[Approaching Isla Providencia from the SE]

Enough people have asked us about the website (how to and stuff) that we’re pretty remiss in not having a general about page.

Dreamhost: The site is hosted by Dreamhost. There are many free blogging sites, but if you want complete control, no ads, your own email domain and stuff like that you need a real hosting service. We have the very generous sister-of-a-founder plan which isn’t generally available, but even for you it’ll be less than $10 a month. With 500GB of disk included that’s cheaper than buying a hard drive and they’ll keep it backed up for you. Use the dreamhost promo code “TimeMachine97” and get up to $97 off¹. Woohoo.

WordPress: The blog software itself is WordPress 2.3.1. It’s licensed under the GNU public license (that means it’s free and open source). Dreamhost has a handy installer that does most of the setup work for you.

Spam Karma 2: A handy plug-in for WordPress that keeps the comment spam at bay. It’s also GNU and it works unbelievably well. If only email spam filtering worked this good. If your comments don’t show up this is probably why. Try rephrasing without using the words “hot teen sex.”

Subscribe2: Another GNU plug-in for WordPress. This is what sends out new post emails to all of you on the subscription list.

Creative Commons: Everything on the site is published under a Creative Commons License. This means you can use the material for almost any non-commercial purpose (including derivative works) without getting permission. We definitely appreciate hearing about how you use it. We know pictures and articles have been used for various club newsletters and classroom activities. You need permission only if your publication has a cover price, contains ads, or is promotional material of some kind. Read the legaleze if you care.

Photos: We both take photos and usually don’t keep track of who takes which. Unless it’s a picture of a cow, in which case you can be pretty sure I took it. We use a Canon S2 IS and a Canon SD600 digital elph. We’ve had many digital cameras over the years and these are far and above the best. We like to have a pocket camera and a big camera. There is a direct correlation between lens diameter and photo quality that you can’t get around. The weight of the big camera allows you to take better pictures especially in low light or at high zoom. Moment of Inertia… A heavier object is easier to hold still. Also, the image stabilizer on the S2 is the cat’s ass. However, we usually don’t like to carry a big camera around populated areas. Hence the smaller auxiliary camera.

Who: The people from Latitude 38 pointed out that we don’t identify ourselves anywhere on the site except for vague references. We are Cheyenne Weil and Joshua Coxwell; from Oregon (more or less). Cheyenne is a jeweler and an artist. You can see her work at cheyenneweil.com. When employment is necessary, Cheyenne does graphic design, writing and editing. I find itinerant labor developing software. We both graduated from the University of Oregon (Russian and Physics, respectively).

¹The dreamhost promo code TimeMachine97 gives $97 off if prepaying 1yr or more and $51 off if paying monthly. This is the maxium possible discount we can offer in the dreamhost promo code program.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 22nd, 2007 at 1:48 pm and is filed under Colombia, doings, nature, TimeMachine. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.