Every once in a while I feel the need to update the look of this blog. Or (as in this case), I get told “H2’s eye surgery was more than a year ago, you really need to update the masthead one of these days”…

So this morning I created a new picture, but for posterity, here are the previous two that I used (and I am bummed to realize that I can’t seem to find my first No More Work Than One masthead anymore…). And also, learning from the past, I’ll include the new picture in this post so that coming back here in a few years will show the complete context.

The last two of course have the free space for the ‘polaroids’ of the girls…

Oh – and I disabled the ads on the blog. Not worth it, given the size of my readership.

Now I need to add pictures from this year to the Picture a Month Gallery and update the rotation for the polaroids and my updates of the blog should be done.

Update: done.

tagged with blog-changes, pictures

A friend of mine and occasional reader (Hi Dave!) complained that the blog was so incredibly slow that he basically couldn’t read it. While I couldn’t quite reproduce the ridiculous response times that he quoted – I do admit that I have been frustrated with the server’s slowness, lately.

So last night I did the stupid – upgrade and update the server “real quick” before going to bed. Yeah right. Three hours later I did have everything working again. And at least it seems that the performance has improved quite noticeably (please let me know if you see the same – and tell me if there are any other issues, things not working, etc).

For those interested, this server (a dedicated P4 with 1GB of RAM) is now running Debian Lenny (5.0.4), I switched over to Apache2 (2.2.9 with PHP 5.2.6) and added some caching optimizations to mysql (5.0.51a right now).

The new masthead was bugging me – the picture on the right just didn’t look “polished” enough. I think this one is much better. I actually switched out the first of the two picture of the girls for one that was taken in September and that I liked better. And now I think the two pictures blend together much better and are much more cohesive with the “Polaroids” on the left.

Anyway, I still miss some of the charm of the old masthead, but this one is much more like what I was looking for. Enjoy.

tagged with blog-changes

I have added another more than two dozen pictures from the first couple of years with the cupcakes to the rotation for the header image… so it’s no longer “just the pictures of a month” that you’ll see there…

Next time I have an hour or three I’ll add more recent ones, too!

tagged with blog-changes