It’s Sunday night and I thought that I would do a recap of what I’ve been working on or what I’ve been doing. Naw, I think I’ll keep it to the work stuff.

I’ve slowed down a little on some of the things that I was doing like making videos. I sat down yesterday to work on my Kenya video, and shortly afterwards closed it up for lack of interest. I did the same thing with my book as well. I wanted to start shortening the videos to bring the overall file size of the book down. As I mentioned a few posts ago, the book is way too large. It’s about 1GB and should be no larger than 100MB, having said that though, I’m not trying to get it that low. I think a fair size for a book that has 160 pages with so many images and movies, would be around 500MB. Since this is my first attempt at a book that unlike my other attempts may actually be worthy of publishing, I feel that the size isn’t as important as my next book will be. Like everything it’s a learning process. Besides, if I print hard copies then the higher resolution images will be needed.

I’ve been tweaking my web site a lot lately. I still haven’t dug into the responsiveness problem though. I also am starting to design my next site. I’m not sure if I”m going to go with my visualarts site that I started awhile ago, or start on a new design for kennethcurtis.com. I have to take into consideration that my life will be busy in about two weeks with traveling and finding a place to live in the US, so finding the time to work on a site or book or videos will be difficult.

It’s been a day. That’s about all I can say about the situation that I had today. I was up late last night and as a consequence I got up very late this morning. That pushed everything back that I had wanted to get done. I only slept about 2 hours later than usual, but it seemed that everything else was pushed back much longer than two hours.

About the only thing that I seemed to either fix or work on today was the contact page on my site. When Google stopped supporting recaptcha and moved to recaptcha2 and 3, I lost the ability to filter emails for spam on my contact page. It didn’t really matter for the longest time, I didn’t get any spam for a couple of years. Then about two years ago the spam started with a trickle and then slowly became a constant flow, and lately it had become a flood. I did a couple things that I hope will fix the problem, I changed the email address, then added a newer version of recaptcha, I also did some formatting with the response and any errors too. I really don’t think that spam will be a problem for at least a few years… until Google decides to not support it anymore.

It’s official, I will be going back to the US next month. I bought my ticket to Honolulu this morning. I will be leaving here in about two weeks and although I haven’t booked a flight to the mainland, I expect to do that shorly. I’m very nervous… That’s all I’m going to say.

If you haven’t checked out my videos please do. It’s been really depressing to see that no one watches them. There are some of my videos that have been up for two months and only 20 people have watched them… so sad that I don’t have any support from anyone.

Today was a tough one and I don’t know why I’m going to write about it, but I think that it may be a good way to wind down from a long day. I don’t know what happened, but a small little job on the site ended up taking more than 12 hours to correct, and I’m still not sure whether it’s fixed or not.

It started this morning about 7 when I decided that before I jump onto the book to finish that up, I thought I’d play with my site. I’ve mentioned a few times that there have been a lot of problems with my site since the last hacking. After the third hacking I just didn’t really try anymore to get the site up to par with what I believe it should have been. Having said that though, it’s always in the back of my head that I needed to fix some things. So this morning as I mentioned I thought I’d go in and see if I could fix the menu on the blog page from covering the other links during dropdown. Seemed pretty easy, find the offending code and make changes. So easy that for about three hours I scoured the css files, the template files, every file that was even remotely associated with the menu I looked at.

It wasn’t long before I noticed some item that I had wanted to change and hadn’t gotten to it yet, so I thought I might as well do it now. That lead to other changes, and then I ended up breaking something. I tried everything to get back to where I was just so I could basically start again. I couldn’t fix it, so I thought I’d bypass the frontend and backend and go directly into the database to make the changes. Okay, I’ve done it a hundred times, it’s a little bit scary just because the chance of total failure is a real possibility, so it’s always my last resort. By now it’s like 1 in the afternoon, and I’ve downloaded and made my changes to the file. The only problem is I can’t upload it. I’m getting an error that is stopping the progress. I do my usual search to find how to fix it, no luck. I can program php/MYSQL with help from duckduckgo, but this fix was beyond my skills. So I tried fixing the db different ways, going through different methods that really didn’t help at all, except for giving me a shred of hope for about five minutes until they too failed. It was just enough hope to keep me from giving up.

So as I was sinking ever deeper into the web abyss, I finally gave in and decided that I should update wordpress. I get worried about updating software because of the problems that sometimes occur with compatibility. So I usually wait to upgrade until I have to, like today.The update took maybe 1 minute to complete. It was so fast that I thought that it stopped or something.

It’s about 4 and the website isn’t really broken at this point, I’ve managed to do some work-a-rounds to get it basically where it was when I started this morning. Anyway, wanna guess what happened after the update? If you’ve been playing along as I tell my story, you’ve probably realized that, yes, I broke the site with the upgrade. Not a major break, but wp was inserting extra code into all the blog links so they returned 404 pages. I dive straight back into the front and backend coding to figure out the source of the code that inserts the links is located. Since the update would only change includes, maybe db, and some pages, the fix should have been somewhat easy. It only took me until about 6 to get it fixed./s

Geez…

On a slightly good note though, after dinner I went back to work and fixed the problem with the dropdown menu, and made some cosmetic changes too. :)

So that’s my story and it happens to be my complete day too. I wouldn’t say that I had fun solving the problems with the site, but I feel good that I did solve them at the end of the day, literally at the end of the day. :)

As I’ve been spending more time working on the site, I keep noticing things that I didn’t realize were wrong or not correct, e.g., the footer in the blog. I seem to remember taking it out because there was a compatibility issue between Bootstrap and WordPress, but I don’t remember for sure. If there was a valid reason I guess I’ll find out when I go to change it. The biggest thing that I have to fix is the responsiveness. It’s the one thing that made me kind of give up on the site after the last hacking. The thought of creating an additional two designs for the different screen sizes that are mangled or missing is going to take a lot of time, both in coding and designing.

So I spent most of the day working on my book trying to get it to a place where I can proof it as if I was an impartial reader using an epub reader. I can do it now, but there were so many things that were wrong it just didn’t make sense to really use the epub to preview it. I’m now at the point where I have to shorten some of the movies, correct some of the sizes of the movies and make layout changes. The text has gone through 2 spellcheckers, and I edited it for grammatical errors and in some cases clarity. I kind of wanted to stay away from changing the original text too much though. There are still some spots where I will probably need edit again, but I think that the text is close to 99% done.

It’s kind of funny that I remember making a couple of posts that I can’t seem to find now. I went through the database this morning and couldn’t find the entry that I absolutely remember writing. In fact there are references to the entry in later posts. I can’t figure out what happened to it. I wonder if I deleted it because of something and had just forgotten.

I had a lot of fun recording what I did yesterday and putting it in the blog. In fact so much fun that I decided to do it again. This time I worked for more than five hours, I think it was nearly six and compressed it down to about a minute and 30 seconds. I didn’t really do the things that I did to yesterday’s video just because I’m tired, so it doesn’t look as polished as the other one… like the other was polished :)

So how much longer before it’s done? The quick answer is it should be done with the infrastructure and basics tomorrow. The reason I worded it that way is because I know that there will be things that need to be changed and edited even after I consider it done. It takes time to reset your brain to actually see a design like others will, so I’d give myself probably until next Monday, unless I can get some people to proof it for me. I don’t really want to ask anyone though…

This morning I got up and decided that I needed to finish the book that I’ve been working on. So after taking a shower I started on it. I also decided that it may be kind of cool to make a video out of it so I set up my screen grabber and recorded everything I did on the screen for about 5 hours. To be completely honest, it felt more like about 10 hours.

So the book is about 150 pages, and I made it to I think page 98, so it should take at least 2 more hours to finish up on the proofing and editing. That won’t mean that I’m done, but it will mean that I’m very close. There are still images that need to be modified or replaced and although as I went over consistency items today, I won’t feel comfortable with it until I go over it again and maybe again.

I really want to make a hard copy out of it when it’s done. I may do it here before I leave. It would be nice to give my Mother a copy.

Because the video doesn’t really fit my youtube channel I didn’t want to upload it there,  so hopefully it’ll work out here on my blog.