James Huckaby…

Once again I’ve remodeled the website, er.. websites.  This time instead of splitting things up, I’ve united all my blogs and comics strips for the monkeyproject into one Frankenstein’s monster of a site.  I’ve been working on a number of things lately to try to clean up my digital world and most of the apparent labor saving or data saving techniques I’ve been pursuing tend to actually not save any time (the data is safe).

For instance I’ve been attempting to use Windows Live Mesh to sync up data on my various computers.  This has been a nightmare.  It is a memory hog and currently has a poor file conflict resolution interface.  I’m switching back to Windows Live Sync (formerly known as Foldershare).

Also, I’ve successfully moved all of my old Outlook e-mail from old workplaces and old Thunderbird e-mail (personal e-mail) into Gmail via their IMAP protocols.   This was a major pain in the butt because of a number of factors.  I had attempted to import Outlook e-mail into Thunderbird first which resulted in missing e-mail headers in Google.  So I had to use Outlook to  move the Outlook e-mail (follow Google’s setup exactly or be frustrated for both Outlook and Thunderbird).

Thunderbird 2.0 failed to move large numbers of my saved e-mails at one time and dying with batches less than 50, so I loaded the Thunderbird 3.0 beta to load batches.  This worked well until I discovered 3.0 beta fails to transfer to Google when it encounters empty subjects lines.  Eventually with this figured out I returned to 2.0 to transfer the remaining couple of hundred e-mail there were empty subject line transfers worked.

Add to that I have a digital archive of thousand of photos from Hawaii that I’ve yet to sort through and albumize the roots of my internet paralysis should be somewhat clearer.  That said I truly hope to post my photo albums from the last year or so on Flickr over the Christmas holiday.

What’s changed:

The monkeyproject.com, raveller.com and halfclosedeye.com entries have been imported and merged from Blogger into WordPress.  All 3 domain names will take you here.  I did this to utilize the ComicPress written specifically for WordPress comic archives.  This transition was also less than seamless as many of my older posts were ported directly from HTML I maintained and the easy Blogger import missed a few entries I had to manually import.  Also ComicPress gets confused when the Comic category is a subcategory so my desired to be able to click the “all” link on the right and have all my posts and comics inter-weaved when viewing a category has been thwarted.  All of these things may go away with later versions, but the overall software is still pretty fantastic.  The amount of time I’ve spent writing my own code to run websites for last 10 years has been fairly substantial and to have software that does what I “manually” did for so long take the burden off of me is a great relief.

If a link to the old monkeyproject forums isn’t up when you read this it soon will be.   There are mechanisms to integrate WordPress and phpBB but I’m not sure I want to do that.  There may be dead links in the old articles and that’s due to the mercurial nature of the Internet.  I tried to eliminate them as much as I could when cleaning up formatting but you can’t save them all.

I have also integrated my old Opinions by James humor pieces into the blog format so there’s that as well.  I’d like to save as many of old pages as I can by integrating them as older articles.  I’d also like to title the monkeyproject comics as much as possible.  But that’s another project.

Personally

Sandi and I have been married for 8 months now and it’s great!  We’re still sorting out the office and the garage after working on lots of the other stuff.  I may have pictures up of that eventually, but anyone who hasn’t seen the house would be surprised at the makeover.

Have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!