Catching up

Posted by Mark on Jan 1, 2009 in nature photography | 9 comments

I know, I know, I am a bad, bad blogger – I have not posted here in a couple of weeks – and I know that is an eternity in the blogosphere.  A story on NPR today about blogs made me feel even more guilty!  So my apologies.   The past couple of weeks have hit me with a bout of writers block, a chronic backache that keeps creeping up on me and is quite disabling, the holidays of course, rushing a few orders out before Christmas, getting sick for few days, a power outage, having to buy a generator to keep my basement from flooding,  and my nervous upgrade to WordPress 2.7!   And yes, I do like a little cheese with my whine.    So forgive me while I ramble a bit to get back in sync!

Screen shot WordPress 2.7

So I am typing here in the new upgraded WordPress, which looks pretty darn slick from behind the scenes.   I have yet to uncover all the new improvements they have made, but the interface certainly has a lot of polish on it.   From what you are seeing, not much has changed, but for a person running the blog, a lot of welcome changes.   For those using WordPress that want to upgrade – be warned, before I hit my “Update WordPress Automatically” plugin button that I wrote about before, I read many comments who had problems with in it moving to 2.7.  So as helpful as it has been to date, DON’T USE IT for upgrading to 2.7!  I did it the old fashioned manual way, which certainly takes a bit more time and manuevering – not too hard.   A few things went wrong, like getting a lot of strange characters throughout all my posts.  It took awhile to clean them up using a Search and Replace plugin.  Some slight CSS tweaks might be needed to update my theme to some new 2.7 codes.  But the nice part of 2.7 – automatic upgrades are now built into the code, so no need for the plugin or updating manually anymore.  Wooohooo!  Kudos to the WordPress folks for making such a slick interface.

On to other notes; if some of you didn’t catch it, Animal Planet just finished their season of Whale Wars.  It is an inside look at the activities of Sea Shepherd in the Southern Ocean against Japanese Whaling fleets at the start of 2008.   Although I have followed Sea Shepherd’s activities for some time now, I found the series fascinating on many levels.   I think the series has been successful in shining more light on the realities of taking species protection to this level.  In many ways I am glad it is reaching many more people now, whether they are for or against these activities – maybe it will get more attention and resolution.   Animal Planet made a decent effort at trying to present information from both sides.   I found some of Capt. Watson’s comments a bit over the top, but in principle support what they do.   If you didn’t see it, you can get a feel for the show through some of the video clips on the site.   I also just recently learned fellow underwater photographer Eric Cheng is on their latest campaign.  I am looking forward to reading about his experience.

So if that isn’t a strange combination of paragraphs, I don’t know what is.  I hope everyone had an enjoyable holiday, and thank you again for your continued visits to this blog.  As the NPR story referred to above points out, there are about 50,000 new blogs created every day.   That’s a pretty amazing number.  There are many, many photography related ones.  And to have the new visitors, and particularly those of you who keep coming back and take time to leave comments – I appreciate it more than you can imagine.   It is tough to keep things fresh and interesting.  Sometimes I have an idea of what to write about, and have to search my archives if I have already written about it before.  So thanks again, and again!   So I am now on to creating a reflection on 2008 post and to kick the tires of this new WordPress version a bit.

Best wishes,

Mark