Web sites will Go Pink during the month of October to bring attention to Breast Cancer Awareness Month, get people talking about breast cancer, and raise money for research.

But to be clear, raising money isn’t the primary purpose of this web event.

The hope is that you turn your site pink (in whatever way works for your site), go out to that World Wide Web thing (in fact you’re on it right now! ) and educate yourself about the multiple issues related to Breast Cancer, then take that newfound knowledge and tell someone else what you’ve learned.

- pinkforoctober.org

Please join me in going Pink for October. I’ve created a K2 style for the occasion, and a plugin to show your support for the event.

325 mg Acetaminophen
10 mg Dextromethorphan HBr
5 mg Phenylephrine HCl

For My Blog

K2.0 theme is in surgery right now for a couple include() corrections

Sorry for the mess Its what I get when I don’t test the waters before diving head first.

http://liulei.name/ is the first blog I know of (besides mine) that is using Evincere. Its kind of exciting! Except that I can’t read anything posted on the blog (without the help of a translator), and it appears that the owner of the blog removed the line at the footer that credits me with its creation (BOOO!)

But Technorati caught the link as a reaction before it was removed.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m quite enjoying it like everyone else and I get giddy when I think about building a completely useless wordpress plugin that lists all the DVD’s I own with meta information from an IMDB API. And I honestly hope the useful things are able to persevere, but things like twitter I see ending in the tears.

In case you didn’t notice, I have a new theme (again). Which is particularly funny to me anyway, because I never even finished the one I was working on in this post. Oh well … This is probably for the best.

In the end, I decided that I didn’t really have the time to build a theme from scratch, it just takes to long. So I went with a pre-built theme by 5thirtyone (Wordpress V2), the same designer that did my brothers theme (Foliage Mod). I’ve made some minor adjustments to it, but probably not enough for anybody to really notice so the credit certainly goes to Derek Punsalan of 5thirtyone

Most notably though, in my opinion anyway, is that I’ve ditched using Gallery2 for managing my pictures and conformed into using Flickr. It means I’ve given up complete control since Flickr isn’t installed on my server, its actually run by Yahoo. But thats both good and bad. again with the “I dont have the time” theme, I don’t have to control Flickr. Also, Flickr seems to have a better API, so I was able to install a Wordpress plugin, FAlbum By Elijah Cornell, that puts all the pictures right on my website without having to fool around. There are a few other really good plugins installed to, but I’ll leave those for another post.

I’m interested to hear what you have to say about the theme, all you have to do is post a comment

I typically get a lot of spam comments here on the blog, its why I have comment approval enabled. But after having to go through and purge over 1,000 comments the other day I decided it was time to get proactive about this problem and I configured the Akismet plugin for Wordpress.

Two days later… I still haven’t had to delete a single spam comment and as of this post Akismet has blocked 17 comments. Granted its still pretty early to draw any serious conclusions, but so far I’m satisfied. I may even be able to loosen my rules on commenting so that the comments you make will show up when you make them, instead of when I realized you made them and approve them.

But the Admin interface is quite diffrent, and especially the page I’m using right now to write up posts. First, I now have a WYSIWYG for doing my composing, also the file upload dialoge is right here instead of on another page making it much easier to upload quick little pics and whatnot.

Few new features here and there, probably a nice list on Wordpress’ homepage http://www.wordpress.org but I’m to lazy to go find it for you.

Anyway, just thought I would note the date I upgraded (even though I did it like 3 days ago and just never posted)

I helped a buddy out over the weekend by building him a phpBB forum and migrating all his data out of the overpriced crap he was using before (ZeroForum). It took up most of my weekend, but I’m pretty happy with how well it went, and I know he’s happy. He went with 1&1 for his hosting and is paying $5 / mo instead of $20. I have some more interesting news about my own 1&1 account, but I’ll bring it up later.

The ZeroForum software is proprietary, so getting data out of it was like pulling teeth. I wasn’t able to migrate users passwords, since I didn’t know what type of encryption was used, but that turned out to not be as big of a deal as I thought, I had the system generate 128 bit random passwords (dont want anybody complaining about my reducing the security of their account!) and just had all the users go though the “I forgot my password” process to have it reset to their liking. Any information I was able to get out of ZeroForum was only in XML files. So my migration process went something like this:

1. Export data from ZeroForum into a series of XML files.
2. Import the XML into an access database to get it usable
3. Dump those tables to an SQL transaction using Bullzip’s Access to MySQL utility (highly recommended)
4. Run the transactions against the MySQL database
5. Write query’s to insert the new data into the phpBB tables doing any data transformation necessary along the way.
6. And finally, touch up the data, do things like encode IP addresses, rebuild the search tables and recount user posts.

The plan is to eventually add photoblogging (using b2evolution or perferable WordPress) and a more professional gallery (Gallery2) that would be for premium members. Right now there is a simple photo album that allows users to post up pictures, but no bigger than 800 pixels on a side and the image gets watermarked with the site logo.

I would encourage you to go take a look at the new site, if you like photography and design you’ll probably find it a great distraction.