Posts Tagged Site News

Ok closer to 3 minutes but we’ll take it! LOL I metioned in one of the posts about hurricane Earl that we were contacted by BBC radio in London after I made a comment to one of their news articles which asked at the end for reader contributions about preparing for the hurricane. I was quite surprised actually when they called me later that evening and asked if we would mind to go on one of the radio programmes, 5Live and speak. We got quite a kick out of the idea and agreed. They got a bit of background info and we went on. Both of us were quite nervous, well me for sure! Anyway they thanked us and asked to share any photos or videos and such. Well we tried to get a few pics and a vid or two but with all that was happening preparing for the storm we didnt have time to get anything really good or interesting. Plus we were worn out as well. Anyway after that initail radio interview I guess they passed on the fact that Alison was from the Northeast of England to their colleagues in Newcastle which is near to Sunderland and the idea of them speaking to a local girl who was in North Carolina was to their liking. So out of the blue the next morning we get another call from BBC Newcastle. The number came upo blocked on my cell so I didnt answer it thinking it was work calling and wanting me to come in on my day off!  They left a voicemail and a number and since I still have a subscription on to Skype I called them back. They asked us if we would spend a few minutes to pre record an interview to air on their morning show “Alfie and Charlie at Breakfast” . We spent a little bit of time talking to a few of them there, very nice and friendly people they are! Anyway we did the interview and found out when it would be on. It aired this morning about half past 7  UK time, of course we snoozing, or trying to snooze. The wind and rain were whipping up a lot then. Wasn’t so bad as it could have been, the hurricane had weakend and was making a northeastward turn as we were going to bed so we were spared the brunt of the storm. Anyway we were back at work first thing this morning and didnt have power so we would have to wait until we returned to try and hear it. As it turned out I was only at work about an hour when my cell rang and it showed “blocked” ! Well I answered it and it was BBC Newcastle again saying the interview was picked up by the BBC London and broadcast all over! Being at work I didnt have a lot of time to talk but they said they want to do another one on how we made out and all. So they are supposed to get back with us to set a time for it. As for the interview we prerecorded it wasn’t until we got back home that we had a listen to it and I was able to record it. 

OK without further ado, here we are!

Our (Alison’s) interview on the BBC

I signed up a while back as I wrote about in this post for the google Friend Connect Preview and today got a mail that this site had been whitelisted to use it! While not replacing any of the login information of this site, its more an added feature letting you sign in to certain features of this site with using your Google, Yahoo, AIM or OpenID account info. Its not incorporated into the core of wordpress which powers this site, it’s rather an added set of gadgets, or widgets if you prefer, such as the “shout out” box there to the right to let anyone post a quick comment or say hello. They have only a couple of gadgets available at the moment including a “rate it” gadget, with the promise of more to come, both from Google and independent developers. I was looking at several of these “shout out” widgets to use before , but most of them have so many proprietary links to ads ands services that i wasn’t interested. This is a very simple one, just comment and post! I have found over the years that no matter how easy it seems to me to post a comment to these blog entries a lot of web surfers really are just passing by and don’t have the time or know-how to do it. Well i think this one will work out well as most people I know have one of these id’s and it only takes a single click to join the site or sign in. As i mentioned its an early release so I don’t know if its available to the general public yet or not, I’m assuming so, but you know what that entails ;) It only took me a couple of minutes to get it set up on this site, the first step was to upload two files to the root of the server which lets the code work around the site. the next step was verify the files were there and the next was to generate the code for the widgets, its already set up on a default size so its only a few seconds to use that and have it running on your web-page. In my case i spent a few more minutes customising the colours to match the site. I chose two of the gadgets, a member gadget, and the comment gadget. I may play around with some others if they can do something that I don’t have already at my fingertips. I did run into a problem trying to post the code into a post- it wouldn’t work. Putting it in the sidebar widgets though was smooth as silk, worked instantly. I think it is a WordPress specific problem as the sidebar is generated from a different directory that the post contents… I think.. well I’ll play around and see what I can do with it. Just as it is now I like it as a simple way for friends to say a quick hello. I’m sure though thats just the tip of the iceberg though. so check it out and say hello! I don’t know what the plans are for these hosted blog programs like blogger and the like as right now you have to be able to upload files to the server. But I see it somehow being incorporated into blogger very soon and actually transforming that into something similar to myspace or facebook! , well the social connection part anyway.

my lady in red

9 days to go and I just can’t wait! :) my heart hasn’t stopped racing since the day she booked the flight! Well truthfully it hasn’t stopped racing since that morning i woke and read that message from her on Mingle! And each day now brings us nearer to our special day and the excitement just builds more and more. Once again today we had a chance for a quick skype and I got to see my baby once again :) Shes just back in from another outing, this time to WalMart! yes they have one there too, operating as an ASDA – WalMart Supercentre!

(From Wikipedia, Asda is a United Kingdom supermarket chain which retails food, clothing, toys and general merchandise. It became a subsidiary of the American retail giant Wal-Mart, the world’s largest retailer,[1] in 1999,[2] and is the second largest chain in the UK after Tesco,[3] having overtaken Sainsbury’s in 2003. Asda is Wal-Mart’s largest non-U.S. subsidiary, accounting for almost half of the company’s international sales.)

So here’s my super shopping Brit standing outside the afore mentioned WalMart. Quite a different look than hte super centers here, but none the less theres the familiar WalMart logo. my guess is pretty soon that star in the middle will be replaced with a world globe ;) Well all of this is just another example of how all this technology helps to keep us close by sharing the days events with each other.

Well i havent had so much to send her these last few days though, trying to get over a bad cold or maybe the flu and I’ve kept inside mostly. I did send her a pic of me after getting rid of some of my grey hair this morning! shhhh! LOL well I dont think I’m so vain really but I do hate having a head full of grey hair and looking so old. I’m not about to give in to it yet, but when the time comes i will go gracefully but until I can afford that “Just for Men” I will keep using it! ;) I dont have a before and after pic so i will just post the after one…

Magically the grey is gone

Now just to get the beard to match! lol well thats another day. Have to do these things gradually or i will look in the mirror and not recognize myself! Well anyway this is image Alison sees from my webcam during our video chats. I still think i have the better view of seeing her ;) Its wonderful these video calls, only it just makes me want to stop and look at her than to speak! As much as i love this I cant wait to give it all up and have her face to face though. Its been a long three years almost and if you think about it it has hardly been a months time we have actually been together in the same place! ?But we still have managed so very to stay close and connected several times a day without fail. Maybe the very rare occassion one of us was too ill or unable to use a pc or cell, but even those days we at least managed once to speak somehow if it wasnt more than a text.

I guess this post is more a ramble than anything else, just trying to pass the time until these days are passed anf we are where we were destined to be, at each others side :) love you baby xxxx

I dont know what I did, but somehow I messed up the WordPress installation and had to reinstall it frm scratch. :( Well the good news is I have been exporting a backup file of every post, comment, image and file so its not been too bad a thing and it seems to have made the site work a bit better too. I think the culprit was a WordPress plugin, WP Super Cache, that set something wrong, or either I didn’t know how to use it. Whatever the cause everything is back now … almost Well i lost the user data, not that I had that many registered ones anyway, LOL , but you will have to get a new password. I actually don’t know if there’s a link anywhere to reset yours as I have added all the users back with their original emails so It may be if you try to log in it will show one of those”forgot my password ” tings and you can reset it. I think I remembered Alison’s and have set hers… and Mike I set yours up with the one I gave you to the sub domain ftp login, don’t know if you remember it but I’ll mail you too with it.
Sorry if its caused anyone any problems, and it sure wasn’t that you have been unregistered on purpose! I’m just so freaking happy I still have my posts! :)

Well I had to lose the other theme as I finally found some of those incompatibilty issues with WordPress 2.6  I was worried aboutafter making the sidebar useable.  Mainly the gallery functions were not working, it would load the gallery images in the post, but no support for the individual image pages themselves, and I really can’t do without them. But I still was able to retain the image header that I so dearly love :) And I still have a very clean looking theme as well, and very well maintained in regards to WordPress upgrades by the designer Sadish Bala on his site WordPress Rocks. He has a number of very well desgined WP themes available for free and a very nice selection of premium themes as well. I am tempted to see if he can take on the job of getting the old theme up to date as it was just so eye pleasing to me, not that this one isn’t though! It’s called MistyLook, and I actually use it on my WordPress as well.  Its solid and very clean and works very well. I should just stay with his designs as they are some of the best out there and I wont have to worry with hacking all these other ones to just get them to function, just dont have the time for it.  well off now to change the feedjit codes and some of the ad codes to match the site… again :( I’m not changing this anymore… for a while ;)  LOL

And I pray the last~ lol First of all , apologies to anyone visiting the site the last couple or evenings and being suddenly lost in a  completely different layout from one page to another, or one visit to another! :o) if you’ve been here within the last few days you may have seen or read the post where I had some trouble with the original theme just having a few bits of trouble with the latest WordPress upgrade, nothing major but it threw off the look of the sidebar widgets just a little bit, well no one would probably have noticed but me, but its those little things get on my nerves, I dont mind if most of the posts I make are lacking any real depth or information, but I want the site to look right at least. Well I have had my eye on this template now for a long time, the link to the original is still in the footer as it is mostly their work still. The only trouble was that it wasn’t ‘widget ready’ as it was advertised to be. Well yes it had a sidebar that could be edited manually, but I wanted to be able to use the widget administration capabilities available with the last couple of versions of WordPress. Just makes it simpler IF I do change a theme, the widgets are carried over to he next template without a lot of work. anyway I confess to not having any grand knowledge of the workings of a wordPress template. Well some of it. I’m fairly adept, if I say so myself, at playing around with the CSS and even adding a few codes here and there. But when it came to understanding how to make the sidebar widgets ‘editable’ (if that’s the word) from the admin area I was clueless. Well I have had this template now a few moths I think, even had the image header set up and couldn’t wait to use it! it was only then after I uploaded and activated it I realised it wasn’t working 100%. Well i have looked and looked how to widgetize a sidebar and to be honest i was lost trying to understand what to do. So that’s the reason I had that other theme going and I made that header image that I thought was very artistic :) Well you can see where the inspiration of it came from, I had this header image already in my head and really wanted to use it. Anyway this evening I was sitting around just messing with the site and css and the thought struck me… what if I replace the sidebar php page of this theme with one from a theme that had a single simple working sidebar already in place. My first attempt was a bit disappointing though. the sidebar appeared at the top of the page and that wouldn’t do. Well i got to looking at a few of the sidebar php files of a few different themes and happened to notice that most all of them had a specific ‘id’ in the HTML division tag at the beginning… EUREKA! I changed the id to the original one called for, refreshed the page and I was ECSTATIC! :) Can it really be this simple?? Oh I love this theme, even more than the one I had up originally. Its everything I wanted, a prominent place to show my Alison Michelle and me together first, then the layout is clean and simple and, to me, very easy to navigate and view the content too. The color scheme is pleasing to me as well. I just like it period. this is the one I will keep, just pray I don’t run into any trouble by failing to fix something else I don’t know about yet. Well as always with these theme changes, if you notice anything out of whack anywhere or any errors you encounter, please let me know. I’ll see what I can do to straighten it out.

Visitors may have noticed the theme changes over the last few days. I upgraded WordPress to the latest versiona week or two ago and something in it set off a few problems in the sidebars of the other template that I really wanted to keep. I guess its for thebest though as Ihave been looking into some that werent so heavily built by images and are faster loading. I did find one I really liked. but unfortunatley it isn’t “widget ready” as yet so I wll have to wait until its updated, if it ever is or do it my self, which I dont have the time to mess with at the moment. I was looking around the other night and found this theme I am using now, Sakura 3. It’s a really nice clean open theme, and easily editable with a minimum of html knowlege. I’ve been customising it just a bit, changing the CSS in some areas and of course the header image. I sort of like thmuted green and tan shades and like the cleaner less busy look, of course the content isnt readily visible as you eneter the page requiring a visitor to scroll down so I may have some quick exits if they dont bother to go gown a bit, but nevermind I like this. It will stay.. for now anyway :)  feel free to comment on any thing you see not dislaying correctly or any probless loading the page.

The last two weeks have been a nightmare as far as work goes, one day off out of the last 13 days and have to go to Friday to have my next one off. Apologies to all my friends and and anyone looking for anything new here, just haven’t had time to do anything other than to talk to my baby across the pond :) Well OK I did have time tonight to update the site some, trying out a new template, but the main reason was the latest version of WordPress is out, 2.6 and I’m a bit paranoid these days to leave any old versions of any apps running on this server. I think most of the upgrade was for new features to the WordPress engine, but I’m sure there were a few security updates mixed in as well and I will stay up to date with them. I don’t want to be redoing the site again! ;)

Mike thanks for the comments and sorry I haven’t been around much lately, but you know how it gets for me, I do check in and read your posts, no excuse not to say hi though is it.. will speak soon though, have a lot pf posts in mind, but for now gotta pay the bills…

Just a test post from Live writer to see if I have finally got this damn thing figured out after months of trying! LOL I have the settings here on the pc, but will it post?! getting ready to find out!… let me try a pic too.. if I’m gonna be disappointed, might as well do it doubly..

With the site being revamped, most of the old content will soon disappear. I have decided to remove the old forum, just to simplify things for me and less to keep up with. I have sent a mail to all the registered users. If by chance some of those email adresses are no longer valid I have put this post up to notify everyone as well. I have set a date of August 1, 2007

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