Just wishing all of you in the blogging community a happy and safe Fourth of July.  This here blog type thang is going to go dark for a few days while my wife and I visit New York City for our holiday.  What could be more American than a road trip on the Forth, right?

It’s been a long week.

Without going into too much pointless detail, suffice it to say that a comedy of errors kept this site dark for two full days while I worked out a number of problems.  Hosting issues, the threat (happily, all in my head) of potential hacker mischief and a lamentable choice to upgrade in the middle of a crisis left me scratching my head and itching to go back and blog.  There were moments in there that I questioned why I was working so hard.  What am I doing with this site, anyway?

But I was also left practically getting hives without an outlet for expression, so I guess I found my answer.

The site is now upgraded to WordPress MU version 1.5.1, and that’s a good thing.  However, I’ve discovered that some critical plugins will need to be recoded to work with the new platform for reasons I don’t yet fully understand.  It’ll all get worked out eventually.

In the meanwhile, thanks to all of you who wrote me.  Everything’s fine now.  We now return to your regularly scheduled blogging.

I’m not sure how well or poorly this bodes for my Memorial Day weekend or summer, but here it is, large as life in your local Friendly’s Ice Cream parlor:

I’ve had a particularly successful morning’s-worth of photography, this morning and decided to adapt one of my better photos to the header of the site.  Those of you reading this via RSS, have a look directly at the website!

I’m going to be posting more photos later on to Flickr, where they will appear on the photos page.  I don’t think I’m done just yet.

I’ve been busy lately and haven’t been able to pay the blog the attention it deserves.  Sorry to those of you who have been looking for more posts.   For one, I’ve been doing some contract work for a major news outlet who is adopting a blog space based on my specialty, WordPress MU.  This is a very large newspaper and a great opportunity for me, but I don’t want to say whom it is until I’m farther along and they launch the site.

That’s about all I’ve got now.  I’ll post later, honest.

OK, after four days of silence, I’ve finally moved into my new East Rochester home and I’m back to blogging.  The new house is beautiful, right on top of the hill on Ivy street.  I actually spent some of my early childhood there and always loved it.  Now that I’m an adult, I can hardly argue with an awesome meat market (Village Fair) right around the corner, at least two awesome fine restaurants, one kick ass pizzeria (Village Way) and all the other great stuff happening on Commercial and Main.  Plus, for the big-box consumer in me, Tops, Wegmans and Home Depot are all within five minutes of driving.

Still, I have to confess that it’s a bit disconcerting to no longer live in the city.  No longer urban, I feel slightly suburban.

But I’m looking forward to spring to start cleaning up the yard and getting things looking nice out there.  The previous owner was a single mom, and I don’t think she got much of a chance to work out there.  We’ve got a nice little back yard that I’m looking forward into cultivating.

And I’ll get back to the business of blogging now, as well.  I’ve gotten some headlines posted this morning, that’s a start.  I’ll be looking closely at the goings-on in East Rochester, now, as well as general Rochester topics.  I’m very interested to see how the new Koon administration shapes up, and I’ll be sure to post my findings.

I’m sorry to my readers for my noticeable absence/lack of posting to this blog.  I’ve tried to keep the news section filled with some goodness, but that’s about all I’ve been able to muster of late.

Those of you who know me personally know by now that I’m in the process of buying a house in East Rochester.  In fact, we are slated to close the deal on the 28th of this month in what can only be described as a whirlwind tour of the real estate market, having gone though the entire process in a rare twenty eight days.  Most of the legwork for this transaction has been done by myself and I am eternally grateful that this process happened in February when the workload at my job is relatively light.

All of this is to say that I’ve had barely any time to think of anything other than banks, lawyers, inspectors, furniture, carpets, movers, moving fish tanks, switching cable, switching gas and electric, scheduling trash pickup, setting up water, filing change of address, offers, counter-offers, stipulations, taxes, forms, signatures, paperwork, rejected paperwork, more rejected paperwork, and the magic words “cleared to close.”

Huff!  My wife and I have not eaten anything that didn’t come out of a box, bag or restaurant kitchen in the last month.  That being the case, it’s a wonder I’ve been able to post anything at all.

Next month will be better.  Thank goodness my other blogging friends on this network have been helping out!

For those of you who have been using the news feed that comes off the upper right hand side of this blog, I’ve made a few improvements to it that you might want to use.  Grab the feed from Feedburner, here.

What’s better?  Well, all the news articles now link directly to the original source rather than having to go through the intermediary (and pointless) news blog.  Secondly, I’ve added tags and related posts for your edification, just like I have on the home page now.  Third, there is a “Discuss this @DFE” link that points to the Forums.

Hope you guys enjoy these new additions.  I’m enjoying keeping this news list going and keeping you informed.  And for those of you who are not currently subscribers, why not try it out?

I just wanted to point out that there is a new feature here at DFE that some of you may want to avail yourselves of. I’ve created a Google custom search engine that pulls exclusively from Rochester news sources including Channels 8, 10, 13 and R-News, the Democrat and Chronicle, City Newspaper, Rochester Business Journal.   Look for it in the sidebar, below the news updates. If you know of other news sources I aught to be including in this list, leave a comment here or contact me with whatever websites you think of and I’ll add them to the list.

I’m hoping that, at some point, Google will let us unlock the power of the News Search where we can order by date. There may yet be a way to do that with what I’ve got, I’m going to keep checking.

I’ve been struggling to find the right set of tools to display videos on this website for a while now.  Viper’s Video Quick Tags does a great job of inserting videos into posts, but I’ve also wanted to keep a video gallery page going for those videos that I don’t necessarily want to post articles on, but which might be of interest to you readers out there.   I’ve worked with a few solutions, and none have been entirely satisfying for me.

But I have come up with something much better, which I found on Veracifier.com, called Vod:Pod.  The beauty of Vod:Pod is that it simply scrapes Flash video off almost any site that supports it, so it’s not dependent on an API by YouTube or MySpace and therefore limited to one service or another.  I can take vids off any page that has Flash videos, including other blogs.  Secondly, I can use Vod:Pod to create my new video gallery, which I think looks kinda nifty, especially since it uses AJAX to load each Flash movie without page refreshes.  Sweet, eh?