Category: Website

George calls my new design “cleaner” and says the new graphic is “cool.” Greg tweaks me, pointing out in his “on the side link” that the site now, for the first time almost since its inception, “features [an] actual house.”

About that graphic (I’ll add this to the FAQ): the photo is not the Jarrett house, or even a Jarrett house. I took the picture in 1998 or 1999 on the Manassas battlefield in Northern Virginia. The house is a dwelling that survived the battle, despite heavy fire. Something about the day and the picture spoke to me, and I used it as the navigation graphic for the whole site in the previous iteration. When I was looking for a new site logo graphic, this one leapt out at me. I think the appeal of the graphic is a combination of nostalgia (I took the photo the fall before I left Virginia for business school) and aspiration (the desire for a house, and a family, that would last through war, fire, and time).

It’s time. I’m pulling the trigger on the site redesign. Doing it incrementally isn’t really possible, but I’m rolling out the first phase separately anyway: doing away with the news item department icons on each post. Their time is up.

My website repair efforts continue to limp along. I am manually rendering the past few days in October, and will be looking at any pages that I manually designated as having a static path (mostly via my Site Map).

In the meantime, I’m full speed ahead on the redesign. Notes to come.

Almost all the static site has rendered now and is once again available at http://www.www.jarretthousenorth.com. Notable exceptions, all from 2003: the end of September (being rendered now) through October. Also missing until I upload it again: my genealogy records and some miscellaneous pictures from other old parts of the site.

A great dinner tonight, a minestrone with meatballs, with a Chianti Riserva from 2000 that was mellow but lively. As are the dogs, who are taken with the new digs here in New Jersey and, after a day, have settled back into their routines.

It looks like the outage that has plagued my site over the last week is slowly clearing up. I have the ability to render pages to the static site on a one by one basis, so the front page has been posted. However, for some reason, I don’t seem to be able to execute Manila’s “render this site” command. Maybe I’ll try another time when traffic is lower. The bottom line is, while the site is coming back, there are still going to be a lot of broken links for a while.

It looks like the static server is back up, but publishing problems are still prohibiting adding new images. At least you can all read my prose… Thanks to Erin Clerico at Weblogger for his quick work, and looking forward to a fully functional site again soon.

A quick update on the outages. It looks like a number of Weblogger hosted sites are similarly affected, including weblogger.com. If you’re reading this RSS feed, my discussion site at http://discuss.www.jarretthousenorth.com will at least let you read the text; my static site at http://www.www.jarretthousenorth.com appears to be completely down. No word yet as to the cause of the outage.

In the interim, I’m writing more holiday reviews but will hold on posting them until I can get picture support working again. The Past Listening and Past Reading sections are similarly on hold.

This was kind of bad timing as I wanted to work on a new site design over the holidays. Hope the outage clears up soon.

It looks like the server that hosts a lot of my static content, including my images and the real CSS stylesheet for this weblog, is offline. I’ve pinged tech support. In the meantime, please “enjoy” the extra weight of inline stylesheet on each page (the last backup I had), complete with extra nostalgic old text sizes and leading.

Thanks to all for the birthday shoutouts, including Esta, Craig, and Tony Pierce.

It’s going to be a pretty mellow birthday. I’m not the same guy I was ten years ago, when I was bemoaning the fact that a stomach ulcer was keeping me from going out for my first adult beverage in a bar upon my legal majority. It’ll be a nice quiet night at home with my wife.

Of course, I’ll be out Saturday at the company Christmas party, and plan to do some singing (as part of the entertainment, not spontaneously) and some dancing (spontaneously, not intentionally as part of the entertainment), but that’s a whole ’nother story…

Update: Thanks also to George and Becky for the CD and the kind thoughts.

We said goodbye to Ed and Gina a few hours ago; this was the second Thanksgiving holiday we’ve had with them in as many years. Partly this is because they’re the only ones of our friends who don’t head back to their respective families for the holiday, but mostly it’s because they’re such great company.

While I was putting Thanksgiving dinner together (aside: 14 pound brined turkey, bouquet garni and onion inside, with pan gravy made with prosciutto, veal glacé, and Calvados; the Changs brought garlic mashed potatoes, green beans, candied yams, and salad; and Lisa made a killer apple Charlotte; and after all that I cooked a duck breast with apricot sauce for a kind of lagniappe), I started thinking about everything I was thankful for. This year it’s easy to break it down:

• Family: I’m tremendously proud and happy to be married to Lisa, and to have made my home here with her. I’m hugely proud of my sister, Esta, who’s living her dream. And I’m thankful and grateful for my family and Lisa’s family, who have given us so much. And my grandfather, and my aunts and uncles, and all those who have come before.
• Friends: All my friends from work, from Sloan, and from old jobs and long maintained friendships. Some things do grow better with age.
• Country: Even when its leadership is in error, I’m hugely thankful and proud to live in a country where we can fight for what’s right by staying inside the system and without resorting to violence. Heck, where we even have the freedom to write a sentence like that one.
• Music: Performing and listening. Yo La Tengo, Elliott Smith, Johnny Cash, Lady Day and John Coltrane. And even Gil Scott Heron.
• Writing: The ability to express myself, and having the place to do so.
• All of you. Thanks, everyone, for hanging in here.

I have a lot of sleep to catch up on, so I anticipate this will be a light blogging weekend. Hopefully I can resume intelligent commentary, or at least voluminous commentary, soon.

September 2, 2002: Sonic Youth at Bumbershoot 2002. Still one of my favorite pieces of concert writing to date, in a sort of Hemingway-esque way: “The band went offstage, then came back on and played ‘Disconnection Notice.’ After the rest of the set, it felt somber and almost valedictory. This was the last set of their tour. Wind came up into Lee’s hair. They left the stage. I left the stadium and drove home.”

My blog just became the beneficiary of the new TrackBack features added to Manila by UserLand. Theoretically at least I have the ability to send outbound pings and receive inbound pings. I say “theoretically” because I’ve tried sending an outbound ping and haven’t seen any results, and haven’t seen any inbound pings yet either. But it should work.

Things that I’ve found while working on enabling this feature:

1. For those who don’t know anything about TrackBack, there’s a good non-technical explanation here.
2. The TrackBack list, like the Comments list, is not available on the static view of my site at www.www.jarretthousenorth.com, but it is available at the dynamic view at discuss.www.jarretthousenorth.com.
3. The TrackBack ping URL is not the same as the permalink for a post. Don’t know why I thought it would be, but… You can find the URL to ping by clicking the TrackBack link under a news item.
4. NetNewsWire doesn’t provide a field for TrackBack URLs for Manila blogs yet.

Esta asks about the asterisks showing up on my blogroll. I finally got the active blogroll religion with Blogrolling.com. The asterisks mean that the Blogrolling.com server shows that blog as being updated in the last 24 hours. I think as long as you ping Weblogs.com, Blogrolling picks it up.

I’m thinking about doing a complete site redesign, but I’m too lazy to do it right, so you might see things change in drips and drabs over the next month or so.