Indemnity83

Around June I inherited a new server, substantially more powerful than the previous (although still second hand). At the same time I’ve decided to move away from Linux hosting and into Windows hosting. I wanted a challenge; to be able to run the same sites, with the same features I was running in Debian with Apache on Windows with IIS and overall its been very successful.

What I failed miserably at was moving my own personal blog (this site). Until about an hour ago I just had a placeholder up. I actually only had two people mention to me that the site was down, so that’s a pretty good sign of how few people visit regularly and my lack of ambition in getting it moved over but this morning my friend Liz said she needed something from the site but couldn’t tell me what, so I took an hour or so and get everything migrated over. Just in time to start up a new set of ‘Flavors of The Holidays‘.

© Zevotron

For the next few weeks, expect this site to be a little messy. I’ve you’re a previous visitor, you’ve likely noticed that I’ve re-done the site! This is pretty exciting for me, as it seems to be the thing I enjoy doing most of the site anyway, but the new design is a big departure from the previous theme, and some of the content was written and formatted to fit in the old design. You’ll probably notice this most with large pictures, not quite filling the width of the post.

I’ve done some minor testing and everything seems to be functional, but I’ll be going through all the content and rebuilding things for the new design. Until then, if you notice a problem just post a comment about it and I’ll try to get to it.

Some of the cooler features (that are ready anyway) are the large image views and galleries, click on the image below to get the full description and details.

© Ben Matthews

© Perturbao

© Seier+Seier

Just thought I would let everybody know.

I think I’ve spent more time changing this site that adding content. Most notably, I seem to flip flop form light to dark.

As is always the case, there are things that need to be tweaked to get them working right. I’m liking* the concise front page though.

Anyway. I just wanted to post something up since its been a long time and I didn’t want you to think you’ve gotten lost in somebody else’s site.

_{*Subject to change without notice}

And I apologies for that, just had a lot of other distractions as of late.

For Me:

• 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.

Yes, I changed the theme again … no, I don’t like it either….

It’ll be changing again soon . In the mean time, sorry for the mess

For those that have never heard of it. The Wayback Machine (now part of Archive.org) is a service that crawls the web, and makes archival copies of websites, providing really cool peeks into the history of a domain. Below are screen shots of my blog as it progressed from the first vanilla version of WordPress into what it is now. The oldest version is on top.

[fa:p:a=website-history,id=1331799451,j=l,s=t,l=p]December 16, 2005. My blog as it first appeared in an almost completely vanilla WordPress Kubrick theme. Click here to be taken to the first post I made to my blog.

[fa:p:a=website-history,id=1331799579,j=l,s=t,l=p]April 27, 2006. The second theme of my blog. I can’t take credit for this theme. I was using a slightly modified version of Simpla by Phu Ly. I guess I never made a post when I changed to this theme.

[fa:p:a=website-history,id=1331799763,j=l,s=t,l=p]February 6th, 2007 Version three of Indemnity83.com. This theme was my design, sorta. I was trying to combine a forum, wiki, blog and gallery into one site with a single theme. The theme is a clone of the Mozilla Developer Center of the same time. It didn’t last long, as I didn’t have enough content to fill the site, and the theme had to many bugs. Related blog post.

[fa:p:a=website-history,id=1332775372,j=l,s=t,l=p]April 22nd, 2007 Version 4 of my blog www.indemnity83.com . Again, a modified version of an existing theme. This one started as Derek Punsalan’s 5ThirtyOne V2 theme. Related blog post.

[fa:p:a=blog-images,id=468655827,j=l,s=s,l=p]Yeah, so….

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

Dont ask me how to pronouce it, or even what it means. But it sure does seem to do the job.

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.