cleverswine.net

I found the Aeros wordpress theme, downloaded it, made some modifications, added my photos/movies/music widget, and here it is! I’ve only tested in Firefox 3 and Internet Explorer 7. The font looks a bit strange in IE7… Anyway, I’ll be fiddling with it some more over time. Let me know if something doesn’t look right in your browser.

I know the sidebar isn’t very elegant (especially the photos/movies/music links). I am soooo bad at design. Fooling around with those 3 links took longer than anything else I’ve done with this update. Every time I tried to get fancy, the layout would go to hell. I have grand ideas - really.

I’ve just installed the BitNami WordPress Stack on my laptop and it was so easy, and so cool! After the install, I had a fully functioning Wordpress up and running locally - complete with Apache, MySql, and PHP. After installation, I exported all of the data from cleverswine.net and imported it locally - again, super easy. As a result, I have a copy of my web site running locally that I can play around with. Sure, I could have installed Linux and set up everything that way, but I’ve had a hell of a time getting Linux to work on my laptop (I tried bleeding edge Ubuntu, Fedora, and Mint). Anyway, I happen to be very pleased with Vista.

I’ve been pretty happy with the current state of cleverswine.net, but I think it’s time for a redesign. I would like to de-emphasize the blogging portion of the site and instead create something more like a portal. I use quite a few web sites that provide activity feeds (Facebook, Delicious, Amazon, Netflix, Last.fm, and Flickr to name a few). Since I rarely blog anything of interest, I’m thinking that the main content on cleverswine.net should be a summary of my online activity (a la FriendFeed). That way, it’s constantly being updated and it gives more insight into me than my shallow blog entries. To take it even further, I’d like to be able to annotate my activity (I may be able to utilize FriendFeed for that). I still want to have a traditional blog, it just wouldn’t be the main focus.

Some other things I’d like to incorporate:
*An image gallery, rather than just linking to Flickr.
*A better “Project” page, where I can more easily showcase code and projects.
*A better “Music” page, where I can post songs with annotations.
*Be able to tag different elements on the site (not just blogs) and have a nice tag cloud.

So many ideas… None of this will happen in the near future, as I have enough on plate at the moment, but I will be doing some research on the matter. I’d like to stick with Wordpress, and I think that will work out.

I’ve added a long overdue feature to cleverswine.net: a Contact form. Now you can actually contact me via email from this web site.

You can use the Contact link in the navigation bar at the top, or just click here. The page is sort of ugly at the moment. I might pretty it up at some point.

Location
We’ll be looking at two potential wedding locations this weekend. Our preference is for an outdoor ceremony, so that’s where we are starting. First, we’ll be looking at the Abernathy Center in Oregon City. We like the photos we’ve seen. There are lots of gardens and gazebos and we would have the reception outdoors under a large tent. Second, we’ll be looking at Viewpoint Inn in Corbett. This place is really nice and upscale, and has a fabulous view. I feel pretty good about both of these places. It may be hard to choose in the long run.

Music
I’ve been listening and re-listening to music for the past couple of weeks, trying to decide what to play at our reception. This task has not been easy, as most of what I like would not be appropriate for a wedding reception. Sure, it’s my wedding, etc., but really, my choices would not sit well with a civilized group of people. I’m torn. Should I just scrap the idea of playing my favorites and put on classical music? Or should I just pick my favorites that are somewhat acceptable to the masses? It’s not in my nature to appeal to the masses…

Web Site
Some of you have seen the web site and participated in the interactive pages. I have been getting positive feedback so far. I wonder if anyone realizes that I totally stole the layout and graphics from someone else’s web site? As a reminder, I am not a web designer, I am a programmer. Therefore, I had no choice but to steal. Once we have selected a date for the wedding, I will update all of the location and date specific pages and announce the URL to everyone we know.

I finally joined the last.fm revolution. You can see all of the music that I listen to on right side of my page. I realize that the page loads much slower, but the cool factor is worth the wait. My last.fm name is dolcex if you want to be my friend.

I added a tool to the side bar on the right from which you can send a text message to my cell phone. Pretty cool, eh?

I’ve always wanted to go with a dark theme for my web site, but, as I’ve said before, I’m not a designer. Well, I happened upon a giant list of themes that I could use, and so I chose one. What do you think? I personally like it better than the last one.

It seems that people using Internet Explorer version 6.0 are missing some of the content on my web site. The left and right columns do not appear. There are 2 options to fix this problem:

1. I can hack the Wordpress theme stylesheets
2. IE6 users can upgrade their web browser

Since option 1 isn’t really an option, here are links to the latest and greatest web browsers (they are free, so you should get one):
Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera

Thank you.

p.s. While I’m writing about the web site, I want to mention that you can subscribe to my RSS feed. I find Google Reader to be a good feed reader, but there are plenty of others to choose from.

This web site has changed again! The content is exactly the same, but I’m messing around with the look and feel. The experience of trying to create my own style sheet from scratch has reinforced the truth about my lack of creativity. In the end, as you can see, I chose the Wordpress default theme because it’s actually better than anything I could come up with! Alas, I am a programmer, not a web designer. There’s a difference.