New Post in a new place

Hi All,

I know this might be a surprise, but I am looking into moving this blog off of blogger. As part of that effort I've put the next Art School post up on Medium. Here's a link:

Art School, Week 9

Please let me know what you think about that platform. Blogger seems to be less than fully supported these days, and definitely has comment problems. I figured trying something new was a good idea.

If it works out, I'll move things over there permanently. If not, I'll keep looking.

Please let me know what you think!

Trying the new version of blogger

The next few posts I write - here and in my other blogs, as they come up - are something of an experiment.  I'm trying the new (draft) version of blogger, just to see what is coming.

If you want to try it, login to www.blogger.com as usual, then go to "draft.blogger.com" and you can see what it looks like.  From there you can also make it your default version if you so choose.

Not sure what to make of it just yet, but I am keeping an open mind.

Gone over a month... *sigh*

Life has gotten really complicated.  Too many projects that destroy any ability to think.

This blog is not dead.  I will return, but probably not for another couple of months.  At least not with any regularity.

Sorry!

It's Been an Eventful Time

We're back home, now, after the funeral for my father-in-law.  It's been a rough few weeks, but Anne and I find ourselves moving forward.  Many thanks to everyone for their support.  It's meant a lot to us both.

Book Review Blog Is Up And Running

Since sometime in 2005 I have been writing book reviews and posting them on the web.  The location they've been posted has changed over time, but I've now decided to create a blog where those reviews will get posted as they happen.  For various reasons it's simpler than what I had been doing.

If you'd like to check it out, the URL is: http://jrpbookreviews.blogspot.com. As of now I have all my reviews written in 2009 put into the blog.  That caught me up on something that was way overdue since I went back to work.  Reviews from 2005 - 2008 will appear over time.

Your feedback about the reviews and/or the site itself is encouraged and appreciated.

Note that I don't claim these are good reviews.  They're just my thoughts about what I am reading, and I read a fair bit.

Thanks much for your interest!

Revamped Blog Format

Just made some significant changes to the way this blog is displayed by blogger, but I hope they are mostly invisible to you.

If anyone has trouble reading this now, or thinks a change that is visible is a problem, please let me know. It looks OK on my browsers, but I run neither a Windows nor a Mac, so I represent a tiny fraction of the actual reading audience in terms of my technology choices.

You can send your comments directly to me via my personal website's contact page, or leave a reply here.

Thanks for any feedback!

New ISP In Use...

This is today's final blog post... I promise.

As mentioned a while back, I was moving my web site to a new ISP.  That's done, and it seems to be working.  In fact I've moved 3 sites to the new ISP.  I'm not going to give the name away just yet since I don't honestly know if I will like them yet or not.  If I do, I'll share that information here later.  If not, I'll get to move again at some point.  That'll be barrels of fun, let me tell you.

There are still a few back end nits on the website that aren't working, but nothing that should be visible to anyone reading this blog post.  Still, if you find something out of place or that doesn't work please let me know.

Oh, wait.  The contact form doesn't work yet, I'll bet.  That's the first thing I need to fix.  Whee.

Anyway, the website can be found at the old URL: http://www.bangtherockstogether.com/  or the new one: http://www.jrpstonecarver.com/.  Either should take you to exactly the same content.

Thanks in advance for any bug reports!

Nothing is simple...

The title says it all.

I wanted to replace the filters in my reverse osmosis unit, but what I got from the store wasn't the right ones. Another trip back tomorrow.

And now I am going through moving my website to a new hosting service. So far it's going just fine, but I expect there will be a lot of rework as part of the move. Whee.

For the moment I am moving my blog back to to publishing directly on google, just to get make the migration to a new host easier. I might move it to my new host later, but then again maybe not.

In any event, you can be sure - since I am doing it - that nothing will go smoothly during all of this. Not much has gone smoothly at all lately, which partly explains why posts have been so few and far between here. Something will have to give at some point, but for now I just cover my head and try to hold on.

In the meantime, it's back to the old hosting provider where I will attempt to put redirects into place for my old blog so it can still be found by anyone searching for it. Then, once that is done, I can try moving the site to the new host.

Fun. Or something vaguely like it.

Today I am a Follower

Yesterday Steve added my blog to the published list of blogs he reads. I'm honored. A bit scared - for the reasons I mentioned in yesterday's post - but definitely honored.

But it was that action on his part that got me to thinking about blog etiquette and whether or not I was doing things properly. I wasn't.

There are about 20 things in my RSS reader at this point. Some are just silly, some I am more seriously interested in, some are from businesses, and others - the most important ones to me - are written by people I know.

I feel no obligation to give regular link space to the business blogs I follow. They may get mentioned from time to time, as appropriate, but the nature of my relationship with them isn't one that requires me to advertise for them.

Nor do I feel obliged to provide regular link space to those blogs that are written by people I don't know. There are several of those, mostly artists writing about their experiences. These are valuable to me, but since the writers don't know me from anyone, there seems to be no obligation on my part to advertise for them. (I might choose give them links, though, and as with business blogs, I may mention them where appropriate.)

The last category - and the one where I realized I was falling down on the job - is blogs of people I know. I had a few listed on my site, but the full list I follow wasn't up there. That, I decided, needed to change.

These are my friends, and through the web of connections that is the Internet it is entirely possible that someone who finds me will realize they also know someone whose blog I follow. By not giving them links, I was actively doing them a disservice.

So this morning I revised the link list. I added four blogs written by people I know to the sidebar. I also added the blog of one person I don't know, but whose work I admire so much I felt that the chance of exposing others to him was worthwhile.

So once again, thanks Steve. It appears that getting in touch with you was good for me in several ways.

And for anyone else out there whom I know and who keeps a blog, consider sending me a link. If you're not on the list I probably don't know about it, and that's no good. I want to keep up to date on my friends.

Gallery Generator Is Done, Again...

I've managed to completely update my gallery generation script again, and as a result I've pushed an updated version of my website live. Other than some relatively subtle things on the main page and a massive change in font for many of you - abandoning IE's default Times Roman font for the much more readable Ariel - most of the changes aren't all that visible. But to me, they're a big improvement.

It's now much easier to add new entries to the gallery, and that was important. I've incorporated some use of style sheets too, and cleaned up the navigation bar a bit to make it more friendly to spiders.

In all, it was a very necessary update, but not one that most people will notice. Having to rewrite the gallery generator twice was less than fun, but such is life. It's good that I got this done before going back to work, as I will be less inclined to sit in front of the computer at home for hours at a time once I start doing that again every day at work.

In any event, please feel free to send me any comments you may have about the revised web site. Anything at all. I'm afraid it will always be a work in progress, but your comments to help me figure out what to do next, so don't be shy. Thanks much!

Computers and Fast Stupidity

I believe it was Scott Adams - creator of Dilbert - that once claimed we are all - every last one of us - stupid. A few minutes ago I refreshed my memory on that point. I am stupid. The loveliness of it in this case is that I used a computer to accomplish my stupidity, and therefore did it very quickly.

I am in the middle of a major set of updates to my website, and a big part of that website is my sculpture gallery. I wrote a program to create that gallery some years ago. Over the past month I'd made a slew of changes to that program, tested them, and was just about done. This morning I thought of one more change I wanted to make, so I started in on it.

That change required me to create a bunch of new files from a template. I created the first file and copied it over into all the other directories where I needed it. It was that copy that did me in. I automated the command and didn't test my automation carefully enough before running it. My 20K script for creating the gallery got written over with a copy of the new, one line, text file.

And before anyone tells me to go out and use some utility to get it back, I live on Linux, not Windows, and the file was overwritten, not simply deleted. The data blocks have been reused.
It's gone for good.

I have a copy of the script from before all my recent changes, at least. That gives me a starting point and saves a lot of time, but I still get to make the changes all over again. That's not even all that hard, really, as I know this stuff pretty well. But it does use time I could have spent on other things.

Oh well. Live and learn - and test carefully before running stupid, four line scripts that copy or delete files!

I'm off to start work on putting things right again.

Another Long Overdue Website Update

I know this isn't art related, but I've finally gotten around to organizing and uploading pictures at (or as a result of) some of the local fires in the past couple of years. These supplement the old Croy Fire photos I had on the website before. Anyone curious about them can click here.

Table formatting issue resolved

Yesterday saw me find the source of the issue in table formatting, and it is now fixed. It only took half an hour or so of google searches to find the answer, test it out, and get it running properly. The problem is a subtle one.

Something about DOCTYPE certain statements causes tables to decide that images are to be printed in text rather than block context. Fixes are being discussed by the HTML and style definition folks, but that's long term. For now, there's a way to override the issue, and since what I am doing is pretty limited in scope, it worked.

What am I doing? Reworking the navigation headers on my website, again. I know, I just finished installing them the other day (mostly - the gallery is automatically generated and I haven't had the time to fix that yet) but once I did it all I found they blended in with the rest of the page too well. They needed to be bit distinctive so that visitors know what they are and could concentrate on the rest of the page.

To accomplish that they needed to use a different background color, and that lead to putting them into a table, and that lead to finding the bug, and so on.

I'm slowly updating all the pages to use the new navigation header format now. It will take several days to get it all done, but the most forward and visited pages are now updated, so things are getting better.

I'm always interested in feedback on my website, so feel free to contact me about it.

Where does all the time go?

You cannot imagine how much time disappears down the rat hole that is page formatting for web browsers. And I have this fundamental issue - I dislike using PDF to format pages.

Yes, I understand that I could get perfect layout using PDFs, but I want my pages to load quickly. PDF files are huge, load slowly, and every browser I use asks before downloading them. Sometimes they don't even display within the browser window.

And beyond that, I don't really like style sheets. I've seen way too many sites that setup some area for text to appear in, but the text doesn't fit in that area, so it runs over onto something else (usually other text, rendering both illegible) or it disappears under something else. Not good.

Nope. I use tables. Everyone hates them but me, I know, but even that may be changing.

Right now I'm chasing down a table formatting issue that I don't understand. Tell the row that it's a certain height. Tell the cells they are the same height. Tell the image tag the image is the same height, and yet the row is still taller than the image, and nothing I can find fixes that. At this point I don't even know if it's Firefox that is causing it, some subtle bug in my HTML, or something else. I'm down to asking people with other browsers to send me screen shots of the page so I can figure it out.

I think I need to do something else for a while.

The Distractions of Web Hosting

I'm starting a very gradual update of my website- bangtherockstogether.com. You may note that some pages have a title/navigation bar across the top while others don't yet. That's a part of it. It's needed to unify the site and make it easier to get around, but it sure does take time to get it right.

If you find anything not functioning properly on the site, please let me know about that. I hope to keep that to a minimum, but it may happen as I tweak things around.