ellsworthlink.net

Just wanted to give everyone a heads up that while ellsworthlink.net will continue to exist — and Deb will be posting to it still — I am going through a bit of an online “re-brand” around ells.me / ELLSdotME / ellsDOTme / ells-dot-me / whatever… So you can follow that madness by clicking over to ells.me or by subscribing to the RSS feed.

I used to be a huge font geek. I would amass great quantities of fonts only to use my favorite dozen on every project… Anyway, over the years I’ve drifted away from caring about fonts—probably because I don’t do much design/publishing work anymore—until I came across YourFonts.com. The font below? Yeah: my handwriting.

It’s funny: why does what seem to pass for the height of digital cool mean taking an analog “thing” and making it usable on my computer? What’s wrong with me? (Note how I ask this on the blog so Deb has a maximum of a thousand characters to answer that question.)

Goodbye iTheme, hello WooTheme! What you’re looking at now is a brand new theme for ellsworthlink.net!

I’m sunsetting the long-time template of ellsworthlink.net—shown here, to the right—for a newer, slightly-more-fun(-for-me) theme called FreshNews. In that process I’m making a number of changes to the back end that will make it either easier for us to maintain, better for users, or just “different” because I wanted it to be different.

One of the big changes is subscriptions. The quick story is that I removed all the subscriptions so we could try a new subscription service. This new service is much (!) more reliable and I think we’ll see folks who stopped getting emails a long time ago start to reliably receive the emails if you recreate your subscription by following the link at the tippy-top of the page on the right-hand side. [Hmm, it is a link, Ellsworth, just give it to them: Subscribe to Alert Emails.] The biggest difference you’ll see here (well, aside from them working) is that you’ll only receive one email per day at the most, even if we post multiple times—they’ll all be included in the every-morning-at-5am email.

Lots of cosmetic changes, and lots of stuff will continue to change, but Deb keeps making fun of me that this isn’t up yet, so here it goes…

C’mon… You knew it was going to happen.

Deb and I went to the Newport Centre Mall this morning to get our eagerly anticipated “his and hers” iPhone 3Gs… We were 35th or so in line but had heard that the AT&T Store we were stalking was expecting 100 phones, so we felt pretty good.

A scant two-and-a-half hours later we walked out with a white 16-gig and a black 16-gig iPhone. The line was wrapping around the hallway outside of the store and Colin was having great fun being alternately really entertaining for the others in line or really bashful. What he never lacked the whole time was energy. He must have run 2+ miles with all his racing back-and-forth and darting around the corner trying to make a break for it. I think he had a lot of fun! He shouted “iPhone!!!” at the top of his lungs when the manager finally invited us into the store.

He was a really good kid the whole time, though—as was his sleeping sister—so I let him show off the boxes in this picture.

It should probably be mentioned that we’re totally smitten with these phones. LOVE 3G! But I think even more than the increased speed is the new Applications we are getting to play with. Truly mobile handheld computing, not just mobile phones.

Okay, so there has been some back-and-forth on the blog today. And I’m sure my bandwidth usage is through the roof with all the bit-pushing I’ve been doing. But the net/net is that the entire site has been migrated to a new (cruft-free) infrastructure and is in the midst of a face-lift as well. You’ll definitely be seeing some wonkiness—perceptive visitors may notice the right-hand sidebar is somewhat different than it has been in the past, for instance—over the next however long, but suffice it to say I’ve made some big progress. And haven’t lost any of our posts since August 2004 when we launched…

Once I’ve got all the back end stuff set up, I’ll post about some logistics, like getting set up with a working email alert whenever I post and some other stuff like that.

As I mentioned on the actual old.ellsworthlink.net site, I am migrating ellsworthlink.net to a new look/feel/infrastructure. You’ve stumbled onto the site during said migration—and there is a good chance this could take a while, so I’m not surprised.

With the changes, I am not making the effort to migrate the 325 posts from the “old” site over here to the new one, but I am keeping that site live as an archive at:

old.ellsworthlink.net

Given how often both Deb and I have referenced old posts to find out a different piece of information (how old was Colin when he got his first tooth? or how many different towel animals did they make for us on our babymoon cruise?), it was obvious we needed to keep that bad boy alive—we just needed to move it into cold storage.

We’re upgrading our blog from an older version of WordPress to a fancy schmancy new version. While I’m doing that, I’m also revamping a lot of the back-end infrastructure to make sure some stuff that wasn’t working before does now (including those of you who aren’t yet using RSS readers and have signed up for email notification of new post) and include some new functionality I’ve been wanting to include for—embarrassingly—years now.

In any event, if you run into any wonkiness in the near future that would be why!