com. Make sure you swing on by and take a look.

As most of you know, I really enjoy photography. I have been fortunate enough to have received a bit of recognition for some of the shots I’ve done, and even managed to attend the 2008 Canadian Juno Awards as a photographer. I thought I’d post a few of my favourite shots here for those that are new here. Most of these shots make use of a technique called high dynamic range (HDR) photography. This entry was written for Blogathon 2008, and in support of the Union Gospel Mission charity. If you’d like to donate to the cause, please visit the blogathon donation page and fill out the form near the middle. You can also follow the blogathon RSS feed for this site by clicking here.

For those of you who actually come to my site from time to time, you’ll have undoubtedly noticed my little counter in the right corner of the sidebar. What that tracks is how long my website has been active in the corner of my living room. If you’re on a paid hosting account, fire me off an email whenever your server goes down so I can keep track against how mine’s doing. So far I’m at 17 days straight without any downtime. If you check out Media Temple’s status blog, you can see that they’ve had 50 minutes of outage during the last three days. Based on their own blog entries, they are running at 99.7% uptime (although based on the outages I experienced and their duration, I think it’s actually worse than that).

Up until about a year ago, I used to comment entirely using the name “Duane”. There wasn’t really any big motivation for doing so, it was simply something I was used to doing from my old IRC chats. At one point though, I realized that it seemed a bit weird leaving big, technical comments on web-sites but not having my name associated with them. At the bare minimum, it felt like it lessened the impact of what I wrote if I use only my first name, or if used an alias. After a year of going by “Duane Storey” pretty much everywhere I write or comment, I can say that without a doubt it’s led to an increase in my online credibility, with people seeking me out specifically because they had something to say to me. Plus, it’s led to people remembering things I’ve said in the past, which generally […]

After setting up my RAID 5 array last night, I decided that maybe I would take a stab at self hosting my blog again. Up until two years ago, I had always run my blog from home. It’s not really that hard to set up your own Apache server, and Linux can literally run for months or more without requiring a reboot. The downside of course is that home internet connections can be flaky, and most co-locations and hosting companies have UPS backup when things go wrong. I recently upgraded my home fiber internet connection to a small business plan, so my internet connection at home is actually fairly insane — I get 10mbps symmetric bandwidth, along with 140 GB of transfer each month. That’s some serious shit. I used to be on HostMonster, but recently switched over to Media Temple. Unfortunately, I haven’t been very thrilled with the service […]

I spent most of the last hour on the couch, just thinking by candlelight. It was a nice break from the norm, having a dark apartment sans the sound of computer fans spinning or other randomness that goes beep in the night. Looking out my window, it’s hard to tell just how many people participated. It seems slightly darker than normal I guess, but for the most part it looks like business as usual in this city. For those of you who missed it, I took my site down for a few hours in support of the event. Here’s a snapshot Rebecca took: And lastly, I just want to mention that WordPress 2.5 was just released, so if you’re looking for an upgrade, now’s a good time (and in fact, many of you are running less than 2.3.3, which is a very bad idea since those versions are totally hackable). […]

Today I took the plunge and quickly upgraded my WordPress installation from 2.3.3 to the Beta for 2.5. In terms of look and feel on the front-end, I doubt you’ll notice any major changes (especially on sites where you don’t have to login). However, they’ve completely overhauled the administration section in the back to make things a little easier to find. I’m not going to really review it, because in all fairness it’s not quite done yet. However, the back end does seem a bit slower, maybe due to the new additions. Also, I have been completely unable to add media using the new interface. It either locks up or finishes uploading but refuses to add the link to the post data. I imagine this is one of the things they are still working on fixing. WordPress 2.5 Dashboard I like the overall look and feel of the back-end compared […]

As some of you know, last year I went from having my blog hosted on GoDaddy to using shared hosting services over at HostMonster (and before that, I went from having a Linux box on the floor of my bedroom to GoDaddy). Shared hosting is a fairly cheap way to set up a website, and you can usually get away with it for less than $10/mo. For the most part, I was pretty happy with HostMonster shared hosting, although in these last few months their databases kept falling over, and I had intermittent connection problems. To their credit though, they always answered the phone and fixed everything in a timely manner. Media Temple’s iPhone Account Center That being said, I’m going to try someone new this time. I asked a few people who they use, and a couple people recommended the next step which is shared computing on a grid […]