For any of you that have tried to visit the site over the past few days, you’ve likely been met with a ‘Maintenance Mode’ screen. It all started with what should have been a fairly straightforward WordPress upgrade, and kind of snowballed from there. It turns out that WP has made some fairly significant changes in the way it handles certain php coding, and those changes were causing some display errors. The good news is that WordPress expert Ronald Vanweerd addressed the issues, and got things in order.

So, why the need for an expert in the first place? You see, this site has some custom coding done for displaying the worklog pictures. One of the biggest reasons for the creation of this site in the first place, was for the ability to host my own pictures and content. I post worklogs on multiple forums, and picture hosting was always a pain. Once the first version of this site was set up, I quickly ran in to issues. I wanted to have pictures sized at 800×600 for posting in forums, but multiple pics that large really killed this site’s load time. That’s where Ronald came in. With a little custom work, and a dynamic cache, I can literally upload any size pic I want for a forum, yet all pics on this site will be cached and loaded at a width of 570 pixels. Load time is great, and I’ve still got all the original images for the forums, unaltered. It has been quite an elegant solution. That being said, when WordPress changed their code, we needed to change ours. There were also some other things I had tweaked, and it got to the point we were better off starting with a clean template. So, here we are! Things are back up, and stable! Thanks for your patience.

Now back to modding!

Lately I’ve been looking for unique ways to reach out to the visitors of this site. I’ve been wanting to make it as interactive as possible, and with that in mind, I’ve added the capability to stream live from my workshop. At this point it’s just an experiment, and I’ll likely make revisions along the way, but the concept seems like a lot of fun. I’m not really sure how exciting it would be to watch, and it might even be very distracting to me, but I think it’s worth trying.

The live feed page can be reached through the ‘Losias Live’ menu button in the header above. As of right now, I’m trying to look at options for notifying viewers when I stream, but options seem limited. I’ll likely send out notifications via twitter, and add any other methods I come across as I go along. My plan is to have all the bugs worked out and everything tweaked for the beginning of Project: OSIDIAS. So, stay tuned, and feel free to offer any input or suggestions you might have!

Sometimes we all need to get away for a little while. I did exactly that a short time ago. I left the cold of a Nebraska ice storm, and hit the sunny beaches of Daytona. To give you some idea of the contrast between the two, take note of the following pictures. There’s nothing like going from subzero temps, to an amazing 88 degrees in just a few hours. In fact, I went from slipping on ice, to eating ice(cream) in a pair of shorts. Gotta love it!

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