The ADD of TheJames

I’m *finally* making an effort to get back into putting some sort of presence out here on the internets again. I’m still uncertain about wtf I’m going to write about on this site, since I have my photography website that I’m trying to keep up also, once again. But I’m going to give it a shot… wish me luck.

(I’m keeping this post here kind of like a memoir of when I started this site.)

Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!

Rather than wait to update the entire site all at once, I’ve chosen to update it ongoing as time permits me to.

I had planned for a more blog formatted section for a while so that I could get information out there about where I was shooting and what was going on and better keep everyone in the loop. Well, here is the start of that.

You can either check this page for updates and new photos or just subscribe using your favorite news reader to our news feed.

Due to an odd database error this AM I have decided to redo this entire site today. I expect it to be up and running tonight with all new features. Wish me luck!

In the meanwhile, checkout my flickr pages .

Beginning next Monday I will be publishing a weekly article here about my favorite stuff. This will be an open ended subject where I will talk about my favorite places, hangout spots, stores or computers stuff; and possibly more. I hope that it will be something useful to the readers here can find useful. Please don’t hesitate to comment or email me with suggestions and/or feedback.

I was playing around a while ago with the idea of purchasing one of those DNA posters; I have always thought they were really cool looking. I still haven’t gotten over the price of those things, but I did find someone who thoght that was equally cool and made a web program that converts your website into a similar DNA like design. It does this by evaluating the ammount of images and text on the pages and pumping it through some algorithm. Really beautiful, go check it out. Here is what mine looks like.

As a side note the creator of the Web2DNA project also pointed to a webpage that turns your website into a graph, also neat but not as colorful. And again ,here is mine

Ok… so I haven’t written shit here for some time (read: way to long). But, I have been working on a really cool project and have some other neat client work in the pipes; more on that tomorrow. Here is a really cool article that I came across that deserved more than the usual delicious link.

Apple’s Telegraphed Punch

CSS Reboot – May 1st 2005

Well here it is… For those of you that are keeping count, that would not include me. This would be version 5 of JamesZambon.com. The ongoing changes not withstanding. I am always tinkering with the CSS of this site and without the flexibility that CSS offers me I would never be able to pull this off with out tons of work. Early last year I began using standards to design and with that I began coding this site in XHTML Strict 1.0. This has really made the prediction of how the design will render in various browsers tons easier. Not necessarily easy, but easier.

Well what do you think about the new design?

UPDATE: I forgot to mention my site is in the list at the CSS reboot website. Goto it and vote all of the sites in the contest.

After finding out about FeedMap from Scoble I entered my data and found this map of the local bloggers. At first I was a little dismayed, but I soon realized a couple of things:

This site only seems to map (by default anyway) MSN spaces blogs. It seems that anyone else must manually enter their data.

And that the bloggers in the Tampa Bay area just aren’t that active.

Regardless, go check out the NeighBlogMap of your area, you may be surprised.

Well I have been tinkering with it for some time and now I have finally switched my site over to WordPress from MovableType.

And I don’t need to hear how shitty my site looks right now, I know all about it (reference). I will be getting around to fixing that shortly.

Anyway, I decided on the big switch for several reasons.

• Speed: I have been quite irritated about how slow MovableType has been on my server. I run my own dedicated server and I get about 300-500 hits a day. So that shoots the theory about server load problems.
• Configuration: and by this I don’t mean setting up the templates (because MT kicks WP‘s ass at that). I am talking about installing and configuring the server and application. WP‘s 2 step install just plain rocks. I was amazed. That and the speed at which it imported all 150+ of my blog entries.
• Free (as in beer & speech): Because I have been a member of MT‘s professional developer’s network I have been alloted an install of MT with 4 blogs and 3 authors. This allowed me to escape their licensing scheme. This was a great token from the SixApart peeps, but I still felt a little weird about using MT under these circumstances. Sure it was “given” to me, but kind of in a bribe type of way. Like a lawyer having a deal with a tow-truck driver for every referral that he send him from an accident he gets a cut of the action. I know, thats a little different, but it’ the best analogy that I could come up with.
• PHP vs. CGI: Kind of related to the speed issue that I mentioned earlier, but a little different spin here. I know PHP very well and by proxy I know PERL and thusly the CGI module. But I do not know (nor do I want to spend time to learn right now) CGI or PERL very well. I feel that by using WP my knowledge and speed of development in PHP will increase immensly.

One of my major dilemmas was that I knew that some things on my site would break once I made the switch. The major loss right now is the Articles list that ran on the sidebar. That is driving me nuts right now. I have several options and I don’t really care for any of them. They are all kludges.

• Write my own module to handle it.
• Keep using MT for it.
• Just let it go and forget about it.
• Go back to MT all together.
• Switch to a “blog-roll” type solution.
• Post daily or weekly “around the net” posts. Looks like the best solution.
• Wish in one hand and… well you know.

One of the other things that I had to compromise on was the permalink structure. I had MT set up to use underscores to replace the spaces in my entry titles. WP uses hyphens and offers no way that I have found to change that. I think there is a way using REGEX and Mod-Rewrite to redirect visitors but I have not messed around with that too much. It looks like it would take more time that I have available right now. My Interim solution is to copy the MT entries (http://jameszambon.com/blog/ directory) into the new web directory. I do not like this solution. It leads to broken links on my site but it does maintain the integrity of the links that point to my site and that is very important.

So I will keep looking for a good solution for the Link-Blog (Article Links) and for the permalinks. However, I am enjoying the experience so far. WP is fast, OSS, PHP configurable and very easy to install. And.. It has inspired me to add some features to this site that I just didn’t have the energy to undertake before (more on this later). I am a fan so far, go WordPress!.