thomas fitzgerald.net

I am on holidays (Vacation) in New York City for the next few days so updates to the blog will be somewhat less frequent, but I’ll do my best! In the mean time, here’s a cool; shot of NY at night I took from my hotel window last night

I’ve just noticed that some of the links I had placed in the last couple of posts were triggering the Lightbox plug in I use for viewing Images and was screwing up the links. The reason this happened is that I’ve been using a beta version of ecto which allows you to insert additional tags into Image links, but unfortunately with the last update it seems to have started putting those tags into normal links as well.Of course it’s my own fault for not having checked those links, but anyway apologies to those who’ve been reading recently and have been frustrated.

Incidentally, those people visiting from the Macrumors story please note that the link they have is escaped incorrectly. Wordpress, the system I use on my blog unfortunately takes the title literally and makes the url out of it, inverted commas and all. It seems as though when Macrumors was linking to it, whatever system they are using has interpreted those as smart quotes, which is a different unix escape sequence than straight inverted commas and is sending to the wrong URL. I can’t change the url now because numerous other sites are linking too, but I’ve emailed them and asked them if they could fix it.

Thanks everyone for your patience.

If you have the time please take a moment to check out my Photography Site and especially my recently updated Photoblog.

I published an article earlier that I really need to have checked better before publishing it. Sincere apologies to anyone who read what I think is a good post, but was ruined by my over eagerness to publish before properly proof reading. Anyway, I’d like to say it won’t happen again, but It’s hard to proof read your own work and sometimes you are in a hurry to get something online and you make mistakes.

Unfortunately in this case it was really really bad. I’ve corrected it now with the help of my brother so if you read through it earlier and were put off by the unfinished nature of the copy please give it another chance. Again apologies.

After *A LOT* of tinkering I have finally re-launched my Photogaphy web site. I had been trying to cobble together a site using a combination of hand coding, some open source php, flash galleries and Wordpress. It had been going no where fast for quite some time so I stopped for a re-think. After doing some experimenting and following on from my article last week about iWeb Pro, I decided to see If I could do it in iWeb. It worked pretty well.

Although it looks pretty simple I pushed the boundaries of what you would normally do in iWeb. Everything is created in iWeb, and the only other applications I used were text wrangler and css edit in order to get Wordpress to work with it. I will do a complete write up later on just what I did, but while its frustrating at times you can do some cool stuff in Apple’s little web package. The only major problem (apart from its limitations) I encountered is that the code it generates is very bloated and contains a lot of garbage, which made it frustrating when trying to extract portions to work with Wordpress. Anyway, I am happy with it and will try and keep the photoblog going, as well as this one of course.

(I figured diluting this one with too many topics would get a bit irksome)

Just trying out this cool wordpress plug in that gives you the nice image overlay pop up box thingey! Click on the image below.

I think I’m finally getting the hand of this Wordpress theme thing. Having upgraded to Wordpress 2.5 I decided to play around with my theme a bit more. I had never really finished it since my last upgrade, but I was never completely happy either. As a friend of mine had pointed out, it was a bit too minimalist, and monochromatic. So I decided to add a bit more colour.

I liked the burgundy colour I was using for the text on my photography site (about the only thing I like about that site at the moment, but that’s another story) so I used the ever cool Adobe Kuler to come up with a colour scheme and then hacked away at it with css edit till I got it to where it is now. I am much happier with it, although there is still a few tweaks to be made, for example in the “what I’m reading” section the images are too far apart. The links are all out of date too, so I need to update those.

As always feedback is welcome.

After a somewhat nerve racking, but relatively painless process I have successfully migrated the back end of this blog from an old old old version of wordpress (1.15 I think) to the latest, 2.5

I plan on doing some cosmetic work to the website over the weekend and some not so cosmetic work, including upgrading Wordpress to 2.5, something I’ve been reluctant to do until now. Hopefully I won’t kill everything, but just in case I do apologies in advance for the outage.

I’ve made some pretty major changes to the site today, with a brand new theme. I took an existing third party theme and modified it to make it look like… well, this. I’ll probably still do some more tweaks, but I’m pretty happy with it. Any comments or feedback is welcome.

Once again apologies for lack of updates. An extremely busy two weeks at work has left me too mentally drained to blog meaningfully. Hopefully,normal services will return soon!

After a little experimentation I’ve decided to put the old theme back. It will do for now until I get to design my own properly from scratch. That’s my big project for 2008! - Learn CSS and Web Programming !

Wishing everyone a happy new year and a prosperous 2008.

I’m just trying a new theme on the site for today to see if I like it or not. It’s a pre-made wordpress theme called i-theme by ndesign studio. I don’t know if I like it or not yet, but the dull grey of the other one was starting to annoy me. Fickle, I know. Anyway, until I learn enough html / css coding to fully write my own, I’ll have to stick to modifying others or using pre-built ones. Comments or feedback would be appreciated.

Thanks