Website

Flickr or Self-Hosted?

I’m trying out taking a photo every day for January. So far so good, but I haven’t done anything with them. We’ll see how long this lasts. So far, most of the photos are boring.

I’m trying to decide between posting them here in my Gallery, or posting them in my Flickr account.

Do you prefer viewing photos on Flickr or on a personal website?
Do you prefer using Flickr or a personal website to post your photos?

If I use Flickr, there are many, many ways to integrate my gallery with my WP blog. Plus it’s super lazy and easy to upload and sort photos on Flickr. With groups and tagging, there’s even a chance that more than 3 people would see my photos! Not that my photography is awesome or anything, I just like comments.

If I keep my photos here, I’ll have to change to a new host. I’ve been with this host for years, and I’m ridiculously brand loyal, but there’s just not enough space to start hosting lots of photos. Upgrading to a new package here isn’t very beneficial, so it would pretty much have to involve switching to a new host. This blog is on Modhost.com. Everything else I own (except SKS) is on DreamHost because of the practically limitless space. I just don’t like the DH control panel interface. I much prefer cPanel, otherwise I’d have packed up off this server years ago.

This sort of ties in with my website amalgamation post, in that I’m still trying to determine the direction I want to go with my website(s).

What do you think? Flickr or self-hosted Gallery? I even made a poll! Come to RaspberryPaws.com to vote!

WordCamp Toronto

Anyone interested in going to WordCamp Toronto with me on March 27-28th?
(Their website doesn’t have all the info on it yet, unfortunately)

It’s like a conference about WordPress, blogging, and networking. I’ve never been to one and I want to go. It would be even more fun to go with a buddy, though!

Website Amalgamation?

Long, random thoughts that have been floating around in my head for a while.

I have several websites. RaspberryPaws, CaitlinThompson, ClutterCubed, and KittenFoot, to name a few. RP is my personal blog. CT is my so-called “official” website (for when I’m all famous and stuff, eh?), C3 is my public decluttering blog (128 feed readers!), and KF was supposed to be my cosplay portfolio/gallery website (but it sucked and died).
I have 15 domains total, but in this post I’m not talking about the ones I have for my mom, the ones I bought because of a ‘great’ idea that I never had time to pursue, the one for Josh that he never uses anymore 🙁 *cry* or Con-G, or the ones like KittyHats.com and SpunkyKittyStyle.com that both redirect to SpunkyKitty.

Ok, fine, I’m a total packrat in all aspects of my life, including domain names. That’s not the point of this post (really).

I’d like to compile at least the first four together somehow. I’m just not sure how, yet.
When I post comments in blogs, I sometimes have a hard time deciding which domain to put in the optional URL field. Sometimes I want to promote my decluttering blog, but sometimes I wouldn’t mind if people looked at my personal blog here. CaitlinThompson.com is kinda languishing, but it’s the URL I stuck on my twitter account when I created it. It got a whole bunch of hits when I got that retweet from Adam Savage, but the content is not very relevant anymore.

I like the general idea of what Gord has done, but I’d like more information on the main splash page.
I could easily compile all the information together into one site under one URL, but I’m loath to lose the names RaspberryPaws.com or CaitlinThompson.com. I haven’t yet decided if that’s irrational or not. KittenFoot I’m thinking of killing entirely anyway, since it’s the most useless. I’d rather have a cosplay section on an existing site than a standalone cosplay site.

Maybe I’ll set up CT as the “main” site. I could have it display its current info (plus hopefully something that doesn’t suck), and excerpts from RP and C3 posts. I’m not sure I could do that without getting dinged for “duplicate content”, but I’m sure there’s some way around that.

Any thoughts? Suggestions? Tales of encouragement/woe? Let me hear it!

Family Tree Software

Has anyone made a family tree site, and/or have any suggestions for some cheap, simple software for creating one?

I’m considering making a site for the Brown side of my family. Every year we have a Christmas Reunion, and it’s getting harder and harder to keep track of everyone (people marrying/changing names/having kids/etc.). We do a gift exchange, and it’s hard to keep up with any changes. For example if you’re told you got “Jennifer Michaels” as the person to buy a gift for, you may not remember that it’s the person you know as Jenny Brown who recently got married, or that Alex Brown is a 4 year old girl, and not the 13 year old boy you were thinking it was.

Ideally, the software could have more than one user, so I could enlist the more tech-savvy of my relatives to update their own info. PHP and SQL is preferable.

I’d like to make the go-to site for the Who’s Who in the Brown family, but I don’t need a lot of bells and whistles. I know there are several commercial sites out there that will host a family site like this, complete with a family tree showing how everyone is related, but since I’ll likely be alone in this, I don’t want to pay $50/year out of my own pocket for a site that’ll likely only be accessed in December when people scramble to try and pick an appropriate gift for the exchange. Plus, I don’t really want another site to have to follow all the time (like Facebook, blurgh) so I don’t want to have a gallery, or individual status updates, or any of that other social media stuff.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Happy Thanksgiving weekend to all my Canadian friends! I hope yours was as excellent as mine was!

I have belatedly made my blog Pink for October. LJ too, but that one kinda sucks because I’m too lazy to edit a premade pink theme. Remember that October is Breast Cancer Awareness month. Both of my (blood) grandmothers have fought – and beat! – breast cancer.

Random Musings

I went to the dentist this morning! I haven’t been in a while, since I hadn’t bothered to find one in Guelph yet. Now I have a good one, based on a recommendation from Josh’s aunt and uncle. Nice guy; did a thorough job.
My teeth and jaw kinda hurt now due to the cleaning, but they still have that dentist-clean feeling even though I ate lunch. ^_^

I need better categories for my blog. I just haven’t had time to think up any good ones. 😛

I’m trying to decide what to wear to work for Hallowe’en and/or what to wear for Trick or Eat.
I’m thinking either my (new, improved) faun costume or a generic vampire or something. Exciting.
Apparently Josh’s work is having a Smurf theme. Haha! His team is twisting it around a bit and making horror Smurfs.

I want to make some pajamas/kigurumi of Kon.

If I got them done on time I could wear them for Hallowe’en! Maybe I could wear them to give out candy in the Guelph Santa Claus Parade! Con-G is trying to be in the parade… but we can’t get a hold of the guy who’s supposed to be in charge of it. We’ve emailed and left phone messages. Boo-urns! We’re not sure if we’re calling the right number, though. The published number is just voicemail with a message about a seniors tour on it. o_0

Note that many posts are now public, and thus your comments are also public. Muahahaha!

New Theme!

I really like this new WordPress theme I just found. My blog was boring (in more ways than just the entries) and I hadn’t found a nice theme that I liked yet.

This one is pretty, though it does have some superfluous features (check the bottom bar – readers can select a custom style for this theme).

Now all I need to to get people to read my blog again. That’ll involve fixing the broken RSS feed. :/
Sweet! I fixed the broken RSS feeds! It was just a stupid permalink problem. :p

LJ Test Post

This is a test post to test a new plugin to see if I can crosspost some of my stuff here to my LJ, rather than having to log in to both accounts and copy/paste the posts I want to appear in both.

I don’t know if it’ll work at all, since I have the privacy settings on WordPress here.

Testing, Testing

This is a test post!

If it works, you will not be able to see it unless you are logged in.

If you are logged in and see this post, please leave a comment on it so I know you can see it.

Then please log out and refresh the main page, and then let me know if you can see this post or not while you are logged out.