Marcel's Blog

Bonsoir All is well in Portland and we are really enjoying life here. You can find out more about our “goings on” in Charlottes new blog on javafoto.com For this cosmic blog entry I just want to elaborate on some changes happening with our two websites cosmicadventure and javafoto. You are all probably curious to know what happened to Javafoto.com and why haven’t we updated it since we lived in Colorado? Well as you might expect the photography business is not very easy to make a living at so we’ve decided it is much better as a hobby for now instead of a side business. Therefore the old Javafoto site has been wiped clean and Charlotte is now using that domain for her personal website. She wants to use it to learn html, css, along with other web apps; and also to communicate some of her ideas and creativity out to friends and family. For now it will mostly consist of a blog and gallery with subjects leaning towards food, photography, travel, and lifestyle. If you’re missing my old blog entries about our going ons then check out C’s blog for more up to date info on some of our weekly happenings. The old Javafoto pictures that were on that site may make their way into the new CosmicAdventure Gallery 2 in the future once I’m caught up on uploading galleries from the last year and a half; more about that later. For now I’ll just make a disclaimer that this blog entry is mostly about Comsicadventure.com and somewhat technical in nature rather than my usual amusing stories. So in other words feel free to skip this blog entry if you aren’t interested in the technical talk and visit the link to our new gallery 2 below for new pics from the PNW.
Gallery 2 link

Many of you are probably wondering why I put all this work into CosmicAdventure in the first place, and what is the point of this website. There are multiple reasons. First and foremost I like to keep in touch with everyone and feel this is a great way to do that while letting everyone know what is going on with us. Our current email is always listed on the website so anyone who knows our website can always get in touch with us. I know I haven’t been very diligent at responding to emails, calls, and just keeping in touch with folks but I am always glad to hear from family and old friends so be sure to keep in touch with an occasional email or phone call. Secondly it is a great way for me to learn and expand my skills in web development, writing, photography, and photo editing. These are all things I’m very interested in and this kind of wraps them into one bundle. So I guess you can say it’s kind of like a hobby for me, sort of like watching TV is a hobby for some people. Someday this web design stuff could lead to a new career direction or even a side business. Even if it doesn’t this is a fun hobby for me and mentally stimulating, much like doing a puzzle, playing chess, or reading/writing a book. Lastly it is a place for us to share our pictures, videos, experiences, and ideas about life. If you can’t share these things with others, then what is really the point of having them in the first place

An interesting side note is that CosmicAdventure and JavaFoto to a lesser degree both had near death experiences. It is true, we almost lost our domain names forever. The files are all backed up for the most part but if you lose your domain name which is the name of the website cosmicadventure.com it would never really be the same again. I’d have to register a new name like cosmicadventureresurrected.com which would just be ridiculous. To make a very long story short the company that hosts our domain names went out of business. They conveniently forgot to tell their thousands of customers but didn’t forget to charge us and others to renew domains while making the appearance of keeping up a normal business . The cosmicadventure domain expired and we were locked out of our account unable to renew it, even though we had paid to renew it. With much effort I was finally able to x-fer it to Godaddy.com where it will hopefully be safe for the ages. To read more about registerfly (now known as the enron of the internet) just google “registerfly sucks” or click this link.
registerflies.com

Now about those new website updates. I’ve finally installed a new version of the photo gallery software. It’s a little different from the old gallery mainly because it runs off a SQL database and has many more advanced features and themes that can be added. The old gallery can be imported but it is a tedious process and some data like comments may be lost, so for now I’ve decided to keep them separate but that could change in the future. Eventually I will make a new website header (top of the website) to include the old Gallery you all know and love, and in addition there will be a link to Gallery 2 (pending) which will contain any new galleries. I have a few more albums from the U.S. part of our eurotrip that I will add to the old gallery, but otherwise everything else will go into the new Gallery 2 section including some Canada, New Mexico, family, and retro Colorado pics (eventually). I may also make a Europe’s greatest hits gallery area with larger edited photos containing some of our favorite night shots, food pics, landmarks, and so on. Gallery 2 is functional now and running smooth but will undergo some changes as I customize the program.

The new Gallery 2 should be a much more pleasant viewing experience for most of you. For some of you it may run slower than the old version depending on your computer and/or internet connection, but like Heinz ketchup it’s worth the wait. Now when we post galleries we will select a lot fewer pictures and edit most of them so they look more professional and bright just like film pictures do when they come back from the photo lab. Yes for those of you who don’t know film pictures are almost always edited at the lab which is why they look so good compared to a digital image that has not been edited and color corrected- like most of our Europe pictures we uploaded in a time crunch without editing. Anyway I will try to keep the new galleries to one page per album unlike the old gallery where some albums have multiple pages. All of our pictures will now be in 800x600 or similar resolution instead of 500 or 640 res. That means the picture is bigger on your screen with more detail. You can now run a full screen slide show but that will stretch out the picture causing some loss in quality. The regular slide show feature will look much better running at the max output of 800x800. Some other features will be added such as a voting system, improved commenting with spam protection, previous/next picture preview, larger thumbnails, slideshows, etc. The pictures will now have a short title for the thumbnails and a longer description attached to most pictures, but you will only see the long description if you view the full sized picture or slideshow which is recommended. Eventually I’ll customize the theme to make it look more attractive.

You may have noticed that the blog theme has already changed for the better. It is much cleaner and easier to read now. With new anti-spam commenting software I should be able to open the comments again for those of you who feel inclined to give a shoutout. Next I plan to change the entire site in a similar fashion to the blog so it is more modernized and uniform but still keep the artistic feel. Some of the pages and code need updating so I’ll try to address those issues. An occasional new static page may appear (like the pages under the sports section) and when they do a link will be added to the recently updated section on the home page. There is still some good journal and video material we have from Europe that I will eventually edit and post in the travel section or possibly into the new gallery or even youtube.

A lot has been happening with us lately in our new home, and Portland does feel like home, but I’ll leave that for a future blog entry. For now be sure to visit Javafoto and check back over the summer for more cosmic updates.

Salut