Desultory Thoughts

After 21 posts you would think that I would’ve mentioned my wife by now! Her name is Heather and she’s absolutely awesome! That’s why I married her almost 9 years ago. We’ll have our 9th anniversary in March.

Come to think of it, I mentioned my wife in a previous post entitled “Advertising Clutter”, the the post dealt more with her magazine than it did her. But she was my inspiration for that post, and don’t forget it!

She’s not only just a great wife, she’s a wonderful mom to our two beautiful children. I love her a lot. She was able to quit her job at LDS Hospital earlier this year and I’m reallyglad that she’s able to be a full-time Mom. I’m not only glad that she’s able to, I’m glad she WANTS to. There are some women that are able to stay home (in fact, sometimes it’s economically a wash that they go to work after paying the babysitter, paying for gas, insurance and car payment on a second car, paying more taxes because of the higher tax bracket, etc) but would rather go out and have a career. Of course, there are situations where it is necessary and I don’t speak of these situations. Several people at my work do it because they have to; usually single moms.

Now that I finally got the site working like it should I decided to personalize it. The design was inspired by the video opener that is appended to most of the videos I do. It’s an animated opening with a song that my brother Dave composed. I’ll post the song one of these days, it’s very cool. Better yet, I’ll post the opener. I did it with Adobe AfterEffects. I’m quite fond of it myself. The first version was done in Adobe Premier, then I redid it in AfterEffects which was a great way of learning all that AfterEffects has to offer.

Switching to WordPress [wordpress.org] didn’t go quite as smooth as I had hoped, but hopefully it will pay off. I’m just glad I made the switch early with only a handful of posts to transfer. There is an import tool in WordPress that should seemlessly transfer all of your posts and comments from Blogger.com. It may have been the way I set up the database and the SQL server, but when I imported the posts and assigned them categories, the category pages weren’t being created. I’m actually still having that problem with the “Blog” category. When you click on a category you should only see posts that have been labeled as such. When you click “Blog” it just brings up the current posts. What’s up with that? I ended up recreating each post manually and that worked better. The problem is, I still have to go back in and add the links; the cool part about blogging. I love that you can read something cool and then go right to the source and find out more if you choose to.

Another set back was the discovery that I couldn’t imbed Google Video (video.google.com) in my posts without breaking the page structure. Late last night I found a plug-in that worked around that issue, but it didn’t work after an hour of troubleshooting. If I’m insane enough I’ll stay up after this post to try and get it working. I hope I don’t make that choice. I’m really tired!

As soon as I posted the “Messed Up!” comment, things reverted back to normal. I immediatley switched to the template I was trying to modify before and it looks like it’s going to work out. Still some work to do to get it personalized and looking the way I want, but at least the blog is readable for the time being.

Somehow I really messed up the template. I’m in the process of trying to figure out what’s going on. I think it happened when I was editing previous posts that were imported from Blogger. On blogger when I posted images I used the style tag and right floated the pictures. I noticed during the import to WordPress that it was stripped out, so I added it back in. I didn’t bother checking my edits and then started applying a new template. So now I can’t be certain what the problem is. I reverted back to the default template and things are still messed up. That’s why I think it must be the style tag in the img field.

Don’t worry, I’ll get it fixed.

I’m in the process of switching from Blogger [blogger.com] to WordPress [wordpress.org]. Bear with me as I make changes to the look and feel of the site. I’ve already imported my Blogger posts and they came over well, with a few exceptions. Nothing serious enough to worry about.

Things that I can tell I like already are categories, which were missing at Blogger. I’m going to be adding a calendar for navigation. They’re pretty trendy, but they really look good, I think.

Stay tuned!