Updated the Jarrepalooza site to include the treasure of items gained from the three North America concerts I attended as well as the expensive mail order items I received in the last couple of years.
Usual WordPress updates here and there.
Working on a new Gorn Gallery migration from Gallery to Piwigo. It went really smooth and just trying to do a few tweaks here and there before converting the site over. Sitting on a couple of Gorn photos until I get it updated.
I’ve added 4 new headers bringing the total number of random headers to 10! As a reminder, these headers are available on the What’s New Pages as well as the Daily Update pages.
Here are the new headers:
Antelope Valley California Poppy Reserve – From April 2014 Daniel took this wonderful photo of me in the Poppy fields that is an homage to my hero Huell Howser.
Bryce Canyon – Me on the trail to the bottom of the canyon. I love this photo even though the color balance is a bit off due to me in the shadows and the bright canyons.
Arches NP Windows section – Lovely panorama of the Windows section of Arches National Park from August 2013.
Landscape Arch – Also from August 13, this is the Landscape Arch in Arches National Park – one of my favorite National Parks!!
In accordance with Social Media Policy, I have added a disclaimer to certain posts and to the Club House page basically saying that my site does not reflect the opinions of any of my employers.
I still have to go through a bunch of posts in a category and as I am re-reading them, I might go ahead and change some of the posts to private just to avoid any issues.
I’ve updated the copyrights (remember those?) for the site. I totally blanked out and forgot to do it. I think that because the site was a hot mess last year and not functioning well I skipped the 2013 update so there were still parts of the site that were reading 2012. So I’ve updated the Gorn copyrights and the Gallery ones. The WordPress ones look like they update automatically so thankfully it is one less thing I have to worry about.
Also, I updated the 404 page on the main Club Josh WordPress install. Apparently if you get an error on any of the sites, it goes to the main 404 page. So I broke out links to the Gorn search engine and the Trip Diaries main page to hopefully help out the three people that still are trying to find old photos of the Gorn with Charo.
Speaking of Gorn, added a new Gallery of the Gorn in Joshua Tree NP as well as adding the corresponding 2014 links to the North American page, updating the list of places the Gorn has been as well as a completely random change to the Tahiti cover photo on the Oceania page. Finally took off the generic picture of Bora Bora and added a photo of the Gorn overlooking Papeete Harbor. I also fixed a problem with the old Celebrity redirect which apparently was non-functional.
Something I have been wanting to do since 1999ish was to do random headers on the site. Today, I’ve launched 5 new headers bringing the total to 6! They are:
Los Angeles from Griffith Observatory – this is the one the redesign launched with and was taken at the observatory near sunset the day of the gathering to remember Huell Howser.
Newport Beach – Taken near the Newport pier, looking north
Death Valley – From my March 2013 trip to Death Valley, this one was taken near Mesquite Flat Sand Dunes
Bay Bridge – From May 2013, View of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge West Span from the Embarcadero.
Capilano Cliffwalk – From September 2012, the only one with me in it. Braving the Cliffwalk with lots of facial hair
Vasquez Rocks – From December 2012, a visit to the site of many Hollywood TV shows and films, including the famous Gorn episode of Star Trek.
Huge update to Club Josh. So big I had to skip up to v27 instead of v26.
After a 6 month downtime, the site is back up and running in WordPress. Basically, I chose to convert to WP because of the amount of developers working on it compared to Movable Type. I loved MT, but it was just way too difficult to design a template for the site, especially since I have less and less time to manage the site. However, each design of WP seems to be better and more flexible for my needs. Granted, nothing looks like the way I envisioned it, but it’s good enough to be better than what was dying on the vine a few months ago.
So to sum up the changes:
New Gorn Galleries – converted to v3x of Gallery and added two new galleries as well as some additional ‘lost’ photos. This is what took most of the work in building the site, because it was the one section I wanted to be up and running 100% right off the bat.
New look to Club Josh – Modified the default template until I can create my own or buy a nicer one – there are thousands of them out there and thankfully getting the bones of the site is the hard part and changing themes will be easy.
New Trip Diaries – I have actually installed three different WP installations on my server. Diaries is now it’s own server so I can re-theme it to whatever I want and don’t necessarily need to re-post to the main blog or match. Currently using the Postcard theme from Woo Themes. It’s nice because it adds Maps, but layout leaves a bit to be desired. Gone are all the old Disney Park photos, but hopefully I will be able to add Flickr integration to plus up the old travel diaries. Also need to add my stats back and check to see if there are any other old links from the backups I have missed.
Jarre & Doingworld – Just ported over as is, will need to do something eventually
Club House – the URL had to change since it is now a WP page. Layout is a bit wonky, but I think as I get better at templates, I can create something formatted a bit better. All the old content except for the server info is there.
Surfin’ Safari and Mobile have joined the archives.
Replaced photo from Mammoth Mountain which had been the header since 2009, with one from Yosemite Valley taken in May 2011. Also changed the link colors in the header from default to white.
A byproduct of the redesign of the Daily Update Archives and the tweak to the homepage was that the Daily Update on the mobile site went horribly wrong. I spent some time re-doing this section so that it looks nice and follows the same style guidelines as the rest of the site. I wanted to create a new logo for the Daily Update, but instead went text based and just re-used the graphic from the mobile site index page.
I do need to update that photo though!
Finally!
After years and years and years of thinking about it, I finally figured out how to make the Daily Update archives look like the Home Page of the site. It took some lengthy modification of the templates for the Daily Update Blog files, something that I had to take notes on in order to remember what to do should I ever redesign the home page. Thankfully, changing the graphic will be as easy as replacing a file or a reference in a style sheet.
There are some minor problems that I have uncovered, mainly that the dimensions of the boxes on the MT generated pages are not the same as on the manually generated home page. This should remedy itself when the home page becomes generated by MT sometime down the road. Another problem is the bottom of the rounded corner boxes. For some reason they are not rendering correctly in the MT pages. I might figure that out before I decide to get rid of rounded boxes..
Since I unified the style sheets for the index page and the MT site, I had to make some minor adjustments to the Home Page include from the Daily Update as well as the side nav links. I am actually quite pleased at how I was able to get it to work. Now I can see about putting the Club House in MT and changing the What’s New archives to this style as well and I might one day have a unified web site.
Changes to the Home Page include colorization of links as well as spacing in the right navigation and the fonts of the actual home page include. But now the archives and the home page are all in the same font and look and feel which should make for a better experience.
This update also included the update of the Movable Type software to 5.02 from 4.32 (that started back in August!)
m.clubjosh.com has officially launched today! I decided to ditch the Lite name for the ever popular Mobile name.
The structure from the old PDA site is still there, but now can be read on most modern cell phone browsers. I have also optimized the site for iPhones, but still want to create an iPhone specific site that can use all of the features and functionality that the platform allows.
I have also updated the Jarre section to reflect the CDs, Singles, and Videos I have aquired over the last few years (now just need to update the actual Jarrepalooza Web Site). Right now, the Daily Update is just what appears on the Main Index page of the Club Josh Web Version. I still need to figure out how to generate Mobile-Friendly archives so you can browse the whole enchilada, but then again, I don’t think people really want to do that, so we shall see if it gets done. Maybe in another 5 years.
I will be adding the new Trip Diaries for 2002-2008 as soon as I finish cutting and pasting from the Daily Update.