‘da Blog

I added a bunch of college friends in Facebook today. I seem to add people in groups and go weeks between adding new friends. On Twitter I started following some new people today…I gotta get some family members and more friends using Twitter (if they aren’t already—have to start looking for them!).

I think there’s a plug-in module for WordPress that integrates Twitter posts into the blog. I’ll try to add that by the weekend. I tried to add the Twitter app to my Facebook page but encountered a login issue so was denied…I want to add that so my Facebook status line and Twitter are one and the same.

What a tangled web we weave on this Interweb thingy we’ve conceived. Thanks, Wil’.

So I got home form work at around 20:20 (yes, I keep time in 24 hour format. Get over it). Washed the dishes and then went upstairs to update some one-page websites.

The first ones I updated were the splash pages to a few sites I have  under the alsplace.com domain including: alsplace.com, atalanta.alsplace.com, galatea.alsplace.com, and galatea.alsplace.com/~aalegado. If you visit these pages you’ll see they are all, basically, the same page:

A screen-shot of the alsplace.com splash page.

The only difference is the hostname reported at the top (this is hard-coded…I didn’t want to reveal the actual hostname of some of the hosts because, well, they’re kinda fugly) and which of two different MySQL databases that the fortune cookie script accesses.

The list of fortunes are identical in both MySQL dbs…I just haven’t learned how I can get the GoDaddy-based MySQL server to answer remote queries, i.e. so I can use the GoDaddy MySQL db for all my sites on all the different hosts I have (there are a few…). I read some support docs on the GoDaddy site and they refer to a “Direct Database Acess” setting that you’re supposed to set when you create a database. Well, guess what? I can’t find the setting. I created a test db to see if I missed it the first time. I didn’t. It’s not there. I might not have the right account. Anyway, I’ll probably ask tech support to see if I can do it. I’d rather use one MySQL server although I’m split as to which one I should use: The one GoDaddy offers for use with my hosting account or the one I have on my self-hosted Linux box.

The other  pages are…

A screen-shot of the aksenovatwins.com splash page.

A screen-shot of the icouldbehappy.com splash page.

A screen-shot of the ithinkthereforeimac.com splash page.

A screen-shot of the pinkyblueskies.com splash page.

For each of these domain names I’ve only created the splash page…no real time to build complete sites.

Speaking of complete sites, alsplace.com used to have some extensive pages mostly-oriented around digital photos presented by custom-scripted gallery pages. I got tired of hand-crafting the pages and eventually installed Gallery2 on a self-hosted, Linux webserver. This worked for a few months and I started to worry about uptime and back-ups so I just opended and account and uploaded my libraries to SmugMug.com which does a much better job of presenting photo galleries (and gives me multiple, off-site back-ups of all my digital photos to boot!). I may add a page here or there to alsplace.com but I think for now I’ll just maintain this blog.

As for the domain names:

The Aksenova twins want me to go balls out and create some interesting features in their site…they seem to think I know what I’m doing. Scary. Still, they’ve got some ideas for some photo galleries that should turn out pretty nice once I can spend some time working on them!

The Altered Images homage pages are just what they are and will probably stay that way. I just wanted to make some Internet Shrines to some classic 80’s songs, Pinky Blue and (my favorite Altered Images song) I Could Be Happy. I’m still working on another one-pager: You Make Me Feel So Good by Book of Love.

The IThinkThereForeIMac page is a fortune cookie-generator. ’nuff said.