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.