This post is for those bloggers out there that don’t read all the various posts from the WordPress team that can be found in your dashboard, but rather wait for a notice at the top telling you it’s time to upgrade. WordPress 2.5, which is considered a major milestone, was released a few hours ago, though there is no upgrade notice yet. If you want to upgrade, got to the WordPress download site.

I have been reading information as the betas and release candidate were made public, and I understand that due to this being a major upgrade, there may be plugins that do not work, more work to do the upgrade, etc. We are heading out for the evening, but I will work on upgrading later tonight or tomorrow, and will report on the difficulty.

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My site was down half of today.  If it had happened any other day, I’m sure that my host’s support would have quickly resolved the issue, but they are running a skeleton crew today due to the holiday.  I had a lot of trouble logging a ticket, and I will take up that issue with that with them tomorrow.  I’m fairly confident they’ll be responsive, they likely just do not realize that their many methods of support defer to each other on a holiday, resulting in difficulty in logging a ticket.

The confusing part was the different symptoms.  We have 4 sub-domains in total.  This one was completely inaccessible; I could not even get into the Admin panel of Wordpress, the software that runs this blog.  In contrast, Karin’s blog was fine.  I had added some plugins and updated Wordpress last night, but had been able to access my blog afterward and this morning, so it was unlikely the issue.  Even still I spent some time going in and deleting those plugins with no success.  I then checked our two other sub-domains, and found one was having the exact same issues as this site and the other site was having issues with cookies and certificates.

After finally managing to log a support ticket in a low priority queue explaining all of the issues, I poked around some more and figured out that the culprit was FastCGI.  FastCGI is an advanced script offered by my host to speed up PHP powered sites such as Wordpress blogs.  It appears they are having issues with it, because everything returned to normal once I disabled it.  I updated my support ticket to let them know, asking them to let me know when I could turn it back on, and now I’ll need to spend some time reinstalling all the plugins I deleted.  I’m disappointed, as I did have some time today to make some posts and work on both my blog and the site’s main page; but instead I worked on getting back up and running.

When we were last in Playa del Carmen for our honeymoon, I spent several evenings wandering the streets, taking pictures from every street corner in the oldest part of town, which also happens to be the center of the tourist area. As one of the fastest growing cities in the world, these street corners had changed a lot since my first visit to the town (most of the streets didn’t exist on my first visit!) and according to the photos and information we have since found online, this trend continues. This is one of the reasons I took these pictures, I wanted to chronicle the changes I knew were going to happen.

Stepping backwards a bit, when I purchased my first SLR almost two decades ago and began to learn photography, almost all sources were in agreement that every time you clicked the shutter, you should then immediately record on paper the shutter speed, aperture, and lens focal length in order that you could study the results later and learn from them. This was not something I was ever good at bothering to do. The modern digital camera records all that information for you in the EXIF data, and so I look forward to being able to learn from it when I get a new Digital SLR sometime in the next month or two. Even your basic digital point and shooters do this, though there isn’t much to learn since they weren’t values you had control over.

A couple of years ago I saw an article online about cameras that had GPS built into them, which then imprinted the latitude and longitude of the photo’s location into the EXIF data. They even including heading data, so that when you looked at all the locations on a map, they also indicated in which direction the picture was taken. When I had been taking my pictures in Playa del Carmen, I had been attempting to note down on paper where each of dozens of frames were taken. Needless to say, this solution would be a lot easier. However, I plan to choose my camera based on criteria related to photography; not the ability to tell me where I am.

Recently I’ve become aware of an alternative solution. While a hand held GPS normally has the ability to record where you have been, which can later be matched with the time stamps in the pictures’ EXIF data, these toys are expensive and somewhat useless to me as I am pretty good at knowing where I am without one. I’ve always been map orientated and highly aware of where I am and which way is north; so a hand held GPS would be of little benefit. Karin is the same way. But there is an alternative device known as a GPS logger. These are small devices that do not have a screen to read their current output, but instead they record your location for later download into a computer. They cost about $100 or less, and can be set to save your location at an interval, for example every 30 seconds; whenever you have moved a certain distance, such as 10 meters; or a combination of both. Generally they have enough memory to save between 35,000 and 100,000 data entries.

After your return home and upload both your photos and GPS log into your computer, there is then software that will look at the time stamp information in each photo’s EXIF data, find the corresponding GPS data for that time, and then update each photos’ add the GPS information into the photo’s EXIF data.  When you upload such photos to Flickr or use Adobe Photoshop Elements on your computer, a map with each pictures location can then be viewed.

There is also the added benefit of having a complete log of your movements, which probably would make blogging about an outing a lot easier with a chronological map to consult.  The only thing the loggers do not do is record a heading, but for the price it would make a lot more sense to bring one over wasting my vacation time trying to record where each frame is taken.

I wasn’t going to mention it, but since Karin spilled the beans, I guess I’ll let everyone know that we have obtained our own domain and will soon be moving our blogs there. I won’t reveal the URL of the site until it is ready; but my posts over the next few days might hint at it, if I find time to post. Setting up a site from scratch can be a little time consuming; but at least be not revealing the URL we can take the necessary time before the unveiling.

While time has been a major factor in my lack of blogging as of late, thinking of setting up our own site also kept me from working on this site. How does that make sense? Simply put, a good site or blog can be a lot of work, and there didn’t seem to be any point in putting work into this blog if we were eventually going to have our own site and I would have to just recreate that work. However, having our own site will definitely motivate me to be more diligent about blogging regularly and finding things to make for an interesting site.

We’ll both be using Wordpress to run our blogs, and it does allow full importing of all our posts and comments from Blogger; so I can feel free to post here and you can comment, as it will all come over to the new blog. The site has already been quite some work, as we had to find a good domain name that is available, research dozens of hosts to find a good but inexpensive one, and configure the site. Right now Karin has Wordpress set up on her portion of the site and she is experimenting with it and checking out the available themes, and I am throwing together a front page for the site. Afterward I’ll add Wordpress to my subdomain, import my blog, and choose from the interesting themes and plugins that Karin has found. We’ll update our feeds so that those of you reading us through your favorite reader will see no changes, and we hope that everyone else will follow us over when we make the switch.