Here in Mel­bourne we do OK when it comes to fes­ti­vals and events. Being the live­able city means there’s always some­thing inter­est­ing hap­pen­ing every week. The Sun­day Age has a two page spread devoted to this every week. It’s great because it means there’s never a rea­son to be bored.

The Event Du Jour was the Sweet Temp­ta­tion Expo. As the name sug­gests, it was devoted to the enjoy­ment and cel­e­bra­tion of all things sugar-based. Lazy Sun­days demand lazy behav­ior, so we didn’t get there until just before lunchtime. For some strange rea­son they’d can­celled the cook­ing classes that each ticket enti­tled us to. We were told this was due to “the over­whelm­ing num­ber of peo­ple who’d reg­is­tered”. That was a new one to me. Can­celled due to pop­u­lar demand!

The expo itself was good fun though. Imme­di­ately on enter­ing we were given a marsh­mal­low on a stick cov­ered in melted choco­late, and it just got bet­ter from there. We tried milk choco­late, dark choco­late, white choco­late, truf­fles, pas­sion­fruit sor­bet, rasp­berry slurpee, cup­cakes and fudge. There was also a guy sell­ing beef jerky at the USA Foods stand for some rea­son. I’m not com­plain­ing though, it was good beef jerky. We met up with a friend from Ange’s work, entered a cou­ple of com­pe­ti­tions and I snapped off a cou­ple of shots with the 50mm while I was there.

There’s only so long you can eat choco­late before the onset of headaches, the shakes and blind­ness set in though. So we left the expo and walked/waddled across the road to the Pump­house for a savoury lunch to coun­ter­act the bags of sugar surg­ing through our systems.

I’d sure like to have a chat with who­ever decided that pub­lic hol­i­days in Vic­to­ria should only be pep­pered through the first half of the year. There’s New Years in Jan­u­ary, my birth­day in Feb­ru­ary, Labour Day in March, the Easter week­end in April and Queens Birth­day in June. Com­ing out of Queens Birth­day there’s a long steep climb to Novem­ber and the Cup Day hol­i­day. Then Christ­mas is almost two months after that. It’s no won­der peo­ple here go crazy over Winter.

Deter­mined not to get sent to the crazy­house we booked four nights of bliss at The Hill of Con­tent in Phillip Island. We’d stayed in one of their Lofts last year and had a great time, despite nearly crack­ing my head open on the exposed beams. This year we booked Havana. A 3-room suite decked out much like the inside of a humi­dor: cli­mate con­trolled, woody, with just a hint of red vel­vety good­ness. Not entirely unin­ten­tional I sup­pose, given the copy of The Havana Cigar dis­played on the cof­fee table.

We hadn’t planned any­thing for the entire stay, so we were free to do what­ever we wanted. Which wasn’t much at all. We were there to relax, not sight-see. We did get a daily rou­tine down quickly though: wake up, break­fast, shower, drive out to attrac­tion, have lunch, come back to the suite (optional), drive out to the sec­ond attrac­tion, gather din­ner com­po­nents, come back to the suite, din­ner, then finally sleep.

At the two winer­ies we drank some good wine, at the eater­ies we ate some great food and at the minigolf place we treated our­selves to a delight­ful round of…golf. What’d you expect? We’d seen the pen­guins last year so didn’t feel the need to expose our­selves to the freez­ing cold twi­light ele­ments again. We did pass it on the way to visit the Nob­bies one blus­tery mid-morning. While I’m on weather, apart from that “crisp­ness”, the weather was actu­ally pretty good for mid-winter. I can’t for­got to men­tion the Rhyll Fish­ing Park oppo­site the bed and break­fast. While it wasn’t cheap, it was still fun for Ange and I to catch our own dinner.

Phillip Island really is one of my favourite places in Vic­to­ria and the hol­i­day was damn near per­fect. It only loses marks because I drove 15km before real­is­ing I’d for­got­ten to return the key to the suite. I can’t hold that against the island though.

Last night while look­ing for the vis­i­tor logs for my site I found that I could upgrade my Word­Press install. I’d been using ver­sion 2.0.2 ever since I first started the site, so I thought it was about time I moved to the newest ver­sion, 2.2.2. I had no idea what the advan­tage would be, if any, but I assumed it would be com­pletely pain­less. Much like the ini­tial install.

After a few min­utes the upgrade was com­plete. The months of work on my site had van­ished how­ever. Replaced with the default blue look. It was easy enough to down­load the old design from a backup and upload it over the top of the clas­sic blue, but when I hit Refresh the site became a blank page. Even the source was empty! I reverted back to the old 2.0.2 and found that was work­ing fine. Even if the data­base did com­plain about the move.

I down­loaded the old them again, this time bring­ing down one file at a time. Some­thing very inter­est­ing was hap­pen­ing. Image files were com­ing down fine, but the PHP ones were arriv­ing as zero byte files. This was why the site was a blank page. After a bit of head scratch­ing, I fig­ured out what was hap­pen­ing. The FTP pro­gram had to be set to ‘Binary’ rather than ‘Auto’. For some rea­son it couldn’t decide how the PHP files should be struc­tured (as I under­stand it).
Once I’d got that fig­ured out every­thing fell into place. I moved back to the 2.2.2 ver­sion of Word­Press, and pasted up the ‘panama’ design you see now.

Just before I trun­dled off to bed I noticed some­thing strange on the site. Two rows of dot­ted lines ran along the top of the side­bar. I didn’t realise it until this morn­ing, but the Pages sec­tion had van­ished. The Blogroll sec­tion had come back to haunt me as well. I’ve lost them from the pre­vi­ous ver­sion as well. So much for back­ups. I now have to recre­ate both pages from scratch. I’d just rewrit­ten the About sec­tion too.

While it was a bit night­mar­ish it was great learn­ing expe­ri­ence. I’ve learn a lit­tle more about how Word­Press works and now with the design sit­ting in it’s own sec­tion (rather than over­writ­ing the default) I’m one step closer to hav­ing my very own Word­Press theme. I never did end up get­ting those log files.

Being the “tech­ni­cal one” amongst fam­ily and friends means that I’m often called onto help them with computer-related prob­lems. Usu­ally these are hard­ware prob­lems: installing new com­po­nents, build­ing whole com­put­ers. Every now and then I’ll get some­thing I can’t do with my eyes closed. Like updat­ing a site based on Macro­me­dia Adobe Flash.

I’ve been asked to build a whole web­site before, and failed (but that’s some­thing for another time). But this was going to be a nice easy update to an exist­ing pho­tog­ra­phy site. That sim­ple update turned out to be 74 indi­vid­ual pho­tos that needed to be worked, one at a time, into the three flash movies on the site.

There were a cou­ple of teething prob­lems early in the process. I hadn’t actu­ally used a Flash prod­uct since 2003. So to say I was rusty would be an under­state­ment. The other issue was that, I didn’t actu­ally have the editable flash files, the .fla files as they’re known. With­out those files I couldn’t make any changes at all. After a quick visit to Google I found a .swf decom­plier. This pro­gram con­verted those pesky sta­tic .swf files into editable .fla files.

Not hav­ing a copy of Flash I jumped on the Adobe site and grabbed a free trial ver­sion. Just an aside, I’ve found the old Macro­me­dia soft­ware demos to be the only ones that give you full access as opposed to restrict­ing func­tion­al­ity. Once if was up and run­ning I opened my first .fla files in many years.

This image should give you an indi­ca­tion of what I saw when I opened it:

If your eyes glazed over the minute to saw that, then you’re not alone. My first thought was “Oh shit. What have I got myself into?”

After that ini­tial shock I like to think I picked up Flash pretty quickly. Though my first attempt was, to put it bluntly, pretty crappy. Images would move around the screen as they faded up and out. Some would refuse to fade away all together, instead appear­ing as a ghostly image under every sub­se­quent photo. Debug­ging all that took a lot of work, let me tell you. But the end result looks fan­tas­tic. You can see my work here: http://www.redvibephotography.com.au

One major irri­ta­tion I found was that the Flash trial was lim­ited to only 30 days. Even more irri­tat­ing was that the full ver­sion of Flash costs $1245. This drops down to $1129 if you elect to down­load it rather than receive a phys­i­cal copy. Still mas­sively expen­sive in my eyes. Even if I did charge for the job, rather than bartered a hot meal out of it, I’d have to do a lot of sim­i­lar jobs to even get close to afford­ing a copy. Prior expe­ri­ence has taught me I really don’t know how to charge for my work.

Noth­ing like hav­ing a friend unveil a great site design to get the com­pet­i­tive and cre­ative juices flow­ing. I’m really impressed with Mike’s new design. It’s bright, it’s read­able, and
there’s no longer any crazy login needed to com­ment. The CAPTCHA is a nice touch too. It might be work inves­ti­gat­ing later on down the track.
After play­ing around with his site I decided to make a few lit­tle changes here and there. I’d already had one major issue to resolve. The menu wasn’t work­ing right in Inter­net Explorer.

This par­tic­u­lar issue was half my bad cod­ing and half IE’s inter­pre­ta­tion of how the CSS Box Model should work. Using a handy lit­tle tool called XRAY for Fire­fox I was able to see that the mar­gin I’d set only pushed the side­bar three-quarters the way to where it should appear. In my genius I’d been using padding to push it the rest of the way. Because of how IE inter­prets the model, the padding was being incor­rectly included in the width of the side­bar itself. Remov­ing the pad­dding all together and increas­ing the mar­gin fixed this. Not a big issue, but it still took a bit of trial and error to get it right.

While I was try­ing to fig­ure out what I’d done wrong with the menu I made a few lit­tle changes to the design. I stretched the view­ing area to 900 pix­els, made the search but­ton line up with the search field and got the Pages images to appear. I’ve removed the blogroll sec­tion though, I just can’t get that image to appear. When I do man­age to fix it, it’ll be right back.
I’ve increased the kern­ing on the text too. reduced gap between let­ters looked great with some words, but over­all it was reduc­ing the leg­i­bil­ity of the site.

The design is almost at the point where I’m happy with it. It’s been a great learn­ing expe­ri­ence so far.

EDIT: As Mike has pointed out there’s a few things I didn’t men­tion. His help on the clean­ing up of the About and Things To Do Before you Die Pages. Plus his sug­ges­tion of chang­ing the perma­link struc­ture (and sub­se­quent breaking/fixing of the image links) was invaluable.