If you’ve visited here before you’ve probably noticed the big change in the look of this site. Over the last year or two I’ve fallen behind on updating the Nucleus CMS software running TKK. Upgrading always seemed like a pain and I was starting to want some more flexible features of other blogging software. Some time back (I’m not sure when) the moblog posting broke, so I couldn’t send pictures from my cell phone anymore.

So I’ve recently been working on moving over to WordPress. I really like how easy WordPress is to configure. So I’ve been manually copying over my old entries into the new blog. I’m mostly finished with that, but I’ve still got many little things to modify and add. In general I’m hoping to make this new site look a bit cleaner and less cluttered than the old one. That may be a somewhat challenging task since I tend to be a rather cluttered person (as anyone who’s seen my house can attest). I’m hoping to eventually integrate the gallery into the main site as well (but that involves an even bigger software upgrade, which will probably wait until next month…).

One problem is that most of the old links are broken and end up just displaying the main page. If you can’t find what you want, check the “Categories” links on the right, the Archives page or do a search on the site.

I’ve gotten inspired to upload a bunch of pictures to the gallery page. One is of highlight pictures of my time here in Japan. Second is of Mukaihara, the town I live in here in Japan. Included in that one is a bunch of pictures of my house and a panorama of the Mukaihara.

I’ve fallen behind a bit on my blog entries. So today I’ve made a stab at catching up a little bit by adding a few new backdated entries:

10/11 - “Saijo Sake Festival” & “Blooming in Bihoku”
11/13 - Fall Colors of Miyajima
11/14 - More Culture - the JHS Culture Festival

Yes, that first one dates back to October - I wrote it offline but never got around to posting it. As an added bonus, they all have lots of pretty pictures.

I still have a few more entries to catch up on, but might not happen to next week. Highlights of those are another festival here in Mukaihara with traditional dancing and stuff & my trip to Osaka. Plus tomorrow I’m going with a bunch of Hiroshima JETs to Fukuoka to watch sumo and ride roller coasters. So I’ll have to write about that too…

As you can see from the test messages today, the moblog is up and running for real again for the first time since switching over to nucleus. A fellow called Ihra had posted test code for an updated version of the NP_PostMan plugin to nucleus. After installing it and fixing a problem with my crontab (I wasn’t escaping the ‘&’ in the url I was passing lynx, it should be ‘\&’) it seems to work fine. There are some issues with Japanese text encoding, still have to sort them out (but if you switch your encoding over to ISO 2022-JP the text should be readable).

So now I can post pictures and messages from my phone instead of having to upload them later when I get home and perhaps have lost inspiration to post something. And if I actually make it to the top of Fuji next year, I can moblog the sunrise…

Was feeling a bit down and blah last night and ended up falling asleep on the couch (always a bad idea). Dunno when, probably 11ish. Woke up sometime after 3am and got inspired to finally work on the PHP to get the little thumbnail for the moblog in the right column working. Largely a hack, but it seems to work now. Unfortunately still haven’t been able to download the code that lets me post via email (the hosting site insists on interpreting the file as PHP instead of displaying it), so haven’t been posting new moblog stuff. If anyone can actually get the code for that, please send it to me — not sure if its some stupid IE vs other browsers mimetype error or something.

Bleh, the sun’s already coming up. Dunno if I’m going to be able to get a couple more hours sleep at this point or not… X-(