There are some downsides. iWeb was a wonderful tool for creating web sites. The integration of iPhoto, iWeb, and .mac, made it real easy to put a sophisticated and complex gallery of photo albums up on the web. I will also miss the nifty mini-slideshow widgets iPhoto could produce (I have kept a couple cause I like them so much).

However it was really really slow. If you were using Internet Explorer as your browser (you really should get Safari or FireFox), or were connecting through DSL or (God forbid) dial-up, well then, you probably gave up on my family site. I apologize for that. That’s what, after a bit of research, led be to SmugMug. You have to pay for the service, but it is a very small yearly amount for the ‘standard’ level service. Sure there are free sites like Flickr out there, but your viewers have to put up with advertisements, and a not as nice interface. Plus SmugMug is really fast. If you are ever interested in using their service, I can get you five dollars off by using coupon code zUHZEirkZ6UDQ in the ‘Referred by’ field on the signup form.

SmugMug gives me unlimited photo storage, so besides now having private backups of all my pics, the public galleries contain many more pictures than before. Also if you see a photo of mine you truly like, besides downloading it for free, you can pay to have it professionally printed ($0.19 for a 4×6), you can even have it made into a mug, an apron, a ceramic tile, keychain, or a slew of other choices. Just so you know, the prices are reasonable because I’ve chosen not to recieve any proceeds from these sales.

So in closing, there have been allot of behind the scene changes on our web sites, plus I had to notch up security in response to a hacking attempt. If you find anything broken, a link not going were it is suppose to, a missing picture symbol, an out right error message, please email me and let me know so I can fix it. Thanks for reading hernandezlife.com

P.S. For the family-only galleries, the password is the same and you no longer need a userid.

Click photos to go to gallery.

Ten Of My Very Favorite Photographs

]]> http://hernandezlife.com/2008/01/31/5-bucks-off-smugmug/feed/ 3 http://hernandezlife.com/2008/01/14/january-catch-up/ http://hernandezlife.com/2008/01/14/january-catch-up/#comments Mon, 14 Jan 2008 06:41:01 +0000 Rick http://www.hernandezlife.com/archive/2008/01/14/january-catch-up/


Haven’t had much time to write the last couple of weeks, (plus Phaedra thought I was posting to much,) so here’s a quickie digest of what’s been going on in our lives for the first couple of weeks in this new year.

Here’s what has been happening, in reverse order:

January 13th
Jessica had a 5th grade Siddur party at her sunday school. Click here to see the photos on our family site (password required).

January 12th
We finally get FIOS installed! Yea!!! 20 meg download and 5 meg upload speeds. All the better to post by. And BitTorrent by.

January 11th
News that the RIAA might disappear. Click on cartoon (or most other photos) for larger image.

January 5th
We went out with Eva & Anthony to celebrate Eva’s birthday. Afterwards we picked up their kids from a neighbors house and finished off with a birthday cake. You can see a few pictures of the night here (password required).

January 3rd
Phaedra gets flowers for no reason from me (other than the fact that I love her Truly, Madly, Deeply).

If you like getting free stuff in the mail then you’ve got to visit the freestufftimes.com website. I visit allot of such places and this one is the winner, both in the most interesting (and useful) items, and in the amount of stuff they come up with every day. Definitely one of the most updated free stuff sites on the internet.

My wife was a little bit skeptical, but the stuff started rolling and and now she’s interested in what new items show up each day. Today alone I received some Lemongrass soap, samples of three different types of Metamucil (I like the berry flavored powder), a pots worth of Folgers Bistro Blend coffee, and four different samples of Biore Pore Perfect products.

Check them out. If you’re too busy to visit their site every day you can get updates emailed to you, although some may be expired by the time you get to them. Before ordering anything make sure you read their tips. They also currently have a contest going on till the end of October if your willing to create some flyers or blog about their site (Hey, you knew there was a reason I was telling you about this). Take a look, you won’t be sorry.

On a fast 7Mbps broadband connection, Joost was running well this morning. Its interface is easy to learn, and the video plays back full screen and streams smoothly. The quality leaves something to be desired, though—it’s not even at the level of standard definition, and certainly not high definition. There’s also not quite enough content on hand, with offerings from a couple of big names such as CBS and CNN, but mostly second- and third-tier content sources.

Even though this beta 1.0 is still a bit rough around the edges, we could still see the tremendous potential of this format. It actually feels like television, but everything is streaming. If this network and others like it are completely built out to where they can actually stream near-HD quality video, we might be seeing people abandoning cable for it. But not yet. [Joost, via Ars Technica]

(Via Gizmodo.)

(Warning: Non-techies just skip this blog entry altogether.)

Here is version, oh let’s say… 2.1, of my website. Basically I’ve moved from hosting my website on .mac (Apple’s servers) to running it on a shared server at HostMonster. Besides going from 10 gigabytes disk storage to 300 gigs, this gives me much more control server side like, perl, PHP, mySQL, Linux Shell Access, CRON jobs and more. All that let’s me put together a slicker website.

The other big change is that my blog (what your reading right now) is now a WordPress blog. Again this gives me greater control over things. Among other thing you can register so you will receive email notices of new blog entries (posts), archives are now segregated by month, and posts can have categories. Another nice feature, for me anyway, is that I can submit these postings from anywhere. In fact, I’m writing this right now, on my iPhone, while traveling on an express bus (x4) somewhere in Brooklyn on my way to work in Manhattan.

In addition the afore mentioned company also saw to generously update my storage from 1 gigabyte to 10 gigs. Also I became the proud owner of a new domain, hernandezlife.com. I had to take this opportunity to recreate our site with more interactive elements, and hopefully make it a more uber fun site. Please post a comment and let me know what you think. Being a new site, there a bound to be a few features bugs about, let me know if you find those too. Thanks for visiting!