I recently decided to switch to a static site framework instead of my old Wordpress-based homepage. Since Python is so awesome, I naturally chose Pelican as my static site generator of choice because it is written in Python. I also wanted something that would be easy to host elsewhere for free, like on Heroku. I'm tired of managing a personal server.

A few scripts later, and I had a site that looked just about the same as before, but was fully static. However, I decided to also take the opportunity to refresh the design, and bring it forward. I wanted to keep the dynamic header that's been part of my site for so long, but I didn't want to create custom rectangular photos like I did before. In addition, if I did the rectangular style photos, they wouldn't fit all the way across the width of the page, leaving whitespace on either side of them.

So I took a design cue from Kickstarter and created a grid of images that are automatically pulled from a Flickr tag on my account at compile time. I also added some other custom plugins to look for special Flickr markdown tags in my posts to automatically insert images. The result is a site that should load faster, be smaller, and should also be easier keep updated and experiment with. I still need to rewrite my travel page to fully port my previous homepage over, but that'll be work for another day as that code is really old, and really messy.

For a long time I've had a photo section on my site. Initially, I wrote the code that just searched through a directory structure for pictures that I had stuck in there. This worked fine for what I initially wanted, but didn't scale well. Plus, it was quite slow. At the time, this stressed my PHP abilities and so I searched for better solutions. What I found was the open source Gallery. This solution worked well for me for the past several years. Since when I was hosted on Berkeley's OCF servers to today's more robust hosting with my own domain name.

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However, I've just begun to realize that this solution is no longer viable for me. I've realized that my flickr and facebook accounts give me a much greater visibility in a much more social environment. In addition, the point of me having photos on my site was to share them family and friends. At this point now, I would have to post pictures in three places. And since each place has different privacy controls, I couldn't just post the same pictures to each place.

All this so far is just to say that I've decided to leverage the power of Wordpress, and install the FAlbum plugin. So now all the pictures on my site are from my flickr account, which will allow me to more easily manage them. With this change, photos.chrisstreeter.com is now deprecated and has started pointing at the new location of my photos. FAlbum lets you view the photos just fine embedded in my site, but one will have to go to flickr in order ...

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I fixed up the RSS link for my site. So now people should be able to get updates more easily.

I've got a new domain! I just secured the domain chrisstreeter.com! Previously, I only had chrisstreeter.net, which was nice and all, but .net just isn't at the same level as a .com TLD. I set up some 301 redirects on my old domain which should make the transition as painless as possible for people.

The only downside is my search engine ranking. I was the number one hit for Chris Streeter on Google and number two on Yahoo. The domain name change will, invariably, affect the rankings, but it is for the best. A temporary hit now to become the number one Chris Streeter now, and hopefully, the number one Streeter eventually.

Well, it looks like I've neglected this "blog" long enough. It really isn't much of a blog, rather, a place of (not so) periodic updates. I've really just focused this site on my photo gallery. Speaking of the gallery, I did some updating recently. Previously, I hosted galleries for 3 other people: my sister, Amy, and my 2 former roommates, Joe and Marcus. Well, I decided to finally separate these galleries from my main gallery. As such, I've created two new subdomains. My gallery is now located at http://www.chrisstreeter.com/photos/ and the hosted galleries are at http://photos-hosted.chrisstreeter.com/. I really don't know how many people check out the hosted galleries, and so I'll soon get a better idea. Through some apache mod_rewrite magic, I've tried to make the old links backwards compatible, so they do a 301 redirect to the new locations. I did some quick tests and it worked without any hitches... for me. Your mileage may vary.

So that's an update on my site, how about what's going on with me? Well, a little less than a year ago, I moved to Santa Barbara, California and entered Corporate America. Santa Barbara has been great and is such a great place to live. I recently acquired a Hobie 18' from my Uncle and have been working to make it ship-shape as the boat has been sitting for at least 7 years. I've had to do a number of things to get it ready for sailing, but as of this past weekend, it was finally ready to sail. However, the weather wasn't as cooperative. One of the greatest things about Santa Barbara is the ability to get permits to park your cat on the ...

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I decided I wanted to do some maintenance on this site, and so updated the design slightly. The updated design fixes some tweaks with the layout that I've been wanting to do for some time. It also moves the sidebar back to the right, where it usually is. In general, the site should be more accessible to all different types of browsers as I read through the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. I wanted to try to conform to a number of the guidelines, and hopefully made some progress. But in general, I believe this layout and design is a bit more polished as the design continues to evolve over the several years this has been around.

So over the past week I've pushed out several updates to this site. First I went ahead and changed the design somewhat. I like it better now, it seems less dark than before. Also, I cleaned up the page generation on the backend by increasing the modularity of all the pages. The CSS also got cleaned up and I've been doing work on the php backend that I hope should make pages faster, not to mention easier to code with.

I also brought back comments but added a captcha to prevent the hordes of comment spam that I was getting before. Maybe we'll see a comment now and then. There's also a pager at the bottom so that past posts are viewable now, as well as permalinks to posts (where you can also post comments). All this also allowed me to get my RSS feed validated (structure wise at least, I still have to edit some posts to validate the feed).

All this is in preparation to rewrite my travel section so that it works with IE, which it probably doesn't do right now. I also need to work making the javascript run faster than slug. So that is what I've got planned in the works. We'll see if I get that done soon as life is starting to become more hectic as I come to the end at one company, and begin the transition to full time at another.

I decided to mess around and add RSS 2.0 to my site. I spent a little time, but got it up and running pretty quickly without too much fuss. It doesn't yet validate as there are a couple things I just didn't want to work out yet.

At least now you should be able to tell when I update my site, without having to check it all the time. Hopefully somebody other than myself will start to use this.

Like I said in my last post, I've started work on integrating my gallery into my site's feel. After some Gallery2 documentation reading, I got the background, header and navbar all up. So I'm going to continue to work on the feel of it so that it matches a little bit more. Stay tuned...

Update

I finished up all the Gallery integration I want to do for now. I basically made it 1 column, and made it so things stay inside that column. So it does look like a different part of the site, but its the gallery, and it should be different.

Well, as I figured, the site didn't render right for IE. I hate GIFs and like PNGs, which have much better transparency support. So, most of my graphics didn't show up on IE. Thus, I added some code that switches to GIFs for IE users (a combination of Javascript for recognition and a new stylesheet to use GIFs instead).