spring2life take2

Sidi Bou Saïd, Tunisia

After a lot of deliberation, it seems that both backup and restore measures were successful. There are some issues left with the galleries, but these are consequences of a gallery software update and I have to resolve these manually.

It turned out that my old strategy of distributing services was successful again: As the domain name was not with the hoster, I could easily contract a new hosting company and had not to wait if and when the old hosting provider decided to allow a transfer to the domain name. And a double-checked backup process, which kept all ressources on my sides and removed the dependency from the provider. But nobody is interested if you can backup, it’s only the restore that counts.

Problems like this of course you don’t have, when you stick with google, and there are good reasons for this. I had to pay the price for my independence.

Nice surprise in the evening: My friendly hoster not only suspended but terminated my account without warning. The action that led to termination was the upgrade of the wordpress version. The account was terminated without providing any documentary evidence  of the alleged overusage of ressources. At least financially the potential loss is bearable, but I am looking forward if they will refund the already prepaid monthly fees.

Lucky me that I have backups and have contracted another hoster (greengeeks.com) already yesterday evening. So what you read comes from the new server, and I keep my fingers crossed that this will be a positive experience.

Hammerau, Bavaria

I hope that not too many of you have suffered from the technical issues this blog had in the last days. Today the account got moved by the truly responsive Hosting24 service crew to a new datacenter, it seems at least to me that load times are considerable shorter now. Additionally I have tried to distribute the load by using the Cloudflare caching and content distribution network services. The latter doesn’t seem to be without side-effects though, at least Martina has seen a number of error screens. I have meanwhile tuned down the cloudflare settings quite a bit, but I depend on your, the visitors from allover this planet, feedback to learn if the blogs behaviour and speed are acceptable or if there are continuing errors. For this I have created the email address blogerror@markus-spring.info, which I kindly ask you to use for positive or negative feedback on the blog performance. Thanks.

Since quite some time I have been discontent with my blog theme. One could image, that among the ‘zillion of wordpress themes on the web, there should be one for me, too. Alas, if there is, I didn’t find it. So I took an evolutionary step forward from my old theme, tried to enhance readability and allow for bigger image sizes on the front page. Thanks to wordpress’ open source code and excellent documentation, the technical best way turned out to be even really elegant!

So I hope I have not overlooked too many quirks. Enjoy – and feedback is welcome!

For completely unclear reasons I cannot upload any image files to my hosting account from Krk in Croatia at the moment. I have tried every available trick including commandline voodoo magic, but no file gets transferred by more the 12% of it’s size.

Posting will be resumed whenenver I am able to overcome this problem. Until then, I am going to enjoy my holidays

¢ Carl Weese

My friend Carl Weese sent me this image today: Their cat Marshall scrutinizing the last post on spring2life, probably checking if that small biker might make up a substitute for a mouse. Seems that spring2life has some renommee also with quadrupeds. Thanks Carl!

The wallpapers for July are ready for download on the wallpapers page. This month’s image is from the Kapuzinerberg in Salzburg, where I spent a fruitful evening with friends from the local photography group (not camera club). More images from this event are in the pipeline. Enjoy.

Always eager to avoid security risks hidden in older software, I first tried the new 3.0 version of the blog software WordPress on my local installation. I was impressed by the smoothness and speed of the upgrade process, which did not cause any hickups or even minor changes in the look of my handcrafted theme. So I upgraded the life site, too – without any problem.

That came only minutes later when I used the bulk upgrade for one plugin just out of curiosity (which always is a bad counselor): The blog went into maintenance mode but never came out again.

Lucky me that I was not the first person with this problem. One web search immediately yielded in the right recipe to correct this: Deleting the file .maintenance in the wordpress installation directory. And I was even more lucky to have a web presence with ssh-access, that made correcting this error a matter of seconds.

Fazit: WordPress 3.0 runs like a charm, but for the time being be careful with the bulk update for plugins.

Quite a while ago, Mike Johnston of “The Online Photographer” postulated a Tenset for all photography websites. I do well remember that there were also some critical voices regarding this idea, in the sense that this would just alleviate consumability of individual work and so on.

Having pondered on that proposal long enough, I finally decided in favour of it, not knowing however how difficult it could be to distill a set of 16 (for layout reasons) of all my images. Still I am not sure about the selection, but of course the Tenset is even more “work in progress” than other galleries – given that I am able to develop my vision and skill.

So here it is. Enjoy!

Carl Weese is probably known to you through his blogs Working Pictures and WPII: Pictures in Public. Those who have visited his website for sure have seen his series about the derelict and decaying drive-in movie theaters. From a European point of view, drive-in movie theaters seem to an inseparable part of American culture and cult. To see them falling prey to a more and more individualistic lifestyle and getting “eaten up” by corrosion and decay evokes melancholic feelings. Having captured singular moments of beauty in this disintegration or sometimes re-integration certainly is commendable

This series today is featured in the New York Times “Lens Blog”. I hope it finds a wide readership. Congratulations, Carl!

Well, this (modified) motto of the United States makes up for a good summary of 2009. This is a year that is characterised by disappointments in most of the fields important for humankind: The financial crisis, created by a lunatic fringe of irresponsible bankers with full support of a large crowd of power-obsessed/greedy/intellectually handicapped politicians backed up by a large population of well-to-dos that still believes in the tell-tale of the proliferation of money through speculation… I stop here.

The Copenhagen Conference was a second major disappointment (I ignore the remarkable Pres. Obama speech in Oslo): Mankind, dominated by the leaders of the most powerful states, China among them, proved to be simply incompetent to deal with the problem of climate change. I am not sure if we will have the time to remediate this failure.

That there is no end visible for the war in Afghanistan is bitter, that there are no political leaders with a vision how to overcome hatred is even worse.

So: In God we should trust. The only problem is that divine intervention was scarce at least in my lifetime (I don’t truly count former Pres. Bush’s inspiration among them).

Image: http://blog.babaoskar.info/wp/

Let me direct your attention to a new blog: babaoskar shoots back.

Bernd is a friend and avid photographer since many years, running the film-only flag until recently and now enjoying his treasured optics on a new DSLR body. The 2nd image in his blog, posted today, matches this November 9th very well. I am already looking forward to his images. Stay tuned.

Nice new blog, isnt’t it? I got several thumbs-up comments and was happy – sleek new design, not too distracting and all. But – those comments came from those who could comment. And with ‘could’ I don’t want to hint to their ability to write, but to the sheer technical possibility to get their comment posted. Those who couldn’t comment were very well knowledgable and able to click the submit button – alas, that fine fusion theme does not play nicely with older browsers like firefox 2.0 or internet explorer 6. If there would be only some optical quirks or marginal display deviations, I would not care too much because browsers do have their own idea what is correct, and sometimes they don’t, but in this case probably the jquery javascript library had its issues with the way it was used here. And in the end this blog is about photographic content, not web 2.0 javascript gimmicks without real value. Locking out users because of the version of the browser deems me to be outright stupid.

Thanks to Carl Weese from Working Pictures and also WPII Pictures in Public and also Oren Grad from Things seen  I was able to track things down. After some testing I decided to go with a new theme, which needs of course some modding to make it fit for my needs, so don’t be surprised if the look of the pages undergoes some further changes. But for a while, I think I will use the ‘minimalism’ theme. Keep it simple, stupid!

Finally I did switch from Blogger to WordPress on a shared server. The reasons I will explain in a later post, for the time being I am glad that the import of the old posts and even 95% of the comments went without any problems. Most of the widgets are in a useful state now, the RSS feed is working and a lot of the functionality I always wanted is here, too. Not to mention the galleries – with those I started my wordpress adventure as I wanted more than a blog but with a maximum of integration to keep the workload low.

Now it’s time for you, dear readers, to adjust the bookmark or feed. If anything doesn’t work as expected, please do inform me. Thanks.