planetkris

Sit back, relax, and enjoy the crash…

We had a blast with all our friends and family!
Don’t worry - I’ll link a gallery or two here when we return.
Maybe I’ll share a story or two… More likely it will be on the brides site - sunmoonstarsgirl.com

It seems as if every few years I remember I have a web log or *cough ‘blog‘ here at the home base - planetkris.com. I once again will remind you that I’m usually busy over at rallynotes.com with my rally adventures. As a spin off to rally, I recently got my amateur radio technician license and have been getting into a lot of new activities and clubs, etc. As an established geek, I’ll be posting about that from now on here. Check out the ham radio stuff on rallynotes if you want to keep up.

Christine pointed out to me that I still have posts from 2005 on the main page.
Speaking of the SunMoonStarsGirl, she has a new gallery up.

While you’re busy checking that stuff out - I’ll be working on my ARRL Field Day post.

Other top items:
I’m getting married in August. Honeymoon in Tahiti.
I started a motorsports company. I’m doing contract tech work in the mean time.
I still live in California.

-and we’re done here!

I’ve mentioned this before. If you want to know what I’ve been up to - hit up rallynotes.com

Oh, and it’s raining in Southern California…
Someone called the local radio station and suggested that people slow down and take it easy on the highway.
I called and suggested that they leave their bald tire, bad brake, cracked windshield, no clue how to drive in rain - fat ass - at home. Leave the rally driving to me…

I’m not 100% happy with it - but the site needed a splash of color. I fixed some issues I had with the side menu. It took me about an hour after that to get it working in IE. I know that I may get inspired and re-design it in a month. Or it could stay like this for a year. I was frustrating Christine last night with the creative process. I get some techno, photoshop, cheez-it’s and about 50 text windows going; and I’m unstoppable until around 2:00am. Sorry girl.

The background is a technique I’ve used before. I like the little anomalies that show up when you create a zero jpeg. Base color; Add noise; More color; Pixelate; Save for web - jpg quality set to zero.

planetkris.com 404 Errors: 8258
/apps/mt/mt-comments.cgi

I thought people REALLY wanted to leave me comments.

I finished moving Tine’s site to WordPress last night. I moved the data over from MT a while ago, and only now had a chance to sit down and whip up a template. The first one I did was for planetkris and the second was for rallynotes. As far as page complexity, rallynotes is a repeating background and two nested tables in HTML. I made Christine’s site a little more colorful and tweaked some other things.

Unlike MT, I have some idea of what WP is doing in the background. I can at any point, open up the PHP hood and tweak a few settings. All of the templates use the same CSS tags, so if I see something on a forum or another site I like, I can grab it and tweak it into my home.

I found a sweet as in free GNU CSS editor called JustStyle CSS Editor over at ucware.com. It shows all the CSS tags possible in a list, so you can quickly hunt down what you want to change, or remember the more obscure tags like ‘background-attachment’.

Side note - some of you may have seen that Matt from WordPress.org recently got pWn3d by Google for hosting hundreds of hidden indexed pages off of wordpress.org’s site. I still love WP and I’m still loyal - but I removed the default WP link off the bottom of all of my pages.

Step one. Turn font smoothing on. No, not you Mac kids… In Windows, go to display properties, appearance, and click on the “Effects…” button. Check the box that says “Use the following method to smooth edges of screen fonts:” Select “ClearType” from the drop-down menu. Hit apply.

There, that’s better. I don’t want to hear any complaints like “now my fonts are blurry!” They’re not blurry, they’re smooth. Plus the’re kerned almost right. Meaning “It lo ok s be t t er th an thi s.”

I’ve spent about 4 hours working on the WordPress templates. They use standard tags, but it still took me a while to get planetkris.com sorted. They apply font sizes and types all over the place. Sometimes using “font : Century Gothic” and sometimes “font face : normal 12px Century Gothic.” Sometimes they define the typeface in #content as well as in #body. So even when you change one, you may need to go back and find the other.

Side note: I removed the rallynotes entries and catagory. I added the popcoaster catagory and entries.

popcoaster; Was a stand-alone coaster site of mine that I created in the hopes of selling some of my artwork. Specifically in the form of T-Shirts. Four months of a CafePress paid site, and I got nothing… So the coaster reviews and pictures will be incorporated back into planetkris.com .

I’ve learned a lot in the last 4 days. I’ve learned that the term “propigate” is bullshit and register.com knows it. I’ve learned that trying to set your nameserver remotely through 2 SSH sessions is futile.

WordPress rocks… so far.

The MT importer worked better then I thought - and I really don’t care about permalinks.
You’ll notice rallynotes.com content here. It’ll be cleaned up soon. Explanation: MT hack back in the day.

I’m moving to my new hosting (BlueHost) in March. Well, I’m there now - but it will take that long to transfer the DNS Linux hosting, lots of bandwidth for rally videos. More uptime then a cable modem in Portland, ME.

In the process of changing hosting I will dump Movable Type / Six Apart. It’s been real, it’s been fun, but it hasn’t been “real fun.” I’m looking strongly into b2evolution. It’s php based, but we’ve come a long way from the original “post nuke”, and I don’t need a content management system. I need a blog.

What’s this mean to you? You may not be able to post comment spam. You won’t be able to search or see the picture gallery. The site should be “static” but up.

Thank you for your attention. We know you have many choices of websites to fly with, and we thank you for flying with planetkris.com. So, sit back, relax, and enjoy the crash…

- Kris

Tomorrow I will be re-locating the planetkris.com server. In the meantime the sites will stay up, but no changes can be made, comments added, and the gallery will be down. You will notice a little drag as a Windows 2K desktop attempts to hand out web pages.

Look for that to happen as soon as midnight tonight, or early tomorrow morning, and last until Wednesday afternoon.

This is in final preparation for the move to California. With the server re-located, we will be able to blog from the road, add pictures, and document our cross country trip.

Update: If you can read this - the server is back up and chugging.