Website Facelift

View fullsize

My website has had several iterations of the years. It started as a simple way to keep my family informed of the house I was building at the time, that was nearly 20 years ago. Now my site is more of a landing page, a place on the web outside of normal social media. It's sat dormant for several years. I want to change that a little.

I love to take photos, so I think I will use my website to show off some off galleries of my photos. Nothing fancy. I don't expect anything to come of it. I just enjoy taking photos and sharing them. To be honest I'm sure my photos will get more views on FaceBook or Instagram, but for those that like what they say they can more easily view my photos on my own website. 

It's an experiment. In the end I'm not getting rid of my website and if I'm not getting rid of it, I might as well use it for something. Still be mainly a landing page. Realestate on the internet, but now maybe it will be a little prettier. 

I Love Stats

I've had a website now for almost a decade. I started back in 2002 so my family could share the building of my first house. I continued through my first downsizing (may their never be a second) and of course all the way through my wedding and beyond till today. I even created a seperate site for my wedding, eternalmagic.com. I love writing and just playing with kellysworld; continually striving to make the site look as polished as possible.

The one nagging question, "is anyone reading?" Thanks to services like Facebook and Twitter the answer is "YES!" Not a lot of people mind you, but more than just me and dear old mom. Mom, you are reading aren't you? The attached graph shows views are up. Nothing major of course, but it's cool to see it going up a little and being steady.

I think, in the end, I enjoy tweaking my website as much as I enjoy writing. That could be my downfall. For me though it's just about relaxing and having fun.

Check Out My Mobile Blog

To help me blog a little more, I'm trying Tumbler out again. The tool is easy to use and lets me do many cool things, like tie directly into FaceBook. It's easy to get to, just go to: blog.kellysworld.net. Tracy and I are off to Boston, so this tool should allow me to better share my experiences while in Boston and Maine. Tracy is graduating this Saturday, if I have a good enough signal on my phone I may try and use UStream so that those not attending can actually watch some of the ceremony.

Until then - Happy Trails! We get up at 3:00 and our plane leaves at 7:00 am. Going to be a long day tomorrow.

Fixed My Website Twitter Blues

It looks as though I have fixed the issues I was having on my website and posting automatically to Twitter that I've updated this website. I think I've also fixed the issue with the daily entry with all of my Tweets for that day. I had to uninstall all of the Twitter widgets for my website and then re-install the one I wanted. Even then it didn't work right away; but then mysteriously it did!!! I had problems like that, I may never know what was wrong. I will kick myself too if I find out it really isn't working. I love how works, and how easy it is to use... but when I have a problem it can be a bit of a pain to figure out what the heck went wrong.

Twitter Issues

Seems as though Twitter is making changes to their back end and it is impacting some of the Twitter solutions that I use. Primary the ones that allow me to cross post from Twitter to Facebook and those that allow my Tweets to appear daily on KellysWorld. I read that changes were in progress, but hadn't heard they were already in place. It's all that I can think of because solutions that were working, are currently not working. It's a little annoying. Doesn't seem to be much I can do about it at the moment, one of the issues with using lots of "free" services; it makes complaining very difficult.

Photos - Update to Site

I'm working on "upgrading" how I handle photos on the site. Taking a bit of a queue from how I decided to handle video, I'm going to use Flickr. While YouTube is pretty much the king of video on the net right now, Flickr has been the king of photos since it's creation several years ago. While it's feature set hasn't changed a great deal, it's still the big boy on the street and does what I want it to do. I've had a Flickr account for ages but stop using it when Apple upgraded to MobileMe. While I like how they handle photos, one glaring omission is the inability to embed photos in other places; like my website. Flickr does allow me to do this, and while Flickr has other limitations, it's still pretty slick.

If you look under the Galleries menu you will now see one that says Flickr. From there you can either click and go to my primary Flickr page or you can go down through the menus to categories.

Be advised that I haven't uploaded too many photos in the past year to Flickr so I have some uploading to do to get the site more current.

I did upload some old family photos this weekend, so there is some fresh content available. You can also see how I can embed a slideshow into the website. Like I said, slick.

I will probably also keep some photos on FaceBook. Many of the people I know use FaceBook and I have to admit, it's pretty handy. Especially if you have a modern smart phone.

Several New Videos

I've added several videos to my "NEW" YouTube channel. Below are links to each. You can also go to the new page on KellysWorld called KWTV. That page is dedicated to just showing the latest videos. It's very easy to use and it totally embedded into the site. There is also a link back to my YouTube channel on the player. If you use YouTube a lot you can subscribe to my channel and follow my videos that way. I expect there will be more video than in the past; assuming I can find the time to do quick edits and upload them.

• Carlos Year One
• Christmas 2008
• Kristie On Helium
• Night out With Kristie

Bit.ly Shortening Test

This is simply a test to see if the Bit.ly shortening service works with the plugin for #TwitterTools on #WordPress. I guess I could have waited for a real post to give this a try, but why not just do a test and get it over with.