So many websites, so little time

November 18, 2008November 16, 2010 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 3 Comments

Assistant DogSite editor Mia Sopaipilla hard at work in her office.

I broke out the BFH last night and spent the better part of quite some time pounding on the DogSite v2.0 (that would be this site), straightening out dents in this and kinks in that while swearing into a frequently empty wineglass.

So now we have three DogSites up and running, more or less:

The original: www.maddogmedia.com
V2.0: http://www.maddogmedia.com/wordpress
V3.0: www.maddogmedia.wordpress.com

I thought for sure that v3.0 was going to be the way to go, mostly for cost (none) and ease of use (plenty). And then I took a sharper glance around under the hood. Only 3MB of storage, which limits photo uploads, and no video or audio uploads at all without “upgrading.” Sheeyit. I already have a paid site — the original, hosted by Hostcentric — and I can chuck my little digital stones into that vast pond for years before I fill it up. And with WordPress installed there, I can do what you see here.

The downside is, running your own WordPress show requires you to get a little more hands-on behind the scenes. Mama WordPress ain’t there to hold your hand and walk you through kindergarten on things like RSS feeds, header images and other tweaks and sneaks. Hence the wine and swearing.

This morning I think things look more or less OK. Of course, it’s early yet.

O, bugger it

November 17, 2008 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 3 Comments

It appears the free version of WordPress may not work for me (and thee). I can see I’d exceed the upload limitations by, oh, say, Thursday. So we’re back to knocking down walls and laying pipe here at Mad Dog Media.

I like taking a pic now and then, and you never know when I might resume raving into a mic’ or a camera, and seems you just can’t do much of that sort of thing for free. Not at WordPress, anyway. Who knew? I’ll have to have a word with my man Al Gore about this outrage next time we hook up backstage at “SNL” to do belly shots of Chamucos off Tina Fey.

White tigers in the trees

November 13, 2008November 16, 2010 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 1 Comment

It was a fine day for cats in Bibleburg: upper 60s, sunny, and trees bereft of leaves, which make for excellent birdwatching. It was a tad windy for cycling, so when I gave the VeloNews.com crowd the slip for an hour I rolled on over to Palmer Park, where a guy can dodge the worst of it.

A cyclo-cross bike is not the ideal machine for Palmer Park, but riding skinny tires and a rigid fork on rocky, sandy single-track has a way of focusing the mind on the task at hand, which is getting exercise without getting killed. Like road riding, only quieter and more scenic.

Speaking of which, a fellow slacker is bound for McDowell Mountain Regional Park tomorrow and a couple weeks of riding in that neck of the Arizona woods. He’s looking at 80-something and sunny, I’m looking at 40-something and breezy. I suspect he invested more wisely than I. I should’ve listened to what my mother told me all those years ago. “What’d she tell you?” you ask. Beats me — I wasn’t listening.

Fall finally rears its old gray head

November 10, 2008 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 2 Comments

Well, dammit, it can’t be Indian summer forever, I guess. Never got much above the upper 30s today, with a light rain tamping down the dust under a sky as gray as a Repuglican’s face on Election Day 2008.

I hung around indoors, taking care of a few electronic chores, then finally said to hell with it around 3 p.m. and went out for a short run into a cold wind out of the north. This reminded me that Herself had pulled our old-school storm doors out of their basement hideaway and I had not yet put them up, nor had I removed our rattly $99 Sears air conditioner from the north-facing bedroom window and replaced it with the storm window.

The storm doors are a breeze — five minutes with a flathead screwdriver is all it takes to replace screens with glass. The air conditioner was another thing altogether. I couldn’t remember how I installed the damn’ thing (badly), so uninstalling it was an exercise in feline entertainment as the sun began to set. As the cats watched with great interest (“What the hell is he doing now?“) I managed to drop the air conditioner straight out of the window and onto the back deck, bam, cutting the shit out of my right wrist as I tried, unsuccessfully, to save the worthless piece of crap from the death it so richly deserved for waking me up night after night during summertime with its burbling, farting and keening.

I will never be smart. But at least I’ll be warm.

Editor’s note: Don’t forget the old site. It’s still numero uno around here until I decide whether this is the Wave of the Future or merely a ripple on the stagnant pond of my mind. You wrote today’s post, about how to deal with the wolf at the door during the Great Recession.

Old dog, new tricks

November 9, 2008 ~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 3 Comments

Thanks for the emails and comments on the latest iteration of the DogSite. Many of you have asked to be able to add a quick comment rather than crank out an email; others have been asking for RSS feeds. Some just want to be able to target an individual post and forward it to someone in hopes of causing a stroke. This WordPress template lets me grant all those wishes.

There are a few things I still don’t like about handing the site over to a template. The biggest is not having a backup copy of whatever I post stashed here on the old hard drive. My buddy Hal at Hardscrabble Times writes all his posts in AppleWorks before sending them into the ether, and maybe I’ll follow his lead using TextEdit, which is a nice, clean little word processor. In the one cut-and-paste I did from The Daily Dog v1.0, I noticed that the post retained the formatting of the original instead of assuming the qualities of this new, bigger-and-better digital world. Lots to learn, lots to learn. And me so long in the tooth, too.