I’ve been putting original content on the web since 1998 with no advertising, no monetary gain, and extremely little acclaim. You few GammaBlog fans may have noticed a diminishment of content over the past few months. Gammablog on strike means less new content and more highlighting of the old stuff few seemed to care about when new. That’ll learn ya!

Chew on some Kitty Blue for a bit, it will change your life. Created and animated by Kay Gelfman. I supplied the theme music for the series.

Filed under: Photos- , Blogs, GammaBlog on Strike - by gamma
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I was going nuts after upgrading to WP 2.7, I was unable to login to my admin area. That’s the part of the blog where you write your posts etc. Everytime I tried to get in, it just bounced back at me, asking me to login again. It turns out that I had to delete the cookies from my browser. Fortunately I was able to find this answer on the wordpress.org forum.

Filed under: Photos- , Blogs - by gamma
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Returning Gammablogians may have noticed the new site navigation icons.  Above from left to right: Photos, Video, Architecture, Street Art, Politics, East Village, New York City Guide, and All the Categories on the GammaBlog. They all have pop-up titles when moused-over.  I’m happy graphically with the buttons, but is it fun for me and confusion for you?

I’m not really sure what sort of simple image could convey “East Village.” I almost went with the letters, EV. My other thought was that damn cube, The Alamo. What I ended up trying to convey was a hi-rise looming over the village. I don’t know if anyone will get it at this pixel dimension. I was specifically thinking of Red Square’s balconies and The Most Holy Redeemer Church on East 3rd Street, though I left the cross out for fear of creating religious confusion.

The cat for Categories may be too precious. (update: I got rid of the cat in favor of a dropdown display of categories, not as cute but more useful).

The NYC Guide book should be redrawn for clarity at this size.  I think the flag segment reads well to indicate Politics, at least for US readers.

I like the Street Art icon. I was thinking splashing paint and paste, the brush should at least convey something vaguely artistic to everyone. The cityscape as icon for Architecture works, but it could also mean many other things. The flash camera and the play-button TV screen should be pretty obvious. And like I said they all have pop-up titles.

I’ve gotten the comment that I am displaying my photos at sizes too large to view without scrolling.  Are others bothered by this as well?  I’m not much bothered by having to scroll up and down a photo, but side to side is annoying for sure.  But clicking on the photos brings you to Flickr, where it displays a version no wider than 500 pixels,  a solution to the problem of sorts. This link-back is required by Flickr, where the photos are hosted.  I like Flickr, it’s a great community of photographers, but I know this link-back requirement creates confusion on the blog.

I chose this Blog Theme ( Simplr theme by Scott Allan Wallick) with no sidebars, so the full width of your screen is available for the photos. All the usual sidebar stuff, the Tag Cloud, Recent Comments and Posts, Links, Buzzflash Alerts etc. is at the bottom of the page.

Feedback is welcome.

Filed under: Photos- , Blogs, WordPress - by gamma
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In case there is anyone who cares. I’m still looking for a good WordPress theme that has fluid width, is widget ready, with a left sidebar, an image header, and the ability to have images as background for the posts.

Filed under: Photos- , Blogging, Blogs, WordPress - by gamma
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I’m experimenting with a new themes for the GammaBlog. Feedback is welcome. Please excuse any temporary strangeness.

Filed under: Photos- , Blogs, WordPress - by gamma
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Here’s a shout out to my pal CybersAM over at Cyberbuss Web Hosting who helped me figure out how I screwed up my .htaccess file and brought down the GammaBlog for the past 24 hours. It all started when I tried to change my permalink structure from the ugly default numbers to the prettier date and title based version. So now both: http://gammablog.com/?p=4298 and http://gammablog.com/2008/03/21/easter-bunnies/ go to the same place.

Update: It turns out that the earlier non php pages are not showing up. I don’t know why, I may abandon many of them and convert the rest into php versions. That might be the best solution. I’ll tackle it tomorrow.

Further Update: The main  problem was another .htaccess file in the old GammaBlaBlog folder from back when the GammaBlog had Bla. I deleted that and restored most of the old featured articles, but now the oldest part of the blog on the WordPress platform, are all badly linked to images. This is comes about from importing the html from the Dreamweaver generated pages from the older version of the blog.  I’m thinking of manually fixing some of it and deleting the rest.

Filed under: Photos- , Blogs, WordPress - by gamma
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[youtube]CJ-AX1G0SmY[/youtube]

Cinematographer, Alan Teitel likes to shoot things at high frame rates. Here’s his Ultraslo channel on YouTube. Don’t adjust your volume, they are silent.
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I’m using the Video Embedder plugin for WordPress by Kristoffer Forsgren, and finding it very useful. It allows me to simply embed YouTube and Google videos in this blog without breaking validation (HTML that might display poorly). Before this plugin, I had to disable the visual editor, as it screwed with the embed code used by YouTube etc. That was very annoying. The current version (1.4) supports embedding for numerous sites as well as Quicktime and Windows Media movies.

Here’s Kristoffer Forsgren’s English blog.

Filed under: Uncategorized- , Blogs, Science, Video - by gamma
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For WordPress users: This plugin has made it so much easier for me to embed video on my blog. The visual editor in WordPress automatically maintains html validation, and messes with the embed coding used by YouTube and Google video. Unfortunately WordPress enters the Visual editor by default. Prior to this plugin I had to disable the Visual Editor in my blog profile (wp-admin/profile.php) if I wanted to embed a YouTube or Google video. (more…)

Filed under: Photos- , Blogs, WordPress - by gamma
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