ThinkSoJoE's Thoughts

I've got a complaint.  I did a lot of work trying to make the perfect Twitter background - but then I found out that I can't center the background, only left align.  Since the content on Twitter is center aligned, it doesn't bode well for predictability with browser size.  Anyways, take a look at this and follow me on twitter @thinksojoe!

I was listening to my last.fm stream this morning, and I decided to put a stream of my most recently listened to songs into the sidebar of this site.  I also moved the twitter stream up above the digg stream.  I intend to establish more of a presence on twitter in 2010, including figuring out some way to get this blog to auto-post links to the world's most famous microblogging service.

Now if only I could get myself inspired to do any of the work that I need to do on several of my other sites.  I own no less than three urls with absolute zero content on them at the moment, which is something that I want to take care of.  They'll all be Fropac Entertainment Network sites, so I'll be doing a lot of work on re-branding the company.  I'm not in the mood for that right now though.  I haven't gotten my Christmas shopping done and it's 10:30 AM on December 23rd.  Realistically, I've only got a few more things to buy, and I know what they're going to be, it's just an issue of getting paid and getting to the store.

If I don't post here again in the next 48 hours or so, Happy Holidays and don't forget the Mythbusters Marathon on Discovery Christmas day!

I finally took the time to re-build my photo gallery here on ThinkSoJoE's Thoughts.  I'd been considering going with something like Gallery2 or Coppermine to do it, but I didn't really want the amount of files that go into those programs cluttering up my server, and the fact that I'd still have to have individual files for all of the images in the gallery didn't help matters either.  On the new server, I have a limit of 250,000 files (which is way more than I would probably ever need, but still), so I'm more picky about what I have running on here.

The desire to avoid large photo gallery systems left me pondering how to handle the gallery.  Finally, I read an article from one of my favorite design blogs, 24 Ways, that talked about using the web as a CMS.  The first thing mentioned in the article is that Flickr can be used to store terabytes worth of photos, and will automatically generate different sizes and allow you to edit them online. While I didn't go on to use the Yahoo Query Language as discussed in the article, I did decide to use the Flickr API for my photo gallery.  It took a while to figure out, but I found a tutorial that helped me learn how to properly implement it, and as you can see, it works great and integrates well with my blog.

The next step for this site will be to re-do my portfolio, and then, since all of my gear is finally in one place, I'll take pictures and re-do the "gear" section.  Hooray for productivity!

This blog was actually the easiest site to move over from DreamHost so far.  Probably because I built it from scratch and knew exactly where to look to make changes to the database structure.  I haven't noticed any bugs here, but I'll keep my eye out...

When I log into my DreamHost web panel, I'm always told that I've been a member since April, 2006.  For nearly four years, Fropac Entertainment has been exclusively using DreamHost to serve up our family of websites including BoredWrestlingFan.com and stupid5pin.com.  Unfortunately, we've had a few issues with down time recently, and after a lot of thought, we've decided to switch to another company.

I'd like to take the opportunity to thank DreamHost and their great customer support team for hosting us for the past four years, and I'd like to make it known that this was a very hard decision to make.  If things don't work out with our new hosts, we may come back.  Only time will tell.