Meanderings in Blogland

The vast international conspiracy to make lots of really stupid projects for me that I can’t bill to anyone goes into warpdrive…

My usually reliable web host, Verve Hosting, had the bright idea to upgrade their servers. They sent me a note about it, with some of the things I should look out for.

If you are using custom nameservers (nameservers based on one of your domain names) you will need to update the IP addresses for those nameservers.

PHP will be configured with suphp on the new server. This will eliminate the need for permissions of 777 on files/folders that need write access by the webserver. Once all of the sites are moved I wil run a command that will change the permissions of all php files to 644 and all folders to 755. With suphp, any files or folders with permissions of 777 will generate an error message on your website.

Certain php options, for example php_flag or php_value directives, will need to be moved from .htaccess files to the website’s php.ini file.

Outdated applications may not work with the newer version of PHP so please make sure your apps like Joomla, Drupal, Mambo, etc. are updated with the latest version of the software.

The new server uses a different IMAP/POP3 mailserver. For POP3 accounts that leave a copy of read messages on the server, the new server will see these as unread, which will cause your mail app to download the messages again. Unfortunately, there is no way to prevent this. It will only happen for people who leave a copy of their messages on the server, and it will only happen the first time you check your email on the new server.

The migration of websites to the new server will begin at 12:00 a.m on Saturday, October 15th. The migration is expected to be completed by midnight on Sunday, October 16th. The old host1 server will remain online and be accessible until November 14th.

Oh, boy. I’ve got almost thirty sites on that server, and they’re promising various sundry incomprehesible discombobulations. The changeover happened. One of my sites immediately went down entirely. It was one that another developer had started, and I’d taken over. While it uses PHP throughout, the pages all have the .html extension. The changeover messed up the .htaccess file which told the server to treat .html files as .php. The only solution I could conjure up to get that site back online quickly was to rename every single page on the site and change the links within the site. Pooptastic.

I still haven’t figured out how to get the upload scripts in my various WordPress installs to work in this configuration. Actually, that’s one reason for writing this post. Does the upload script work for this, newly updated WP install? I’ll try to upload a new photo:

looking WSW from Mt. Lassic

Well that’s interesting. It doesn’t work on the blogs people actually read. What’s different about this one?

And then, just when I thought I was more or less through the trauma of server upgrades, the same client with the .html – .php problem contacted me. His blog was kaput. All it produced was a database connection error. I tried to login to his control panel. The login didn’t work. I tried to login to my main control panel, to get into his (I have a reseller account). Didn’t work. A quick, panicked scan of the various sites on that server revealed a strange mix of OK sites and database problems. And no way to connect to any of the control panels.

I contacted Verve’s support. They got back to me quickly. Someone had hacked into my account, gotten into some of the sub-accounts, and sent a bunch of spam. I needed to change my master password. I did that. Still couldn’t login. Back and forth with support. Many times. Eventually, after banging my head against the wall all day, I managed to get the relevant passwords changed and logins working and get back to where I thought I was already.

One advantage of payroll jobs over self employment: when crap like that happens when you’re on a payroll, you get paid for your time. When crap like that happens and you’re self-employed, who ya gonna bill?

I don’t usually pay much attention to the ads on my gmail account, but this one caught my eye. And blew my mind.

Keep “Hanoi Jane” off TV

Sign Petition to keep Hanoi Jane off this major TV network!

www.moveamericaforward.org

Nothing says “move America forward” better than wallowing in some forty-year-old, stupid political theatre from a movie star.

Samuel Oliver Bereman, my mother’s father’s mother’s father, left a journal of his adventures in the Civil War. I’ve had “plans” for some time to do a video blog project, following his journal through the South, visiting battle sites, interviewing historians, and profoundly ruminating. Eventually, I’d take the vlog footage and condense it into a two hour movie that I could sell, take to film festivals, etc. Next time I have a few thousand spare bucks and a couple of spare months… oh, well.

While my snarky family members generally refer to him by his initials, family letters refer to him as “Ol”, short for Oliver, his middle name, contrasting with his father, Samuel Emerson Bereman. I’ll use Ol here.

Anyway, a year or two ago, a bunch of my extended family members got together; I was unable to attend. A box was put aside for me with a bunch of Bereman stuff and miscellaneous tidbits from other branches of the family. Among these papers was Ol’s papers documenting his promotions and his discharge from the military after the war. It seemed like these were cool enough to throw up on the web and see if anybody cares.

Ol’s promotion to Sergeant

Ol’s promotion to First Sergeant

Ol’s discharge

There are a number of interesting documents in this box, including newspaper clippings of the deaths of several Bereman cousins and some personal letters. I’ll try to post a bunch of them as time permits.

Sometimes the magic works, and sometimes it doesn’t. I’ve been experimenting with WordPress plugins which connect to Facebook. My first effort was something called Simple Facebook Connect. That one’s a frightful misnomer. If there were any justice in the world, they wouldn’t be allowed to use the word “simple” in the title. In order to use the thing and it’s allegedly fantabulous functionality, one must create a special Facebook App. Fifty-seven WTFs and sixty-three huhs? later, I managed to create an app (or at least I thought I did) and copied and pasted the long strings of jibberish into the correct (?) places. I activated several of the features, and voila! Nothing happened. No FB anything anywhere. I have no idea what went wrong or how to troubleshoot the thing. Somewhere along the way, I even lost track of what I was trying to do exactly. So I gave up on that one, and tried some other plugins.

Next up was the WordPress Facebook Like Plugin. Now that one is simple. It just took a few seconds to download, install, and activate. Now I have like buttons on all the posts that nobody ever reads.

Now, the newest of the bunch: Embed Facebook. Their description says:

Embed Facebook lets you embed various Facebook objects (album, event, group, note, photo, or video) in a post or page. You just need to paste the URL of a Facebook object anywhere in a post or page, the plugin will automatically embed it for you.

Sounds good. I’ve downloaded and installed it, so here’s a test. Here’s a gallery from my new artist page:

http://www.facebook.com/media/set/fbx/?set=a.179823632069443.55989.178206532231153

And here’s the artist page itself:

Garth Hagerman Photo & Video
Artist  |  fans  |  View on Facebook

One reason I’m broke all of the time is I spend an awful lot of unbillable time learning new stuff and re-learning not-so-new stuff that I don’t use enough to keep fresh in my crowded little brain.

Case in point: Facebook. I started an FB account a year or so ago, largely so I could figure out how to do stuff for a client. I fiddled with it a bit, solved the immediate problem, and moved on… I thought. It didn’t grab me as being immediately useful or profitable for my own stuff. But old friends started tracking me down, I linked my YouTube account to my FB account, I started posting some photos, I started getting some photo fans, and so forth.

Gradually, I began to realize the power of the giant monster that is Facebook. I realized that several of my other clients should at least have “like” buttons on their sites, even if they don’t want to set up their own business FB pages. So, I went to work figuring out how to use some of the FB widgets, and incorporating them into existing database-driven sites. That was pretty simple once I figured out what the bleep I was doing. But figuring the bleep out took a while. So, it wound up being a total of a couple of billable hours spread around three different clients, and eight or so hours of banging my head on blunt objects.

Today, I started work on a new client’s site. She wants a WordPress site (this is a WP blog) with built in FB functionality connecting to her event’s FB page. Seemed simple enough in the abstract. But, it’s a whole new can of worms, learning-curve-wise. In order to do her site as a credible professional, I have to figure out how to use a new set of tools, using my own WP blog and my brand spanking new FB artist page (Garth Hagerman Photo & Video) as guinea pigs.

So, first I had to start the FB Artist page, then update my blog so it’s running the current version of WP. Next, I install the FB plugins.

At least I get to put some time into promoting my photo stuff.

I want to go camping for weeks and months on end; I want to garden.

I don’t want to bother with money; I don’t want to design my life around money; I want to have enough money.

I want to travel; I want to put down roots.

I want to arise and photograph the dawn; I want to snooze comfortably ’til ten.

I want to march vigorously all day; I want to sip pina coladas at poolside—no, scratch that—I want to sip single malt scotch from a stainless steel flask at lakeside.

I want to live on the cutting edge; I want to be a curmudgeonly fart.

I want to live simply; I want the latest and greatest tech toys.

I crave solitude; I need others.

I want to live forever; when it’s over, I’ll want to have lived.

I want flavor; I want health.

I strive for clarity and simplicity; I revel in contradictions and paradox.

I really don’t know what to do with the data life hands me sometimes. A coupla weeks ago I finished the run of a play. I was acting as Marley, and half a dozen minor roles, in a one-hour adaptation of A Christmas Carol at the Mendocino Theatre Company. It was a smashing success. Why?

I’ve done many shows at MTC. I’ve acted, I’ve stage managed, I’ve directed, etcetera, so forth, and so on. The typical MTC production goes something like this: A bunch of people toil away for months (for little or no pay), trying to squeeze every subtle, meaningful nuance out of an excellent script. The show opens. About twenty or so people a night show up. They yawn. They clap politely at the end, then they promptly forget about the whole thing.

This production started as a staged reading. We’ve always known that Christmas shows are great from a marketing standpoint, but they’re tough to pull off, as everybody is already tooo busy during the holiday season. But people should be able to make time to fling together a staged reading.

The staged reading thing turned into a cartoon snowball rolling down a mountain. We got a pianist. We got cute kids to sing songs to open the show. We choreographed a little dance number. We got nice costumes. We got an elegant lighting design. We learned our lines.

Once the show opened, we has a little show that was… I don’t know… elegant? meaningful?

Whatever it was, it did well at the box office, pretty much selling out nearly all the shows. And people seemed genuinely moved by it, too. But what were the keys to its success? The familiar story? Dickensian magic? The lean, condensed adaptation? The acting?

What lessons is MTC supposed to draw from the show? Stick to familiar material? Short shows? Simple, emotional plays? Keep the staging very simple? Make sure there are always some cute kids in every show?

I’m flummoxed.

But, you can see the show for yourself and derive the formula for theatrical glory. The show’s on Youtube.

It’s odd how people can disappear from one’s life for years and then pop up suddenly…

Back in the late seventies, I was a high school student in Wayne, Nebraska. My parents owned a big old farmhouse which had been divided up into apartments. We rented the apartments to students at the nearby college. Mostly, the renters came and went without making much of a splash in our lives, but one group became friends. We even had an annual air hockey tournament. But the current in the river of time sent us off in different directions.

Recently, one member of that old gang contacted me through my website. He (and another member of the group) is working for a non-profit organization helping orphans in Kenya, the Makindu Children’s Center.

It looks like Makindu does a lot of good work. They have a fund raising event going on now, the Proper Walk. It’s sort of like a walk-a-thon, except the particiants are walking 170 miles across the Great Rift Valley instead of strolling across a US town in an afternoon.

Makindu’s description of their work says that they “… provide nutritional, medical and emotional support, access to basic education, and opportunities for vocational training for over 400 destitute AIDS orphans and other vulnerable children.”

It sounds like they are worthy of greater support from us all.

Oh my, time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like… nevermind, everybody’s heard that one. Anyway, long time, no blog, and it’s not because nothing blog-worthy has happened. It’s more like stuff happens faster than I can type it, or something.

Anyway, I’ve been putting some time and energy into promoting my nature photography online again. From a business standpoint, that’s just dumb. There are about a gazillion good photographers out there, and about three people who occasionally buy nature photography. Not a good ratio.

Ten to twelve years ago, I actually made a significant portion of my income from selling nature photography at art fairs. I had pretty much the only color darkroom in the area, so I had a nice niche selling my custom printed local scenics. My few competitors sold cheapy drug store prints or horrifically expensive custom lab prints.

As digital technology has advanced, my work has improved, but everyone else’s has, too. Now everybody and their grandma has a nice inkjet printer and a ten megapixel camera. Quite a few people even know how to use them. So, my product has improved and my sales have dropped to near zero, even while I have my own “gallery”… OK, it’s mostly a web design office.

But, I digress… this post was supposed to be about Smugmug.

A couple of months ago, a guy I met in a bar emailed me a link to some pics he’d taken. The photos were good, but the gallery site was even more interesting. The layout was attractive, the organization excellent. As I poked around more, I learned that they had “Pro” accounts, where you could set up galleries of your photos, and sell them without actually filling the orders yourself. The orders are sent straight to a specialty lab which prints and ships the orders.

I haven’t been getting many orders from my web site lately, but when it happens it’s consistently at a very inconvenient time: I’m off camping, I’m out of mat board, the jets on my printer are clogged, I’m drowning in a sea of urgent web work, or some combination of the above. With Smugmug, all that doesn’t matter; the order gets shipped promptly anyway. I was a little sceptical of the quality of their printing, so I ordered a few of my own photos (once you have the pro account, you can order at low wholesale pricing) and they turned out quite nice.

So, a couple of weeks ago, I plunked down the $150 for a year’s worth of Pro, and started uploading photos. It’s a frightfully time-consuming process, to get the right versions of the right photos uploaded and placed in the right galleries with the right keywords and looking up latitude and longitude data so the pics are listed on maps.smugmug.com and getting the pricing right and yadda yadda yadda.

But, the time has come to formally start promoting my Smugmug site. It’s still fairly small; I’ll keep plugging away with adding new images, and new localized galleries. But, there’s enough there for the world to look at.

Photos of coastal Mendocino County

Photos of California’s Lost Coast

Photos of the Sierra Nevada

And there’s plenty more. I’ll try to find some time in the next few days to blog about the particulars of setting up the Smugmug site, tips I’ve figured out, etc. But for now, one last little thing: If you should find yourself setting up you own Smugmug account, use this magic personal coupon code: tFHWQQZiHZTI2. You’ll get a discount, and I’ll get a credit against next year’s account fee.

Some of life’s more interesting moments are mundane, trivial events which somehow capture larger truths. Here are a couple of them from my life:

The Dressing Room Clock

I’ve done an awful lot of theatre over the years. If there’s one thing theatre people are good at, it’s complaining. I’m not sure we’re different from everybody else in that regard, but I digress.

During the run of one show I was acting in at our local theatre, I noticed that the clock in the dressing room had stopped. I was the only one around at the time, and it was Sunday, right before a few days off. “Dad-burned, dinkle-dorfing theatre,” I said silently to myself, “everything is always breaking around here.”

Thursday rolled around, and it was time to do another show. I soon noticed that the dressing room clock was still stopped. In retrospect, I’m not sure who was supposed to notice the problem and fix it, but still, I was annoyed. “Things never get fixed around here!” I grumbled to myself. Had there been anyone else around, I would have grumbled to him, too.

Of course, I’d never told anyone of this situation, and there was no reason to think that anyone other than the actors who use that dressing room would notice. But still, I was annoyed.

I looked back at the clock. I realized that clocks like that don’t plug into the wall, they take one AA battery. Furthermore, I had my camera bag with me. In that bag, there was a stash of AA batteries for the flash. It dawned on me that I had a few options:

• I could continue to grumble ineffectually to myself
• I could grumble ineffectually to other actors
• I could point out the problem to the stage manager and actually get it fixed, OR
• I could just fix the damn thing myself and be done with it.

The Handyman’s Curse

Another time, my girlfriend and I were having dinner with a couple of friends. The male component of the couple was celebrating; he’d just received his certification as an electrical contractor. “Why would anyone work as a $15/hr handyman, when they could work as a $75/hr contractor?” He said, looking forward to larger paychecks.

“Oh, poo-poo,” I said silently to myself. That $15/hr handyman is me… in a metaphorical sort of way. Our society does value specialists, with their intricate knowledge of esoteric topics, far more than generalists.

For better or worse, I’m a hopeless generalist. I can’t stand the idea of doing one narrowly defined thing over and over and over and over, regardless of what that particular thing is. Maybe I’m stuck for all eternity as a $15/hr handyman of sorts… a photo/graphics/video/web/text editing handyman.

Arg.