Category: Site Updates

So I’ve two new photo sets to share with you, and a question:

1. Vancouver Photos. I’ll hopefully add to this album regularly, as I take photos around town. For now, there’s photos from a walkabout I did yesterday, plus a couple from 2 weeks ago.
2. Kings of Convenience @ Richard’s on Richards, March 11th, 2005.

So if you go to both, you’ll note the former set is posted as I’ve been doing for ages, here on Tannock.net. The KoC photos I posted at Flickr, to check out how that works. And I really like how Flickr works, for the most part. But I shouldn’t use both my own gallery and Flickr, because that just doubles the work involved in upload and commenting, etc, or if I alternate, leave my photos in different places, which is not so good.

So my question to the public at large is: Should I switch to using Flickr? On the plus-side, it has great tagging/indexing/community features, it’s easy-to-use and is “hip”. On the down-side, it’s not mine, I lose some control of the photos uploaded, there’s the “what if it shuts down, or is sold” factor, and given the volume of photos that I post (which still isn’t alot), I’d probably have to pay to use it, whereas my own gallery is free….Any and all your opinions on the matter are welcome.

So you may have noticed that this site has been experiencing some downtime of late. The server it’s on is apparently a little unhappy. Sometime in the new year, I’ll buy a new box, and move the site there, but in the interim, this site might be a little…sketchy…for a while. So if you come to read something, and don’t get a response, try back in a couple of hours. Hopefully, I’ll have noticed that the site is down in the interim, and will have called Steve (an actual different person, not a 3rd-person reference to myself), who will hopefully happen to be in front of the box and thus able to give it the solid kick it deserves.

So not that they’re terribly heavily used, but I’ve turned off Trackbacks on the site. Why? Because comment-spammers, apparently hip to the fact that well, that doesn’t work anymore (plug-ins + approving all non-TypeKey’d comments) have moved on to Trackback spam. I received 160 trackbacks last night, all pointing to site of the usual suspects. So no more Trackbacks. Everyone else who allows them, expect to get spammed in the next little while.

update: Apparently, there’s no way to globally, retroactively turn off Trackbacks. So that kindof sucks. I don’t really want to manually close all trackbacks. There must be a way somewhere, I just haven’t figured it out…

So this site’s been down for a while. Not entirely sure how long, but most of the day. I’m not sure why, but it’s back now, so you can all start breathing again 😉

I blame the elves. They’re out to get me since the the whole ear-pulling incident.

So I’ve uploaded (& captioned) photos from my recent trip to Tofino. I’m pretty proud of the sunset shots. Also, please note that there’s an inordinate number of photos of fire. I was trying to figure out how to take a good picture of fire, because it’s hard (the focused bright light of the fire vs. the surrounding darkness). You’ll probably see that they get better as they go forward too, should you care.

So a couple of minor changes around here now that I’ve had a little time:

First, and most important, is a new side blog: “Elsewhere”. This will be a collection of links that I find interesting, and want to post to, but aren’t necessarily worthy of their own post. It will be populated by people who send me links, links off other sites that I link and of course random curios I come across in my normal web-surfing. So if you’re bored, keep an eye on that. As a note, the idea was stolen from What do I Know’s fantastic links blog, so please check that one out as well. Quite likely, several of his links will be replicated here.

I’ve also replaced the text titles on the right side with gifs, using Constructivist Square, the english version of the Cyrillic font I use in my main title. I’m not so sold on color & size at this point, so if you’ve any suggestions, please let me know.

I’ve moved the two archive sections (monthly & category) into jump-lists to conserve space,removed the (to my mind) totally useless ‘recently’ links and grouped the search function down with the archives, where it seemed to belong.

Lastly, there’s a new link down on the right-hand side to my Corporate site, Pencilneck Software, in case you ever want to hire my services. It’s a somewhat obtuse link, but that’s ok by me (the PN on the triangle-soup background is from our business cards. I just shrunk it down to fit over there. We’re still playing with ways to effectively use our new identity pieces).

So obviously the site looks a little different than it used to. I’ve upgraded to MT 3.0, and spent some time clearning up the massive amounts of comment-spam. I’ve also implemented some new things – for instance, all comments must be approved by me before being posted if you don’t have a Typekey account.

Over the next few days, I’ll bring back the normal styles & layout, but the interim, please make do – this has to be a spare time thing, and as you probably know, I don’t have that much right now.

Two new photo sets up here at Tannock.net.

First up are photos from my trip to Banff a couple of weeks ago

Also appearing are some photos from the Franz Ferdinand show last week.

I’m very pleased to announce that I’ve installed Jay Allen’s MT-Blacklist plugin, which should hopefully at least reduce the vast amount of comment-spam I’m getting. Fortunately for me, most of the spam has been posted to my older pages, I’m guessing ones that rank high in google, and this plugin proclaims to simply step in retroactively. I’m probably not going to go and browse through my back posts, because who knows where they are. As an indication to a possible further solution, Spam-Assassin blocked every single comment notification email of my spam-comments. So whatever tech is in Spam-Aassassin could conceivably be added into MT, or into this plugin, down the road. For now, I’m happy with what it claims it can do. I’ll know by tomorrow if I don’t have a score or so blocked messages in my spam-catching folder.

Rob was so kind as to provide me with a pair of site icons. The one in use is a star (). The other one is the Comrade’s head (). I’m sticking with the star for now, partially because I’m a fan of The Red Star comic series, but ideally, I’ll get around to writing a teensy little script that ‘randomizes’ them, I think.

Thanks a tonne, Rob! 100 000 shares of Tannock.Net enterprises to you!