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Okay, folks, feedback time!

August 4, 2012, 9:30 PM

So I spent some time today playing around with a new theme for the site.  Something on the way towards the ultimate goal: a new look for The Schumin Web after nearly eight years with more or less the same design.

In making this new design, I put what I had been throwing around for a while in my head into Dreamweaver to see what it would look like.  And this is what I came up with:


James Madison University” Photography set

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Categories: Schumin Web meta

“Magic” is the latest concept…

July 24, 2012, 10:31 PM

So I’m testing concepts in my sandbox site ahead of a full redesign.  I want to see what I think of potential color schemes and potential new arrangements, and what others think about the same.  So I put something together last night to see what it would look like.  What I did was I went with a dark background color and put a light background behind the content.  I also replaced the logo, mainly just to get my regular logo out of the picture (since I want to change it anyway).  Nothing else changed.  The layout is exactly the same.  Just colors and the logo.

And here is the result:

Main Page
Main Page

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Categories: Schumin Web meta

The post-launch tweaks…

July 5, 2012, 9:15 PM

So the launch of The Schumin Web under WordPress is now five days in the past.  And now that it’s all in production, that’s when things start to come out.  Since the launch on Sunday, I have fixed a few errors in the Stuarts Draft High School photo set, I have changed the way I present RSS feeds on the site, I’ve connected all the various feeds to Facebook, and the comment system is a little different than when it launched.

On that last point, I am also slowly but surely getting used to the concept of comments and how to handle them.  For one thing, since comments are moderated, I get notified on my phone when comments come through so that I can review and approve them wherever I happen to be.  So now I have two notification tones.  I have this tone for regular text messages and such, which I’ve had on three different phones since 2008.  Now I also have this sound for comments through the Disqus app.  And I’ll bet that a lot of people are not surprised at all that I would have that for the comments tone (if you haven’t listened to it yet, I’ll wait).  Considering what it is, though, it certainly has great comedic potential around friends.  First time it went off was for some test comments that I threw at the site to see what would happen.  But then the first time that it went off “for real” while I was out and about was on Monday night.  I was leaving the pool and walking towards the car, and it went off.  Felt like real Power Ranger right there.  It was a comment, but with that kind of sound, it could have been a monster attacking Angel Grove (or at least a few putties).  You never know with these things.  But I’m slowly but surely getting used to it.

A few folks have questioned why I’m locking down my comments to the extent that I am.  Realize that right now, registration is required through one of a choice of six different services (Facebook, the Twitter, etc.), and all comments require approval before they’re visible.  As I see it, since the comment system is brand new right now, I’m taking a very cautious approach to things starting out.  Realize that, outside of my old discussion forums, the last time I allowed people to post on Schumin Web was about nine years ago.  I used to have a guest book on my site, and it eventually became more of a hassle than it was worth.  I spent far too much time removing rude and uncivil comments from my guest book that people posted there.  So on April 16, 2003, I locked the guest books down, and then removed them.  I do not regret that decision.  The memory of that incident four months before the Journal launched, along with my inability to program such a thing on the old site, led me to not include comments on the Journal when I started that in August 2003.  Now, though, the Internet has changed, and I think I can allow commenting directly on the site once again.  Why let a group of morons derail good “Web 2.0” discussion, right?  The discussion guidelines lay out the ground rules, and anything that falls below the guidelines won’t be allowed through.  Additionally, I am not allowing anonymous comments in an attempt to bring some civility and prevent the abuses that happened with the old guestbooks, since the names and emails on the abusive posts were fake, and just as mean-spirited as the comments themselves.  So the idea there is that people have to associate their comments with an already established identity on a third party’s site.  Thus you have to throw a reputation of some sort behind your posts.  I’m not worried so much about whether it’s a person’s real name or not, because regardless of whether you’re posting as “John Smith” or “Unsuck DC Metro”, you’re not using my site to establish a brand for yourself.

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Categories: Schumin Web meta

Welcome to The Schumin Web, now powered by WordPress!

July 1, 2012, 12:01 AM

So how does it look?  This is The Schumin Web under WordPress in production – the culmination of about a year’s worth of effort in converting content from the old platform (a mishmash of whatever seemed to work) to the WordPress platform.  The work of the project known as “Falcon” is complete, and Falcon is now The Schumin Web.

I would also like to take a moment to thank the folks who beta tested Falcon over these last two weeks to make sure that everything was perfect and ready to go.  It’s always good to have a few extra sets of eyes looking at things to make sure that any mistakes are caught, and I appreciate your helping me check things over.

As far as changes go, there is a lot that’s different in this new build of the site – far more than I can say in a one-sentence site update message.  Here’s a rundown of some of the changes that have come with the conversion to the WordPress platform:

  • No more Splash Page.  After more than a decade, the Splash Page is no more.  The first page that a user entering through the main URL now sees is the Main Page.  The Splash Photo feature is now on the Welcome page.

  • Completely new URL structure.  If you are linking to or bookmarking anything on this site other than www.schuminweb.com itself, then your links or bookmarks will no longer work.  It will probably take a few days for the search engines to catch up, so contact me if you were linking to something and can’t find it on the new site.

  • Fully restored content.  All photos have been restored from the originals.  I believe that the photos now look better than they ever did.  Additionally, all internal and external links have been updated for the new locations of things.

  • Full size images online.  I now offer my images online at the largest size that I have available.  See for yourself.  Click and download (but follow the license).

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Categories: Schumin Web meta

“…you’re in Angel Grove…”

June 27, 2012, 2:47 PM

So now that Falcon is done and pretty much just waiting a few more days to launch on July 1, I’m starting to turn my mind towards other endeavors again.  First of all, I significantly curtailed the amount of Wikipedia contributions that I would make while doing Falcon.  I want to keep the level of my contributions at that lower amount, because Wikipedia has started to annoy me as of late, and I’m happier making far less edits.  Plus I spent too much time on Wikipedia before, and that caused work on Schumin Web to suffer, and so it’s time to spend more time taking care of my first creation.  The time between shooting and publication on photo sets had become far too much, with many months between becoming the norm.  And that was unacceptable.

But looking at what I want to do, aside from the aforementioned Transit Center update, I’m thinking about doing some creative writing.  I’ve been watching a bunch of Power Rangers episodes lately, and I want to try something in that vein (you wondered why I mentioned Angel Grove in the title, didn’t you?).  No, I’m not dressing up in spandex and fighting monsters.  Though that would be kind of fun – three guesses as to what Power Ranger costume I would be wearing, and the first two don’t count.  But no.  I want to do something along the lines of the adapting of stock content into a completely new story and making it believeable.  Realize that the way Power Rangers works is that first the Super Sentai television show is made in Japan for Japanese audiences.  Then Saban acquires the rights to the season, and cuts the episodes up to make a completely new show, adding their own original scenes, and recording new audio to go over the Japanese footage of the suit battles, zord battles, and (sometimes) villain scenes.  A careful viewer of Power Rangers can usually notice when it changes between original footage and the source material from Super Sentai, because the quality of the footage is a little different with regard to lighting and colors, the Power Rangers’ costumes are shiny in the Sentai footage but not in the American footage, and occasionally elements of some costumes are changed (like Elgar’s face in original Turbo footage, vs. in Carranger footage).

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The last update on the old platform…

June 24, 2012, 8:07 PM

Boy, this is a weird feeling.  But it’s true – this Journal entry is the last update I’m doing on the old system.  The final conversion to WordPress happens in less than a week (12:01 AM on July 1, 2012, to be exact), and so at this point I feel like it’s more trouble than it’s worth to continue to cross-post updates on Falcon and the production site.  I’ve been writing new Journal entries in Falcon and then converting them down to the old system for a few weeks now (vs. converting for Falcon), and so it will be nice to not have to do that anymore, since the conversion was entirely manual, and prone to mistakes.  And once beta testing began a week ago, that took the wraps off of Falcon, it got particularly annoying to do the extra work for a site where its days were numbered in the teens, and where the successor website was already publicly available (albeit in beta test form).

That said, if I do any Journal entries between now and July 1, I’m not cross-posting them to the old site.  I’m going to post them on Falcon only, and then they will come over when Falcon becomes the production site.

Meanwhile, beta testing is going quite well, thank you very much.  People have been combing through Falcon, and interestingly enough, not a single technical problem has been uncovered.  I figured I’d have a small list of errors that needed to be corrected after a week of testing.  Apparently I did my work fairly well.  The only mistakes that have turned up are minor factual errors in the Fire Alarm Collection pages, and a date error on the new James Madison University photo set that’s being released with the conversion.  Nothing technical at all – entirely “human” problems, i.e. I could be the biggest WordPress whiz in the world and still have made those mistakes because they had nothing to do with WordPress.

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Categories: Schumin Web meta

Didn’t think I would have a “Fox issues the power” moment, but…

June 8, 2012, 10:41 PM

…but it looks like Falcon is going to have one.  First of all, though, if you’re wondering what I’m even talking about, it’s a Power Rangers reference.  Before Power Rangers Zeo began, they ran “It’s Coming” previews, and then ran the full song before the first episode of the show.  One line was difficult to understand.  The correct lyrics were, “Unleashing the power”, but Sis and I thought it was “Fox [something] the power” (Power Rangers was airing on Fox at that time).  Back in 1996, we wrote to Mark Oxman (aka “Maxmouze”), who ran a Power Rangers newsletter at the time, about the lyrics.  He indicated that the words were “Fox issues the power”.  Even though Mark Oxman got it wrong, the mondegreen has become how I describe hyped up premieres.

And Falcon’s becoming Schumin Web isn’t that big of a deal visually.  The site will look mostly the same.  But the Fire Alarm Collection pages are getting a big upgrade.  That’s because the restoration of that area is coinciding with some long overdue updates, including added alarms, and all new illustrations.  Realize that many of the photos in the alarm collection pages are more than ten years old.  That’s back in the era of my original Mavica camera.  And I wasn’t nearly as meticulous about how I kept photos early on, and the originals for the old photos had been lost.  So there would be no restoration at all if I kept the old photos in place.  So over the last week or so, I configured part of my kitchen as something of a photography studio, and took new photos of every alarm in the collection.  I’ll leave the final result under wraps for now (mostly because I’m not done with the pages), but I want you to see some of the behind-the-scenes work, as the alarms went in for their closeups…

The tablecloth on my kitchen table does double duty as a backdrop for fire alarms.
The tablecloth on my kitchen table does double duty as a backdrop for fire alarms.

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So apparently even my creativity is subject to the laws of supply and demand…

May 22, 2012, 8:19 AM

Apparently so. Last week, I was working on new material for Falcon (by the way, three new photo sets so far to launch with Falcon), and I was running dry on topics for Journal entries. And the one time I did try to write a Journal entry in the past week, I ended up figuratively “ripping it up” midway through it because it wasn’t going the way I wanted.

For those wondering, by the way, the abandoned Journal entry was about those stupid blog disclaimers that you see all over the Internet these days. Specifically, it discussed those “my opinions are my own” lines, because I find it akin to apologizing for one’s opinion. A more realistic sounding blog disclaimer on that thread would read, “I’m sorry if I might offend you because I am capable of forming my own opinion, as said opinion may not necessarily coincide with your own beliefs, and I don’t think you can handle that.” Unfortunately, though, that was about the extent of it. I couldn’t flesh it out any further. Well, crap. And thus into the recycling bin it went.

I was out grocery shopping last night when I figured out why that entry went so badly. Basically, my creativity is limited. I only have so much of it to go around and I have many things to feed with that creativity. I was able to make it work when I was doing the main conversion because that didn’t take any creativity. Just a matter of cleaning up work from previously spent creativity. Thus I could restore content for Falcon and then turn around and do an absolutely fabulous Journal entry. Not so when I do new material. I can’t stop a photo set, and then turn around and do a Journal entry. The Journal entry ends up falling flat.

This, meanwhile, leads to a new way of planning my moves on here. If I don’t space things out and try to force it, mediocre work results. Thus budgeting my creativity, just like money. I only wish I had as much money as I had creativity. Then I wouldn’t need to have a car payment every month.

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Categories: Myself, Schumin Web meta

Man bangle number two…

May 10, 2012, 9:50 PM

So I tried another “man bangle” recently. This time, I got this one from Amazon.com:

Men's Massive Solid Stainless Steel Handcuff Bracelet Bangle Jewelry

And this time I remembered to get photos of me wearing it:

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Categories: Jewelry, Schumin Web meta

So the question is, what is a suitable bribe?

May 5, 2012, 10:14 PM

So I’m currently working on restoring Journal entries from August 2011 for Falcon. The end of the main conversion is near, though there’s other work to be done before any launch happens. The plan from here to launch is to finish the main conversion, fix all of the flagged content issues (connections that I couldn’t make right away for whatever reason), do a whole bunch of scanning and restoring for a few Odds and Ends areas, do all new photos for the Fire Alarm Collection pages, and then work on a number of new photo sets.

Once I get to that last part, where I’m working on new material, I will begin doing beta testing on Falcon. That’s where I get other people to go in and start using the site like normal users would. The idea is to get other sets of eyes on things, in order to hopefully identify and correct any issues or errors that I may have missed. I fixed a lot of weirdness and old errors with the conversion, but as always, I am not above inadvertently introducing brand new flies into the ointment. And with nearly 1,500 Journal entries and a bunch of photo sets and other pages, mistakes are inevitable. I was showing Falcon on my cell phone to a coworker on Friday, and discovered a mistake in the theme, getting Falcon’s 404 error message instead of the page that I was expecting on a certain link (that issue is now fixed).

My current plan is to get a few folks to come over to my house with their laptops and take the site for a spin. It is my intention to fix any problems that get identified on the spot. Why my house rather than a coffee shop or something, you may ask? Because if we’re looking for bugs, I want to be at my real computer where the site is made just in case I need to fix problems on the theme or dig through an archive to find an image or something.

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Categories: Friends, Schumin Web meta

Walking down Georgia Avenue and talking to the camera…

April 26, 2012, 7:46 PM

So this evening while I was walking home from the Metro, I decided to turn the camera on myself and do a Video Journal:

So there you go, I suppose. I am walking home along the northbound side of Georgia Avenue from Glenmont Metro to approximately Rippling Brook Drive.

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Sixteenth anniversary!

March 22, 2012, 11:49 PM

So the Video Journal that I did for Schumin Web’s sixteenth anniversary was a bit more challenging than most that I’ve done. First of all, though, here’s the video:

In this video, I discuss the site’s anniversary, how things are changing on the site, and how I’ve changed in the last year as well with my weight loss and all. Check it out. I’m sure that you will find it quite interesting.

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Falcon update…

February 18, 2012, 12:10 PM

So it’s been about two months since I discussed Falcon, which is the name I’ve been using for the new version of Schumin Web that I’m building off to the side of things. The current production site (i.e. what you’re reading this on at the time of this writing) is kind of a mashup of whatever I could come up with to do what I wanted to do, and mostly built in-house. Falcon, meanwhile, runs WordPress.

This represents a major shift in how I do things. When I started doing this site in 1996, if I wanted something, I had to build it myself, and that’s how all the major site functionality still works for the most part. The Journal, for instance, is my own design. That’s why there’s no place for commenting. I could never figure out how to do it. Now with free software and such, the community builds the engine, and so Falcon is built with off-the-shelf parts and a custom skin.

As far as where the progress is, I am currently working on porting and restoring content from 2007. That’s stuff like J27 and October Rebellion, plus lots and lots of Journal entries. It feels really strange to be working on these pages, because this is the time period when I got fired from Walmart and moved to Maryland.

And here’s what Falcon currently looks like. Remember that the basic design is the same for now, and so the changes are going to be in the details.

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Categories: Schumin Web meta

Discovering a significant bug in Falcon…

December 10, 2011, 1:11 PM

This is where things get frustrating! I discovered a significant glitch in my “Falcon” development site.

But first, for those not familiar: Falcon is my development site, where I’m currently working to convert Schumin Web to the WordPress platform. It’s running WordPress 3.2.1 right now (but will probably jump a version or so before I’m done). I’m running it all in a test location while I build it and then port and restore content. Then when it’s finished, I’m going to move it onto the main URL, and then it will cease to be “Falcon” anymore, since it will become the production site. Then I’ll probably set up a new development site as “Falcon” for future development and experimentation, such as a full redesign (the site under WordPress will look mostly the same as it has for a number of years).

To run certain parts of the site, I set up custom post types. I have custom post types for the Fire Alarm Collection, Quote Articles, Photo Features, Site Updates, and Splash Photos. What this will look like when finished is nothing new, as those of you who have been with me for a while, when you see the way these things look, will see something very familiar, even if it’s totally different under the hood. The problem is that when you page through the pages of these custom post type archives, the site will act as though it’s displaying the next page, but the content will not change. Let me show you what I mean:

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So I believe that the spirit of Patrick’s Christmas lights have attacked my camera…

December 4, 2011, 10:39 PM

Yeah, it’s only been a week since my Thanksgiving trip to Stuarts Draft ended, but better late than never, I suppose. I’ve kicked production work on Falcon into high gear, and just about everything on my Internet life has taken a back seat to that, including Wikipedia (I’m taking a Wikibreak!). I have a feeling that if you look into my eyes, you’ll see that blue squares-in-squares pattern that I use burned onto my retina.

But this is a Video Journal. So that means one of these, which I shot on the drive home from Stuarts Draft along Route 29:

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