More Snow – a commute by car

More snow greeted us this morning, so we first spent a while clearing the car and driveway.    This would be the second day in a row we would be commuting by car.  Warm clothing, a flask of hot drink and a shovel in the boot and of course a camera and off we set.

It was not far before we got stuck in the deep snow, a bit of shovelling and we got going again.  Eventually we made it to the main road, and from there, quickly made it into work.

With the weather so bad (well for the UK anyway), it was decided that anyone who had made it in by car should leave at 13:00 to guarantee they got home safe, so we headed home in the afternoon, only stopping for a few photographs in Lincoln.

Once home I dug out the laptop and proceeded to finish up some paperwork.  Lets hope tomorrow is less interesting.

Apple’s IOS – 4.2 Released today

iPad

Maybe not exciting for Apple iPhone users but a big update for iPad users.  I know a lot of photographers now using the iPad as their in the field back up device.  A great way of backing up and reviewing your images, before getting back to the office or hotel room to process them on your laptop.

IOS 4.2 brings all the advances that the iPhone 4 has to the ipad.  Available to download today.

Update:  Mac Users, don’t feel left out, a Safari update was also released today.

Backups

How many times have your heard that you must backup, and how many of you actually do so.

For that matter, of those that do backup, where do you keep that backup, in the same bag as your laptop so both can be stolen. Up stairs at home, only the one backup? When did you last test it?

Don’t worry I am not about to tell you a heart rending story of lost data, even though I know of people who have.

Just a reminder, disks fail, and we all live digital lives these days with cherished memory’s sat on our hard disks.

Please backup to at least two independent disks, test them regularly and why not leave one at a friends house, or at you office. Just think, if you house was robbed or burnt down and everything was lost, how would you feel if your favourite digital memories were lost forever.

Oh and please remember it’s the BBC UK Children in Need Day today, join in, or help out at an event near you.

wordpress-http-error-crunching

While uploading photographs to my new blog, I have been having a lot of difficulties.  The files upload but then I get a http error during the crunching stage.  Once uploaded the images cannot be sized, only put up at there original size.

I spent sometime looking at the WordPress help pages but eventually I found the answer here:  Just adding the line

AddType x-mapp-php5 .php

to the top of my .htaccess file, fixed my load problems.   This file is located in the folder you installed your WordPress to on you host server.

Moving Posts & Going Live

More Blog configuration: Tonight once home I manually moved my posts from my first blog to the new dev blog.  Just cut and paste.  Next time I need to move to a different blog, the full WordPress software allows easy export and inport.

I then backed up dev to my laptop and deleted Live.

If your after a good FTP client for OS X, I use Transmit.  Makes jobs like this very easy.

Then I FTP,ed the contents of dev to Live. Once that was done I logged into WordPress altered the paths to refer to the blog new location.

Everything seemed to work, so now the final part to delete dev.

Wow, its all still works!

Update:

Well nearly works; the picture I had in a post was lost, I suppose I need to read up on how to officially move a site!

WordPress ios (iPhone) app

How to manage your WordPress blog remotely.

Well I always have my iPhone with me so that seemed the best way.  I had a search on the iTunes application store and soon found a WordPress ios application.  It was free so I downloaded, installed and gave it a whirl.

Well I spent a while not getting anywhere, like many other users.

What they don’t tell you, or at least I never saw it; you have to enable remote access in your blog first.

It’s easy to do, just log in, select settings, then writing, and at the bottom enable the access. Easy when you know how.

Sent from iPhone during lunch.

mysql

Well, that was easier then I thought.  Between the wordpress help pages and the ease that my web hosting company made of creating the database, within a matter of minutes I had a simple highly customisable blog up and running.

Now to start moving posts from the old site to this.

Blog Setup

Well tonight after a cold motorcycle ride home (1.5 C), followed by a hot chocolate, it was time to do some more wordpress configuration. This blog which may or may not stay is fairly basic, just the default options with all the hard work done by my service provider. Tonight I started a fresh install of WordPress to give me a more custom and unique look. I have to admit its all Chris B’s fault, his new blog does look rather professional so it was time for me to have a go.

First a new Sub domain to host the test site (if this works i’ll move it over to the blog.brown-family.org.uk).

Then I download loaded WordPress and uploaded to my site, now for the technical bit, mysql. This will be a first for me, never used mysql before. I’ll let you know how I do.

to WordPress or Not

Hi world.

Well, our first Blog entry.  Normally we have the odd bike related entry on the Motorcyle page, the bits that are family related on the family etc.  These are written in a simple text editor using html and ftp’ed up to our website.

Most people now are using Word Press, a far easier way to publish your thoughts, so this is a simple experiment, to see how it goes.  I am going to keep updating the other pages but also add the odd thought or two here.

Let me also add this is not what I would call a real WordPress site, just the default blog option that uses WordPress, that my web hosting company gives users for free.  Getting the mysql database up and running, and downloading the WordPress application and getting a real site up and running is the job for later this week.

As this moves from Development to Live and possibly back again, and I also repost some old favourites, it might prove a little hard to follow at first, but please bare with me.  Any posts before this date have been moved from the old website.

Back to Work & more Photography

After our amazing holiday, visiting all round England, a bit of Wales and round the coast of Scotland it was time to go back to work, but my body had other days.

Bank holiday monday saw me come down with a terrible cold, and Tuesday our first day back at work I was no better. After that I managed to drag myself in, but we had to travel by car, I was not up to riding the motorcycle.

 

In the middle of the month I also did a studio photo shoot, as you can see above, not bad results.

The big thing was the release of iPhone4. Richard has the original iPhone, and has been very pleased with it, now that its three years old it was time for the updated model.

I am sure in the news you have all heard of its problems, but I have found it to be the best phone I have every had. The display, camera and gps are excellent. The reception is certainly better then the previous phone, and I have had no problems with it. If the phone is gripped tightly the signal strength does drop but this causes no issues in actual use.