http://shannon.technobohemia.net is my NEW blog. It's built from Drupal, so it's a bit more sophisticated than this one. Plus, it's anti-spam isn't totally out of control. This blog is so anti-spammed that it's not even possible to post a link!

I'll be shutting down TechBo blogs over the next month or so. The only other blog is Xyon's ETN Birders site and it's rarely updated. I'll make him a new one soon.

Thanks for reading and join me at my new site!

The Ringmaster

Link: http://jchistory.technobohemia.net/index.html

I've added an intro page to Jobe's Opera House. It's a simple page to give visitors 3 links to the main history sections: forum, wiki, and photo gallery.

The photo gallery has double duty acting as an image host for techno bohemians.

I'm waiting for the new forum url to go live so I can fix the bad links the domain juggling has caused. The new directory won't recognize index.html, so visitors keep getting a forbidden message. I hope that once the forum moves to http://jcforum.technobohemia.net, it will fix the problem. Otherwise, I'm going to use some bad words.

I finally fixed the posting permissions to allow me to post to my blog again!

Here is what's been going on in the website progress...

I installed a new gallery that I hated...now I've restored the old gallery, but I can't take time to import more than a fraction of the old images.

Blogs fixed themselves...go fig.

Music service is on hold. No one used it anyhow.

Chat is gone. It was never used.

I think I'll be able to use the Coppermine gallery to play back our videos! I'll work on it over the break. I want a YouTube style interface!

The Coppermine Gallery is being reoriented to post images for my history site Jobe's Opera House!

Radio vs. Static needs an upgrade.

I'm getting disheartened. I'm not seeing much evidence that people are using my sites since the hack. Without feedback and people cheering me on, it's hard to get motivated to rebuild.

Thanks to Mr. Vesham's timely visit last night, I've installed Imagemagick to the server. Image Magick is a program that sites can use to scale photographs and images without losing a lot of quality. It's working perfectly on the JCWiki (http://jcwiki.technobohemia.net,) but Gallery 2 is not wanting to play nice.

The Gallery 2 problem seems to be a fairly common one, but I can't yet find a solution that doesn't require a programmer.

Still, images on the JCWiki look great.

This morning, thanks to a quiet week at work, I sat down and learned how to set up a "cron job" on the server! A Cron job is a way to have the server automatically execute a script at a specified time. Why is that worth blogging about?

Because that should activate the TechBo AD server! Yup! I've got an ad server to embed in all the Techno Bohemia web pages!

"NO, sweet Ringmaster! Tell us you have not fallen to the dark side of commerce!"

Nope. Just shameless self-promotion. The only ads carried will be Techno Bohemia cross promotional ads! There are so many specialized sections of the site, the ads will allow me to promote videos in the music section and the whole site on the history site. I mean, if anyone wants to give me money, I'll run any ad they want, but I'm not expecting advertisers to bust down my door.

It will be an hour before I know if I entered the data correctly. Fingers crossed!

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In other news, I fixed my busted computer with a vaccum cleaner last night! I looked in the case with a flashlight and saw that the heatsink over the processor was caked with dust! The computer had been overheating and shutting down, so being the big bad tech guy I am, I popped the fan off, vaccumed the heatsink out, and boom, it's fixed. I wish I'd looked at it in April when it first started shutting off. duh.

Anyhoo, not having to worry about it shutting off will allow me to make graphics for the site once again and probably tinker with lots of new features that I've been putting off. It's amazing what a comfy chair can accomplish!