Category Archives: Site Updates

Technical Difficulties

Since Friday, February 23, we’ve had some technical difficulties with the prwdot.org domain which may have prevented people from sending us email or visiting our website (or any other website in the prwdot.org domain). If you are reading this message, then for you the problem has already been fixed (at least on the computer and internet connection you are using at the moment). For others, our site may be inaccessible until as late as Saturday, March 3. If you wouldn’t mind, please leave a comment on this post letting me know that you were able to read it, so that I know who is once again able to visit our site.

If you’d like a more technical explanation, read on.

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Yahoo! My Web 2.0

For those who haven’t already noticed, I have switched my [Linklog](http://prwdot.org/linklog.html) from [del.icio.us](http://del.icio.us/) to [Yahoo!](http://www.yahoo.com/)’s [My Web 2.0](http://myweb2.search.yahoo.com/) service. Every time I come across an interesting link that I’d like to remember, or that I’d like to share with everyone, I add it to My Web 2.0. Occasionally these links make it over to our regular blog, but more often than not, the Linklog is the only place to find them. If you would like to follow along, you can simply check out the [Linklog](http://prwdot.org/linklog.html) page, or even better, subscribe to the [Linklog feed](http://feeds.feedburner.com/prwdotmyweb) (also available from our [Feed info page](http://prwdot.org/feeds.html).

My reasoning for the switch has to do with del.icio.us’ recent [acquisition by Yahoo!](http://blog.del.icio.us/blog/2005/12/yahoo.html). del.icio.us and Yahoo!’s My Web 2.0 serve the same function: saving, tagging, and organizing collections of links, as well as sharing these links with the web community (if you so desire). I don’t believe that these two products, performing the exact same function, will exist as separate entities for very long. I also don’t believe that del.icio.us offers enough advantages over Yahoo!’s existing offering to make it compelling for Yahoo! to keep around. So I’m just making a pre-emptive switch over to My Web 2.0, because I think that’s where the future is. I am sure that if you don’t switch, there will be some sort of transition in the future… but I’d rather just make the switch now.

If you’re looking for a great way to keep track of your links, try [My Web 2.0](http://myweb2.search.yahoo.com/).

Guest Map

I have set up a [Frappr!](http://www.frappr.com/) guestmap for World Wide Wood. Frappr uses [Google Maps](http://local.google.com/) to let our site visitors show us where in the world they are! So head on over to the [guest map](http://www.frappr.com/worldwidewood) and make your mark! The guestmap link can always be found on the left side of our pages under ‘Quick Links’.

Go to it!

Running on Gallery 2

I haven’t formally announced it until now, but for about a month now we have been running our photo gallery on [Gallery 2](http://gallery.menalto.com/). Our old gallery [still exists](http://gallery.prwdot.org/), but we won’t be adding anything new to it. We will just be keeping it around so that links to the old gallery still work.

The new gallery is linked from our sidebar, or you can simply reach it from [http://prwdot.org/gallery2/](http://prwdot.org/gallery2/). To the user, it will look more or less the same as the old gallery, though we have restructured and reorganized many of the albums. Rather than simply migrating the old gallery, I went back to my source photos and re-uploading everything, making some improvements and fixes to photos along the way.

For our family members, your accounts from the old gallery should still work with the new gallery. The biggest difference is that we don’t have a separate gallery for family photo albums. The family albums are now sprinkled in with the rest of the albums, but they are invisible until you log in to your account. So if you’re a family member, and you can’t log in, can’t find some photos you’re looking for, or don’t already have an account, please let us know!

The biggest shortcoming of Gallery 2, so far, is that it doesn’t have any RSS functionality built in. There was a module developed as part of [Google Summer of Code](http://code.google.com/summerofcode.html), but it hasn’t made it into an official release of Gallery 2. From what I’ve heard, it isn’t even built on the latest Gallery 2 code, so I probably won’t be using it for a while. Of course, according to [Feedburner](http://feedburner.com/), only six people are subscribed to our old gallery’s RSS feed, so maybe it’s not worth it anyway. Would anyone miss it if our gallery’s RSS feed went away? ( Did you even know it was there? Did you know about our [other feeds](http://prwdot.org/feeds.html)? )

The other disappointment is that Gallery 2 doesn’t have automatic notification of new comments to the gallery. So I have to go through manually and check to see if anyone has commented (so far it’s two comments from [Michelle](http://mikao.blogspot.com/) – thanks!).

Other than that, the software is great from an administration and customization standpoint. And it still works with [iPhotoToGallery](http://zwily.com/iphoto/) – a must!

I hope everyone enjoys our [new gallery](http://prwdot.org/gallery2/)!

One Year

One year ago today, we [launched our site redesign](http://prwdot.org/archives/2004/09/pennies_nickels.html). Other than a few minor tweaks, the design remains unchanged. We are both very happy with the design, and we haven’t felt the need to make any major changes*. We hope that everyone else continues to like the design as much as we do!

* That is, changes visible to our users. We have made some semi-major under the hood changes, such as moving to fully standards-compliant, semantic XHTML markup.

Markdown

I’ve just installed [John Gruber](http://daringfireball.net/)’s [Markdown](http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/) plugin for [Movable Type](http://www.movabletype.org/). This plugin allows us to use nice, readable, non-HTML markup when we write our blog posts. It also allows our blog readers to use this same shorthand when posting comments to our blog entries. You can get a basic intro [here](http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/basics).

Enjoy!

MT32

***Movable Type 3.2 is out|http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/news/2005/08/movable_type_3_2.html***, and I’ve upgraded the prwdot.org blogs to the new version. Presently, and in the immediate future, there really won’t be many changes for our blog readers to see. But for the folks who have blogs hosted at prwdot.org, you will notice various changes and improvements in the content management interface.

If you’re looking for a powerful, full-featured, mature blog authoring system, go check out ***Movable Type|http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/***. And if you need any professional assistance with Movable Type, head over to my pal ***Chad|http://jayseae.cxliv.org/***’s ***Everitz Consulting|http://www.everitz.com/***.* You could tell him that Peter sent you, but I don’t think that will get you (or me) anything. 🙂

*Incidentally, I just noticed that the E.C. site has been redesigned by Jesse of ***PlasticMind|http://www.plasticmind.com/***… very, very slick.

Post frequency

Question for you blog readers. How many posts would it take before you would seriously have trouble keeping up with our blog? Currently, we are averaging around one post per day. Would you be able to deal with two posts per day? Three? Four? More?

There are a lot of things that I’d like to post about, but I hold back on posting because of this (possibly incorrect) perception I have that our blog is already enough for most folks to keep up with.* So let me know what you think about that… could you stand to see more posts out of us? Or is it enough to handle as is?

* That’s partially the reason that I was toying with the ***WoodCast|http://prwdot.org/woodcast/*** – I was thinking that I would use it as a platform on which to discuss all of those topics I didn’t blog about. As you can see, however, I only have the introductory episode. I realized after discussing the issue with Becky that the idea I had come up with was little more than an audio blog, and not a podcast… and that’s not really what I want it to be. So it’s back to the drawing board with the WoodCast. We’ll see if anything actually comes out of it.

Gallery 2

***Gallery|http://gallery.menalto.com/***, the software that powers our ***photo gallery|http://gallery.prwdot.org/***, will soon be releasing version 2. I’ve been testing out the latest preview builds, and it is pretty sweet. The look and feel are quite different from the current version of Gallery. It’s much faster and more robust, and has a lot more power for managing photos. You can head over to our ***test gallery|http://prwdot.org/gallery2/*** to see for yourself how it looks. Let me know what you think!