After a few months of work, largely interrupted by Damian’s birth, the new website design is finally up. The previous design had been around since 3/31/2007, so it was well past time for a new design. This new design is intentionally lighter and more clean. I plan to add more Web 2.0 features to it later to make things a bit more slick. The theme is nice enough, I might clean it up a bit and release it for general use. Anyone want to use this theme on their own blog?
I’ve been working on a new website for about 2 weeks, and now it’s ready to share with the world. Quite simply, it’s a catalog of our home videos. Jaspenelle’s Dad bought us a video camera for Christmas, and we have made several videos.
Video by michaelandjaspenelle.com
Most people would use YouTube or some other video sharing site. I considered using them, but I prefer to host web-content myself whenever possible. If you are using a third-party, like YouTube, you have to agree to their terms and deal with their servers and their policies and restrictions. I don’t like being restricted.
The website was actually developed quite quickly - because of several existing open source solutions, I actually had a working (albeit not very pretty) mockup working after a few hours of coding. The remainder of the 2 weeks of development was making things nice and experimenting with different features. It’s built using the following technologies:
Currently, the code for the website is not in a releasable state - some things are very specific to the current environment. Over time, I hope to get it cleaned up, add a nice admin interface (right now all administration is done via WinSCP and SSH), and make it more configurable, then I may release it to the general public.
Let me know what you think!
So, I finally got around to upgrading to the newest wordpress, version 2.5. It was quite a pain due to the way I have this site setup. I keep everything in SVN to make it easy to make changes to the code from anywhere, without having to mess with FTP and such. My first attempt at merging the changes failed miserably, and I had to restore it all from backups and start over. The second time, I skipped the svn integration, I’ll have to fix that later, but it’s working for now.
Jaspy want’s a cloud, and to get rid of the categories, so that will be my next project - but not tonight, I need some sleep before I get sick again.
I had a wonderful birthday. I really did. Jaspenelle pampered me all day (not that she doesn’t pamper me all the time anyways, it was just more so that day). I relaxed, played with the cats, we went to a movie (The Reaping - great movie BTW, you should see it it you haven’t) at a new movie theater in town. All in all I had a good time.
It was just when I was about to go to bed that the disaster struck. I was trying to upload a video of Aos to youtube (check back friday for the feline friday if you want to watch it) when suddenly the internet stopped working. I came into the studio where phoenix, our beloved [web server|file server|router|desktop|beast of a machine] is kept. To my horror, 4 of the hard drives in the RAID array were showing Orange - they had died. Unfortunetly, that was just one too many. To the credit of linux, it was still running - just not very well. The filesystem was giving I/O errors for most operations, and had moved itself into read-only mode. The routing part of it wasn’t really down, just the transparent proxy I had setup that needed to be able to write to disk.
I gave phoenix CPR for a few hours and decided that it was a goner. I shut it off, reconfigured the network so that phoenix wasn’t required as a router, and started to come up with a plan to get our personal websites back online, and allow both myself and Jaspenelle to work on the computer at once (with phoenix gone, we were down to a single desktop: mooncougar).
From 2am to 8am, I pointed the DNS entry for our local computer (local.garjasp.com) to my hosted server. Because all of our personal sites hosted locally used a CNAME to that one entry (actually required because my dynamic DNS can only update one entry - local.garjasp.com), I was easily able to put up a message letting people know what happened:
Server Crash
Our beloved server, phoenix, has had another massive hard drive crash. This time, he signed a DNR, so we are letting him die the death he wishes. Our personal websites will be down until we get another server set up, and our online time will be limited, as we now have to share a single laptop.
Michael and Jaspenelle Stewart, 21-Apr-2007
My plan of action was simple:
We ended up buying a Compaq Presario SR5010NX with Windows Vista Home Basic. (Yes, I’ve returned to the Beast — Windows) for a little under $450. It took me the better part of 8 hours to remove all the crap on it I don’t need, put all the crap on it I do need (Firefox, Thunderbird, Gaim/Pidgin, Gimp, gVim, PuTTY, TortoiseSVN, OpenOffice, and Avast Antivirus — I may have returned to the beast, but I still love open source)
While installers were running and files were downloading, I set to repurposing mooncouger. I had originally planned to just wipe it and start fresh, but when I tried to boot from the Ubuntu CD-ROM, it wouldn’t load (it booted, just wouldn’t come up). It turns out that the CD-ROM in mooncougar is on it’s last legs. So instead, I fired up aptitude and put a minus on the x11 category. Then promptly spent 3 hours resolving the broken packages 
During all this (still multitasking), I started unpacking the backups. This is the second time I’ve had to restore from backups this year, and it was a breeze. My backup system Just Works.
This morning, in the hour I had before I had to go to work, I got Apache, MySQL, and PHP configured the same way phoenix was, and reset the DNS for local.garjasp.com to point back to mooncougar. I had to leave for work before I could test as well as I would have liked. But most the sites were working fine. A few tweaks and cache rebuilds here and there when I got home today, and everything seems to be working well.
I cannot stress how important it is to have a daily backup routine. Mine is automated, and well tested. If I did not have it, I would have lost everything - websites I’ve designed, jaspenelle’s art, software that is a work in progress (including the entire SVN history), and much much more. If you don’t have a backup routine, and have anything that you can’t lose, then you are playing with fire. It will burn you one day. Hard drives crash. Technology fails. Be prepared. I was, and because of it, I have everything still.
If you did not notice, the blog has changed in many ways other then the new domain name (don’t forget to update that in your blogroll!) You can click the link below this excerpt to see my whole post or my whole blog now and from the main page see Michael’s blog and all our other sites.
Michael built it all (with a lot of my input!) and posted about it in his blog too, I’ll try not to repeat too much of what he said. I think the new design is pure awesomeness. I adore the layout and colours, which we debated about for quite awhile before finding something we both loved. Its all in one place so I don’t have to go everywhere to find everything anymore. I can give people one domain name instead of ten from now on.
I think the layout is pretty self explanatory but if you have any questions or find anything wrong let me or Michael know. I hope that you like it as much as I do.
We’ve been planning a site such as the one you are now looking at for over a year, a combined blog and portal to our other websites.
After we figured out what we wanted, it only took about 2 weeks to design from start to finish, and then modify the design to be a Wordpress theme. Nearly every page is easily customizable, and this will allow us to create sub-blogs that have a completely different design.
If there is enough demand, I will clean up the code to the theme a bit and release it for other Wordpress users to use. Let me know if you would like to use the theme for your site. (The released theme of course would not have this custom front page - though if you want a custom front page for your wordpress blog, I am available for hire.)
If you find any broken links, images, or problems, please let me know.
Enjoy!
It came to my attention a few minutes ago people were getting 404 errors on my blog (people you got to let me know when this happens, drop me an email or something! ;)) It problem is fixed now, let me know if anything else pops up.
So I fainlly went through the 4000 some comments my blog software has marked as spam… hopefully Michael can upgrade my wordpress (where you comment) so that I can approve people on an individual basis and won’t have to deal with the 100+ spam comments I get a day. My other blog uses that technique and it seems to have a lot less problems.
So Eknock, Eala, Kymba, Raven, Ginanne, Venny, Zyleeth, Shafanhow, Skywing, Velen, Dad, flarecarrot, Meowman, WildeRavan, Silerenth, Rah-Bop. Purrmeow and Opaistt are the people I found in my spam filter.
If you comment does not show up don’t worry it just means it has to be moderated because something landed it in the spam filter. Hopefully this won’t happen again but I will keep a closer eye on my spam filter till we upgrade.
I added an about me page here for anyone interested. Michael found a neat thing so that I can list the books I have recently read on the main blog page. I am wondering if there is a way I can have my most recent up there and then above them the one I am reading at the moment. Kind of how the blogger of You Who? does it on his. Oh and expect the layout of this journal to change soon because this one is incredably boring.
I need to make a note to myself here too, to ask Michael about I can make some custom fields for the bottom of these posts so I can list what mood I am in. what music I am listening to and what tea I am drinking. Mmm tea.
If you are here from Michael and my journal and curious about this one; this journal is going to be a deeper look into my spirituality, things I do not talk about on the other one but that I occassionally briefly touch on.
If you will be reading this blog drop me a comment and let me know. I have an RSS feed so you can keep track of me that way.
