When I was writing about my banner images, I wanted to identify the name of the bridge in one picture from Dublin. I wound up finding a website and was able to narrow it down to the Mellows Bridge, but no thanks to Wikipedia where the picture of the bridge looked like this:
Here are all the pictures I use in the blog’s banner and how those pictures came to be.
Ireland
A lot of pictures come from my July 2008 trip to Ireland (gallery). In chronological order, they pretty much tell everywhere I went. We started in Dublin, and while Susan’s choir was practicing, I walked down to the River Liffey and took pictures of a lot of different cool bridges. This is the Mellows Bridge. I uploaded this picture to Wikipedia.
Leaving Dublin and heading south, we stopped by the Rock of Cashel, a hill with some old churches on top of it. This is a neat picture, not as good cropped as at full size.
Now that the new blog is in place, it needs people to be able to find it. I looked in the logs and nobody is getting to it via search engines. Jeb was going to set up some redirects at some point to automatically forward people from the old pages to the new ones. Sometimes you will run across a web page that tells you the original page has moved and will transfer you to the new page in a couple of seconds. You can do this with meta tags or with some javascript. But the best way to do this is through a 301 redirect which users won’t even notice and Google and other search engines accept as an official move of your site. The “301″ number means the page has moved permanently. If Google was sending people to your old page, when they see the 301 redirect they should keep sending them to the new site. With websites, it is all about keeping your page rank with Google. For instance, on the Flashlight Wiki this month, 3,553 visitors were referred by search engines. 3,296 of those were referred by Google (93%). Second place is Yahoo with 93 referrals (2.6%). Not that the blog is a money making site, but it’s nice to be noticed. Continue reading
My cousin, Mary, invited me to be her Facebook friend today and I gladly accepted. On her page she had a link to 2012 as the Year of Code, saying her New Year’s resolution was to learn more code. At the link they had a quote by someone saying:
A young person asked me for advice for “those who aren’t technical.” My answer was “Get technical.”
At work we use drafting software called Microstation. It originally ran on UNIX workstations, but was soon ported to PC’s. However there are still little UNIX touches. One weird thing in UNIX is how things are sorted. Usually when you sort things with numbers and letters in the name, the numbers sort to the top. In UNIX for whatever reason, the numbers sort to the bottom. Since Mac OS has been based on UNIX for a while (I guess this is why, I don’t know for sure), the iPod sorts songs the same way. So 10,000 Maniacs is at the end of my Artists list instead of the top. Continue reading
Recently I upgraded the MediaWiki software for the Flashlight Wiki I made in 2010. I had a list of customizations I made for version 1.16.0, but the upgrade is version 1.18.0. So based on the old customizations, here are the slightly different ones I needed for 1.18.0 and its new skin, Vector (old skin was Monobook). Rather than make a new list every time I upgrade the software, I am just updating this post, so really these customizations are for the current version which is v1.20.4.
Back in August, I had tried and failed to upgrade the Flashlight Wiki’s software from MediaWiki 1.16 to 1.17. For whatever reason, I thought it would be a good time to try again. Only now they are up to version 1.18. Continue reading
Today I was on Wikipedia and wanted to look up some information on a movie I watched last night called Crazy Heart. But when I was typing “Crazy Heart” in the search box, my hands were moved over to the right by one key of the keyboard. So instead it came out: vtsxu jrsty. Wikipedia asked me “Did you mean vsxu jesty?” There was a link for this and I was thinking that Wikipedia now has so many articles that you can type in jibberish and there will be an article about it on Wikipedia. But I clicked the link and, sadly, it said no article existed. I’m really not sure how they thought it would be helpful to suggest a slightly different piece of jibberish that also did not give any search results.
Last year after Europe seemed to have been hammered pretty well, I decided to put my 2011 Roth IRA contribution in Vanguard’s Total International Index. This turned out not be so great because Europe continued to have problems and a tsunami clobbered Japan. US stocks (where the rest of my money is) stayed about the same, but it was a roller coaster ride. Continue reading
Jeb has moved the family blogs from Movable Type to WordPress. He did a great job of moving over my hundreds of blog posts which includes tons of pictures that also needed to come over. I hate to think what all it took to bring everything over. I found a couple of problems where pictures didn’t show up, but for the most part everything looks intact.
The appearance of the blog is pretty similar except that the picture at the top of the screen is huge, wider and much taller than the pictures I had on the old blog. I was able to fix that eventually (towards the end of this entry).
Continue reading
