Fresh paint
I can’t believe the redesign of this site is taking me so long. It has been almost four months since I decided to switch from Movable Type to WordPress – mostly because of the modern widgets, jQuery interfaces and almost limitless options of themes.
Most of that time was spent just getting ready to jump ships…. and now that the switch is under way, things are going exceptionally smoothly. Outside of a few issues with some plugins under PHP5, the new themes and structure of the site are working well so far.
Instead of a growing number of disparate sites, I will be using the following structure for Linfa.net :
- Home – Landing page for the whole site
- Create – Computer graphics resources, photography and portfolio
- Play – Video Games tips, reviews and screenshots
- Work – Sample code, notes related to Knowledge Management, Semantic Web and Information Visualization
- Contact – Social Links and contact information
- Shared – Personal feed of favorite links or videos as I come across them
A separate site will be dedicated to a dynamic resume (CV), with its own URL.
Each sub-site will have its own personality and options adapted to each theme. Now that WordPress is providing a multi-sites option by default,
Leaving the dark side
The time has come to move my computer to greener pastures.
After comparing my experience of MacOS-X on my laptop to my experience of Windows Vista, the choice was clear.
On one hand, almost three years of daily use of my laptop and barely any problem to report. On the other hand, Vista treated me with annoying reminders, slow down on file access and unforgivable issues with handling of large amounts of files.
The majority of applications I am using have a Mac version available. The rest can be handled easily by VMware fusion or even bootcamp for more demanding windows only applications.
When I came to replace my aging desktop, I decided to move to a mostly Mac environment.
After moving my files and my applications to my new and shiny 8-cores Mac Pro, I feel like I have moved to a new house. And from the look of it, this landlord is treating me much better than that Windows guy.
Websites updates
Several updates after upgrading to Movable Type 4.1.
While I am looking into translating existing sites to the new template system, I took a chance to organize my flickr gallery, simplify my main gallery on Linfa.net, several bibliographic references to my resume, clean up the design of koumako.com and catch up with content updates to the Elder Scrolls Trekker.
I also took this occasion to bring the sites under the umbrella of Google Adsense and Google Analytics.
Cheers to our new Google overlords.
MOO cards
My first batch of MOO cards arrived today.
That was fast. About 5 business days total – far below the announced 10. I guess they are giving themselves a marging of operation when they come up with these time estimates.
Quality of the cards is nice. They do feel more like business cards than just printed pieces of paper.
The finish is matte and lack contrast on some images. I will have to remember to compensate for that in the future.
They are quite smaller than regular business cards – hopefully, they will be noticed for that and not get lost too easily.
Self publishing
The refresh of this site is mostly complete. All I need now is the final version of Movable Type 4 to incorporate more dynamic features in a fresh new design. At the rate updates are going on the MT4 website, it will be probably sometimes in the Fall.
In the meantime, I recreated my gallery pages using JAlbum and Simpleviewer. I will look into using more of that great little flash viewer across the site when the updates are complete.
I took that occasion to update my personal photostream, organise pictures into (flickr) sets and even place some photographs on a photo map. Updating the gallery made me rediscover my flickr account and the capabilities for self publishing I completely ignored since I signed up two years ago.
Since Siggraph 2007 is fast approaching, I tested some of these services :
MOO | MiniCards – for sleek, colorful contact cards. They look cute but the company is based in the UK and the service not particularly quick (5 to 10 business days to receive an order).
QOOP business cards – to compare the speed and print quality with a company based in the US. They had more choices of templates and customization available but their format is more traditional.
Zazzle – to print out joint flyers with Crealab (follow the link for a web version of the flyers). They will be printed on the inside of notecards and folded to show both sides at the same time. I am curious to see the result of that project .. especially since they pride themselves with their superior speed (only two business days ?!). They also have a marketplace and a selection of products similar to Cafepress.
Blurb – with their nice desktop tool to compose books, their large selection of templates and their marketplace, they look like an interesting alternative to Photoworks for producing books. I stared working on a first book to test the print quality. It will take a few weeks to finish the content, so there is no rush on that one.
The orders are in… I will update my comments when I receive the final products.
New design
After almost a year without any update, I decided to break the routine and start with a clean up of the site. On the menu : new style, new portfolio page and various tweaks across the site.
This is in prevision of the upgrade to Movable Type 4 in a few months … or whenever the final version becomes available.
Gallery offline
I had to take down the gallery before of high CPU activity on the server it is running on.
Update – I traced the issue to over zealous robots and other spiders, from Google to Majestic 12. It will take a while before they all receive new instructions to stay away from my images via the usual ‘robots’txt’ file. Until then, the gallery will remain protected by password.
You can still view part of the content of the gallery using the links to offsite images from the gallery main page.
New pictures in the gallery
Still in the process of updating the gallery with pictures I want to share online.
I created the Games album for shots taken while traveling through some of my favorite games. Not only they can be as intense as movies or books at times, but some of these games are so visually engaging that taking pictures while playing becomes very similar to taking shots during your latest vacation.
I also created an album for some of my favorite pictures of Masks and updated the Statues section with shots of mortuary art.
Gallery update
I finally found some time to migrate the whole gallery to the Gallery 2.0 system.
This has been going smoothly so far. It is a lot easier now to load new images, create albums, and organize images in general.
I also took this occasion to load photographs, draft 3D images and missing images that have been waiting to go online for a long time.