The Wayback Machine - http://web.archive.org/web/20040624201749/http://photomatt.net:80/

In San Francisco »

And the weather is gorgeous! Rode the BART from the airport, and it was the most comfortable public transporation I’ve ever been on. The Muni was about the same as any other subway/train thing I’ve been on, except every third person had white iPod earphones on and a Powerbook in their lap. I’m sitting in Crepes on Cole and it’s a very nice place, the food smells great and the music is good. Very cozy. Can’t wait for Tantek to get here so we can eat. What amazes me right now is the number of people just walking around. Lots of babies, lots of dogs. Lots of people holding dogs like babies. It would be easy to sit here and people watch all day. What’s funny is in the back of my mind I half expect every face that walks by to belong to a web celebrity, like at SxSW.

Comments (11)

Well That Was Fun »

I said I would take it down, I never said for how long. Thank you to everyone for taking a little time out with me in celebration of the big day. I was as surprised as everyone else, and watching the reactions come in was pretty interesting. The emails ranged from shocked to congratulatory to incredulous to angry. Thank you to everyone who wrote in. Many people linked to the site being down which should help solidify the #1 position in the eyes of the fickle mistress Google. Thank you all as well.

You’d think it would be cooler here in Houston, with hell freezing over and all, but it is as hot as ever. At the same time I’m told in San Francisco I need to dress in “layers.” I packed all my layers up months ago! Might have some <div>s around though…

I was able to get some of the work I was planning to do on the site done, mostly tweaks to the look and layout of things. I wouldn’t call it a redesign, more like a summer variation on a theme. Many of the changes are very subtle, but in my eyes important. The most obvious change, the sun in the corner, looks nothing like I want it to, so I’m not sure what will happen to that. (If you have any ideas, send them in.) Many other things still need attention, so expect to see occasional breakage and constant tweaking over the next week. I finally closed the comments on the mosaic. So it will stand at 1,017 comments,. The page is still huge, so I’m going to move the comments to a separate page just for that entry. The jazz quotes need some cleaning up, and I’d like to add a little information about each player to each page, including at least a picture. The photolog is being overhauled, and the long-promised classics section is almost done. Finally I promise that photo will be random again, any day now.

It was just a little over a day, but it feels good to be back. Let’s not do that again though. I really missed writing here.

I’m going to be in San Francisco next week, so if you are too I’d love to meet up. Drop me a line.

Comments (16)

Yahoo Mail (or lack thereof) »

I saw Ernie had done some work on the new Yahoo sites so I thought I’d log in to check it out. Notepad was… a textarea. Calendar was cool. Contacts still had all the information I had imported 4 years ago, which I thought was pretty neat. When I went to the mail tab, however, I was greeted by this not-so-friendly notice:

Your Yahoo! Mail account is no longer active.

Why is my account inactive?

Yahoo! Mail deactivated your mail account because either:

  1. You have not logged into your account in the last 4 months, or
  2. You have asked that your mail account be deactivated

What does this mean?

  • All emails, folders, attachments and preferences have been deleted
  • All messages sent to saxmatt02@yahoo.com are being bounced back to the sender
  • You can still use your Yahoo! ID to access other registered services on Yahoo!
  • Deleted information cannot be recovered

Protect your account!

Subscribe to Yahoo! Mail Plus and you will not be required to sign in […]

I got tired of typing. I think everyone at Yahoo should be banned from using exclamation points for a month, even in their code. I hope I didn’t have anything important in that email account.

Comments (10)

Redirection Proposal »

As many people have heard now, blogs that were previously hosted at weblogs.com are now needing to find new homes. Dave is going to be sending people their backup files but it looks like a lot of links may be broken, and some people proposed keeping a list of the old and new URIs.

Why not go one step better? I apologize if this is not technically feasible for whatever reason, but here’s my idea. DNS is very flexible, Dave can have specific A records for subdomains of sites that are going to stay under weblogs.com, and then set up a wildcard * A record to point to a different IP. This IP could be anyone running a service that would allow people to redirect their old domains to their new ones. Technically this would be pretty simple, no more than a few hours of hacking. The machine serving the redirects could have a wildcard virtualhost entry in Apache and a simple PHP script (or Python script, or RewriteMap) to serve 301 Moved Permanently headers depending on the hostname.

It could redirect to whatever the site owner wanted. The hosting overhead would be minimal. I’m willing to personally commit to writing the code and hosting it for at least 2 years.

Comments (7)

Times when I have posted during the last month

You have either an older browser or CSS turned off. That’s okay. You might be on a cell phone or other limited device, in which case I’ll stop wasting your bandwidth. If you have a older browser and aren’t in a controlled enviroment, you might find your web experience generally more pleasant if you take a little time to upgrade.