LaBarca.org

Tweet tweet… Just added a Twitter feed widget to the sidebar. Are you on it? Let me know.

Also, I have an aggregated feed of all my online activity at Tumblr. Which I then feed into my Facebook page. It’s all very meta, but it’s my attempt at keeping sanity in the ever-expanding online social networking clusterfudge ™.

And remember:

CHASING THE NEW IS DANGEROUS TO SOCIETY.

I just finished upgrading the photo album to use Gallery 2. It was a huge pain (despite the multitude of ways Gallery lets you import photos), but I think the effort will be worth it.

The extended functions, including searching the album can be accessed in the sidebar, which you can show by hitting this icon: . You can find links to comment on photos and albums in the sidebar too.

You can subscribe to an RSS of any new pictures with this URL, or look in the sidebar of the gallery for RSS links to any subsection. If there are any problems with the blog or the photo album that I missed, please let me know.

More site updates - I added a LastFM weekly top artists list for my profile to the sidebar. It looks like this:

I’ve been tracking my music habits for about a year now using the service, and it’s a bit odd to look at the stats. LastFM tracks what songs you play using plugins for players like Winamp and iTunes. I have both plugins installed, but I rarely use iTunes to play music - just to organize it. Most of my music listening happens in Winamp with music that I recently acquire or rip - while it is still unorganized and possibly incorrectly tagged. I usually play the hell out of an album if I like it, then tag it correctly and file it away in my iTunes library - rarely to be played with any frequency again.

The main inaccuracy is that I use Winamp to search through tracks for use in creating Système-D podcasts, and then reviewing podcast release candidates. I also listen to Shoutcast streams frequently, which are not recorded. So that skews the stats a bit too. But I think the weekly top artists list that I included is a good reflection of what’s been hitting my ears recently.

The primary reason for including this thing is to keep myself sharp. If I catch it looking completely lame, I know I have to go out and discover new music - or awesome older music.

I’m in the process of moving the entire photo album to a database-driven gallery, which will replace the static pages I’ve been using for years. It’s taking a while, since there are 5.24 gigs of pictures to move over, and some cleanup to do as well. But it should be worth it after I’m done. There’ll be lots of new features like RSS, comments, a cool interface, and best of all - easy uploading for me.

After the gallery is switched over, I have to go through all my old posts here and fix broken links, so that should be good fun too. Once everything is done, I’ll put an announcement here - signaling that it’s safe to start letting me know about broken things.

Update (Sat Dec 9): I’m doing this now.  Things will be broken for a while today.

The contract with my old web host is up and it was time to move on.

The new one is giving me 20+ gigs of space for the same price as the old 9GB host. Consequently, things will be in chaos for a bit with the site as I move things over. So hang tight. labarca.org email should still work.

Update: From zero to hero in less than a day. Still working on transferring the 4 gigs of photos over though.

Update 2: Finally done copying photos. Everything seems to be working, but if you’re looking for Fermiumproject.org, you’ll have to wait a bit. Something’s cooking…

There’s a new site I’m trying out to host selected videos - Revver. My page is here. It is also in the links on the right.

They let you put up any amount of videos for free, and actually give you some revenue if people watch them. I’m just interested in the free part.

Anyway, I put the video from the Goodbye Jumbo party back in 2000 up there and will use it for other videos when needed.

I’m currently in the process of re-uploading the whole photo album. I decided to remove all of the videos to free up about 2.5 gigs of space on the server, and unfortunately couldn’t do this serverside. I had to do it locally and upload the changes. Boo. It’ll take about 24 hours to get all 4.5 gigs uploaded and unzipped.

Anyway, this means I don’t have to pay for more space (yet) or rely on Flickr (which really wasn’t built to really be a photo album). The videos in the photo album were pretty annoying to download anyway.

One day google or someone will give us a terabyte of space to upload and share all the videos we want for free - and I’ll jump on it.

Since the price of keeping so much data online is somewhat hefty, I’m trying to lighten it up a bit by joining Google’s AdSense program. Those are the links you see on the right of the home page. To make it most effective, I’m going to eventually place them in the photo album as well. The album gets thousands of hits a month if you can believe it.

I’m running out of web space - so I’ll be using Flickr heavily to post new photos. If this Google stuff works out I can upgrade to a larger plan and dump the Flickr photos to the album you’re all used to. If that happens, I’ll still use Flickr to get new photos up fast till I have time to put them in the album.

So to help out, if you see something that interests you in the Google ads, please click on it.

Thanks for understanding!

Update Dec 06: Moved to a new gallery system and took the ads away.  Didn’t generate much revenue anyway.

I added a photostream from Flickr on the right. This will always show the latest 5 pictures I’ve posted to my Flickr account. I’m ditching Textamerica for Flickr so all cameraphone pics will go there. Robyn still has her mobile pics at Textamerica, and you can get to them from the menu at the right.

Update Dec 06: The photostream is now generated from the local gallery.  No more Flickr for me.

Closed the guestbook and archived the real entries. No more ads for online strip poker.

Added a note about the wedding mix (YFCD R&R). Send me an email for the download link.

Also, added pics to the album from my mom, Jason and Ken & Michele.