The Mines and The Miners

Or, Happy Two Weeks And A Day After New Year! I figured I should try to post at least once a month, so I hereby declare this the “post of the month until proven otherwise”. It’s fairly prestigious.

I meant to post the exciting events of URBANA 06, which I attended from Dec. 27 through the turn of the year, but I’m not very reliable when it comes to posting here (you probably have not noticed) so I decided just to say it was awesome and i’m sure I will talk about it later as events warrant. To summarize, I was in St. Louis over the change of the year with a few other people (or should I say a tens of thousands). I spent the St. Louis New Year in the Edward Jones Dome and I spent the Missoula New Year in my hotel hallway sitting beneath this window and talking with the most wonderful woman I have been blessed to know (she’s the blurry one in the picture).

Since then, i’ve been getting back into the ol’ swing o’ things. Perhaps i’ll let you know how that goes. Wait expectantly. Or don’t.

Previously, I mentioned that I do not have the time to overhaul my old CMS. At this time, I have decided to accomplish a smaller task which I do have time for (hopefully), and that is the creation of a PHP image gallery. In a few recent projects, I have had the need for a gallery which outstripped the scale and features of my old SCMS module. As a result, I have leaned heavily upon Gallery 2. Gallery has the features that I require, but the code bloat and the inherent slowness that results make it unreliable and underperforming for certain situations at both large and small scales. For this reason, I will be developing a new (yes, yet another…) PHP multimedia gallery with the features/performance/customization capabilities that I need.

On an aesthetic note, I have decided to use a modified version of the Connections Reloaded theme by Ajay D’Souza. This theme is itself a variant of the beautiful Connections theme by Patricia Müller. I will be continuing modifications of the theme as I have the time.

This will be, we all hope, a slightly more updated version of my website. No longer will it languish in the stagnant realm of abandoned web pages.

I have decided that I simply do not have the time to fully rewrite a new version of my Small Common Module System (SCMS) upon which this site used to be based (for an active example, see umtiv.org). Now that I have decided that, it remains to be seen what I will do with this site. My friend Steve has inspired me to do something useful with it, so I look forward to seeing what form that will take.