黄 嘉 維

After a week of testing, I’m proud to unveil the latest iteration (3.0) of g a r y w o n g . o r g.

The changes:

• Retiring the Redoable theme from Dean J. Robinson. It had a good run – August 2007 to November 2008 – but modifying the php to implement the many tweaks was making maintenance more difficult. With the deprecation of plugins I was using in my Wordpress 2.2 installation, it was time to move on to a theme that would be more extensible.
• The new theme is Thesis from Chris Pearson. With what I was hoping to implement, it made sense to move to this theme as it’s best quality is the ability to use hooks to mostly eliminate the need to touch the core theme files. So far, it’s been well worth the $87.
• Gone is the middle sidebar, bringing this site back to a cleaner, more manageable two-column layout. As much as I liked having the sideblog in the middle column, it became really annoying to keep the text of each headline and comment to one line each to keep the clean aesthetic. The sidenotes are now asides and will appear inline, allowing me the freedom to write as little or as much as like.
• Gone as well is the monthly calendar from the sidebar – it was just taking up too much space. Also gone is LiveSearch – we’ll all just have to do with typing in a search term and pressing ‘Enter’ to perform the query. Tough, I know.
• Making it’s way over from the old musicblog is the inclusion of recently listened to tracks in the sidebar. Once again, you’ll all be able to see the eclectic selection of music I listen to.

If you’ve noticed that there’s been a slowdown in the number of posts being put up (how about none at all), don’t be worried. This isn’t another sickness-induced absence but a hiatus I’d plan on taking from mid-July to September. I’ll still be posting sidenotes every weekday but weekend posting and main column posts will be on a break for the rest of the summer.

See you all after Labor Day!

I’ve added some new features and deprecated some others in the past month or so. It’s best to just get them all explained in one post seeing as how I’ve been a bit lazy in explaining them as they were implemented.

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After a bit of tinkering, I’ve added a moblog to the site. It’s made up of photos from my cellphones, past and present, and is powered by Flickr.

Yes, as I shiver my way through typing out this post, I am fully aware of how wrong it is to insert the word ’spring’ into the title. Still, it seemed appropriate as the long winter has almost passed and with spring training having started, it seems close enough to spring to make some changes to this site.

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Last summer, I started a music-themed photoblog titled “The Wong Way”. Over a six-month period, I went to over 70 concerts, taking well over 1,000 photos at these concerts. At one point, I was going to shows every day of the week. I was able to improve on my action photography and I had a lot of fun doing it.

I was also very tired and I got pretty sick. Nothing too serious – just the flu – but it took me forever to recover.

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I’ve added a page, American Bar Crawl, to the site that chronicles the journey to go to all of Beer Advocate’s Top 50 Places to Have a Beer in America – complete with a Google map!

After a marathon of coding to modify the current template, it’s now been adapted to accommodate a true photoblog on this site. This will stay true to the generally accepted definition of a photoblog – one post, one image. The idea is to have a new photo up each day, hence, the title “Photo A Day“. That doesn’t mean I’m taking a photo each day to post but I’ll generally try to stay as current as possible.

Yes, I’m back in the blogging mood. I’ve got a backload of photos and posts to publish that should get me back into the swing of things.

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