This is freaking amazing: the sounds of ice sheets warming in the morning. Nature is pretty awesome, and destructive.

So, it has been quite some time since my last post in this space. In the last month or so, I ached to get this back up and running. In spite of working 80+ hours a week and getting little sleep and flying all around the country, I have done it. While this post, again, is a post about posting/blogging/self-served, it is a new beginning. Of though, emotion, travails, successes, and failures.

Here it comes!

After one and half years, sensory output has been given a fresh new look. Infused with “WordPress”:http://www.wordpress.org/ v1.5 and a customized “Hemingway”:http://warpspire.com/hemingway theme by “Kyle Neath”:http://warspire.com/, I can put my mind at ease for a while, basking in simplicity and a hint of panache. Granted, I did have a new version of the sensory output when I moved from my custom-rolled WordPress theme to “Michael Heilemann’s”:http://binarybonsai.com/ infamous “K2″:http://binarybonsai.com/wordpress/k2/, but it never sat very well with me as I think it tries to do too much for too many people.

While on the surface, you see a new look, much more was done deep in the underbelly of the beast that is the WordPress database. You see, long, long ago, -in a land far, far away- in the MySQL database, I did not understand the intersection between PHP’s inability to handle Unicode, the MySQL database and WordPress’s latent, hidden abilities to make up for PHP’s lackings. Per this miscommunication, I set the encodings of my database (every database, table and field) to unicode in the hopes of achieving geeky nirvana. In this dastardly moment, all of my rich postings (i.e. all the wonderful Unicode characters that Mac OS X’s character palette makes so readily available) to this blog were slightly altered, as if my database were switched with one of an alternate universe.

To undo this, I used my knowledge of various sci-fi flicks to swap out the evil, alternate universe version of my database for the one and only belonging to this reality, effectively undoing most of the catastrophic warpings of my words. Still, as I was pondering the inner workings of the database, I went further still, and I removed silly HTML and other oddities, converting posts to Textile-only. This was a lot of work despite the paltry archives, my fingers swiftly removing @<a>@ and @<img>@ tags.

After that fine work, I set out to implement Kyle Neath’s great theme. It lacked a few basic items: blog roll, pages listing, and other bits of CSS. Overall, however, it is performing swimmingly and far and above my wildest expectations. Granted, I have not yet figured out what the deal is with WordPress functions like @is_page()@, @is_archives()@, or @is_home()@, but I routed around that minor issue.

Then, I overhauled the secondary pages on my site, namely my “portfolio”:http://www.sensoryoutput.com/portfolio/, “projects”:http://www.sensoryoutput.com/projects/ and “fun”:http://www.sensoryoutput.com/portfolio/ pages. All of these pages are now true WordPress pages, formatted with Textile and a little custom CSS thrown into the Hemingway theme stylesheet.

Finally, I implemented a few necessary plugins, namely:

• “Extended Live Archives”:http://www.sonsofskadi.net/extended-live-archive/
• “Related Posts”:http://www.w-a-s-a-b-i.com/
• “Del.icio.us Cached”:http://www.w-a-s-a-b-i.com/
• and “Dunstan’s Time Since”:http://binarybonsai.com/wordpress/timesince

Whew. Maybe this is just the impetus I need to get back to writing more regularly. I certainly do have a _long_ list of topics to explore, including network neutrality, political rancor, and most near and dear to my heart of late, medicine.

So, after being hacked a few weeks ago and getting the attention of the good people at “Txd”:http://www.textdrive.com/, I finally got around to updating my copy of “WordPress”:http://www.wordpress.org/. Unsatisfied with the current slew of official and non-official themes available for WordPress “Strayhorn” v1.5.2, I decided to use “Michael Heilemann’s”:http://binarybonsai.com/ new über-theme: “K2″:http://binarybonsai.com/wordpress/k2/.

Installation and upgrade were fairly innocuous. The lack of documentation (and understanding by me) for K2 did confuse me a bit, as the K2 pages over at the Bonsai state that it supports various plugins. What exactly does “support” mean? Compatibility? Well, it actually means that the appropriate plugin function calls are already wrapped in @if(function_exists())@ constructs. As such, all I had to do was download the plugin and upload it to my plugin directory. Clarification of the instructions in this regard would be helpful.

Beyond that, the functional details of K2 are nice: AJAX comments, separation of trackbacks/pingbacks, nice CSS out of the box, support for schemes within the K2 theme (make color/font/layout changes to CSS), admin panel configuration of theme preferences. The list goes on. I do, however, have a small gripe. As a perfectionist, I like both my front-end and back-end to be as clean as possible: semantically-correct XHTML, nicely-tabbed XHTML document source, separated JavaScript and CSS, and simple yet elegant design. K2 achieves the last, but at the expense of a clean backend. In viewing the source for my pages to aid in troubleshooting, I found it very difficult to find what I was looking for do to the disorganized state of the XHTML. The JavaScript issue probably has more to do with a deficit in the plugin architecture of WordPress than any fault of K2, but it still bothers me.

Anyway, the s.o. (blog title, anyone?) is slowly being reorganized, and it may take some time to return to normal. Your patience is appreciated.

For the last few months since starting medical school, I had a number of pictures that I wanted to post to my “online gallery”:http://www.sensoryoutput.com/photos/ but could never find the time to rename, keyword, sort, and process. Well, I found the time today. Go check them out!

I have pictures from the day after my three-day cross-country drive in moving to Washington, DC. We visited the various monuments, and all the pictures are replete with the requisite “Red, White, and Blue”:http://www.usflag.org/. In addition, I have a few pics I snapped at a Nationals baseball game and a med student frisbee game a few weeks ago. Enjoy!

!(alignright)http://www.sensoryoutput.com/wp-images/postings/mint_logo.png(Mint, by Shaun Inman)!:http://www.haveamint.com/ After a long lull in my posting, I am sure that no one even cares: I have installed “Mint”:http://www.haveamint.com/, the fresh web statistic tracking program created by “Shaun Inman”:http://www.shauninman.com/. Although this site serves little more than my personal creative outlet for writing, thoughts, ideas, and exclamations, there is a wee bit of narcissism that follows the creation of a personal blog. As such, how can I tell if I am (not) popular? Eating a “Mint”:http://www.haveamint.com/, of course!

Mint intelligently collects and displays hits, unique visitors, referrers (minus the referral spam, of course), and much more. Mint replaces the venerable “ShortStat”:http://www.shauninman.com/plete/2004/06/shortstat-again, which I used since this site’s inception more than a year ago. I added an SVG chart to my copy of ShortStat that matched the look and feel and I am anxious to rework it as a plugin (called Pepper) for Mint.

At $30 per domain, Mint might be a little overkill for my site, but the scalability and logical, common sense approach to the data collection is right in line with my goals of -world domination- better data visibility in smart, open formats. SQL is a such a format, and Mint is the means to accessing that data. Did I mention that there is also a “Mac OS X Tiger”:http://www.apple.com/macosx/ widget, aptly named Junior Mint?

The installation was more simple than I imagined. Change a few lines in the configuration file, upload the directory. I followed the installation prompts (site name, email, and password for authentication to haveamint.com presumably), copied the JavaScript line into the site files I wanted to track, and in seconds, I was staring at Sensory Output’s mint breath.

For all your linking pleasure, see these gushing accounts of the wonders of Mint. (Yes, by now, I am a Mint horror, too!)

* “Mint: The Flavor of the Month(Mint: The Flavor of the Month)”:http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/archive/2005/09/mint-the-flavor-of-the-month, by Mike Davidson
* “Mint: Better Than Girl Scout Cookies(Mint: Better Than Girl Scout Cookies)”:http://jeffcroft.com/blog/archives/2005/09/mint_better_tha.php, by Jeff Croft
* “Mint: Fresh ‘N Yummy(Mint: Fresh ‘N Yummy)”:http://www.thebignoob.com/Blog/308/mint-fresh-n-yummy, by Keegan Jones
* “Mint: It’s Good and Good For You(Mint: It’s Good and Good For You)”:http://www.iammattthomas.com/journal/mint-its-good-and-good-for-you, by Matt Thomas
* “Pimp My Mint(Pimp My Mint)”:http://www.hicksdesign.co.uk/journal/pimp-my-mint, by Jon Hicks

* “Dr. Inman’s Mint(Dr. Inman’s Mint)”:http://www.bearskinrug.co.uk/_articles/2005/09/03/dr_inmans_mint/index.php, by Kevin Cornell
* “Mint: A Stats Odyssey(Mint: A Stats Odyssey)”:http://www.robweychert.com/editorials/2005/09/03/mint_a_stats_odyssey/index.php, by Rob Weychert

As all you folks out there already know, “Google”:http://www.google.com/ is _the_ mother of all search engines. Being at the top of the pack, though, is not without its pitfalls. Google is criticized for many things it does right and wrong in users’ eyes, and rightly so: Google has amassed so much of the search engine market share that they virtually manage access to huge chunks of data islands on the Internet. Certainly, one can know how to get to various website by surfing from site to site, but finding a particular nugget of information requires using Google to get at it. This is where their immense power lies, as they control how popular a site may be through their “PageRank”:http://www.google.com/technology/ technology that indexes pages by various criterion and ranks them according to various search terms.

These criterion are the keys. Knowing how important these keys are with respect to one another can result in a rising PageRank for any particular page. Enter the sleazy Search Engine Optimization companies. They claim to know what’s best for any page and use a number of techniques to help their clients achieve that coveted number one spot on Google (and the other search engines, too). But the only party that can truly understand the algorithm at work is Google themselves. Any attempt to know or claim to know is preposterous, as many in the blogosphere have pointed out in the past.

Still, there are some criterion that are made transparent as seen from one Google index update to the next. For example, Google recently updated their major index as analyzed using a slightly altered set of criterion, and “sensory output”:http://www.sensoryoutput.com/ fell off the map when searching for “sensory output” (without quotes). Weird, huh? Now, I know that _sensory output_ is nothing special in and of itself as it signifies nothing in science or otherwise, and I liked the combination of words. These two words used to bring up this site at the top of Google, but no more, as it has been buried. Now, I ask (and will answer) why?

For some time, many have known that Google forbids certain sneaky tactics by SEO(Search Engine Optimization) companies to boost their customers’ ranks such as “cloaking”:http://www.answers.com/cloaking&r=67, “doorway pages”:http://www.answers.com/main/ntquery?method=4&dsid=2222&dekey=Doorway+page&gwp=8&curtab=2222_1, and “spamdexing”:http://www.answers.com/main/ntquery?method=4&dsid=1512&dekey=spamdexing&gwp=8&curtab=1512_1. Now, I have never used such techniques and have relied on my web design and the good developers of “WordPress”:http://www.wordpress.org/ to create well-formed XHTML. The content is all original, so Google should have no problems with my site. Still, there was one thing I forgot to mention: when writing blog entries such as this one, I often use Google to locate pages to which I can link so that users have that information accessible. when I have done this in the past, though, I sometimes copy the link directly from the results page. That URL(Uniform Resource Locator) does not actually point to the link I wanted, but back to Google, who redirects the user to the actual link. I found about ten blog entries where I had mistakenly done this, and most of them were recent. I think Google did not like this because it could be seen as a way to boost my ratings by linking to their search result links. This is, though, just a guess.

If anyone has any particular insight into why I have been bumped off, please let me know in the comments. I’m not terribly offended by Google, just curious.

I have been on a blog, back-end fix-it-up improvement kick lately and the trend continues. Today, I implemented a needed amelioration to my statistics package, “ShortStat”:http://www.shauninman.com/mentary/past/nofollow_the_leader.php by “Shaun Inman”:http://www.shauninman.com/. If you are familiar with this wonderfully-simple PHP(PHP Hypertext Preprocessor) script to track visitor information, page hits, user agents, and more, then I think this picture will speak more than my words:

!http://www.sensoryoutput.com/wp-images/postings/shortstat.png!

For those unfamiliar with ShortStat, I have added an SVG(Scalable Vector Graphics) graph that depicts total hits and unique visitors over the last two weeks. I plan to add a pie graph for the browsers and platforms (minus crawlers and search engines for both) in a few days when I am not extremely busy. Also, I think some of the SQL(Structured Query Language) calls in Inman’s script could be optimized and aggregated (i.e. use @GROUP BY@ to minimize the number of calls instead of making multiple calls within a PHP(PHP Hypertext Preprocessor) @for@ loop).

Technically, I should be tackling other projects, work, homework, and other sundry tasks on my to-do list, but I enjoy adding such features to my blog. I need to upgrade to “WordPress v1.5 Strayhorn”:http://www.wordpress.org/, so look for that announcement in the next few weeks.

As promised, I have finally implemented a decent “photo gallery”:http://www.sensoryoutput.com/photos/ solution on sensory output called “PhotoStack”:http://www.photostack.org. In the words of the one developer, PhotoStack is:

bq. an image organization system (written in PHP) featuring template driven layout, smart caching, automatic thumbnail creation, RSS(Really Simple Syndication) feeds, picture level EXIF(Exchangeable Image File Format) date extraction, and picture level descriptions, all without the need for an SQL(Structured Query Language) like database.

I cannot even remember for how long I have searched for a photo gallery solution, vacillating between “Gallery”:http://gallery.menalto.com/, flash-based “SimpleViewer”:http://www.airtightinteractive.com/simpleviewer/, the ever-popular “Flickr”:http://www.flickr.com/, and even a home-brewed solution based on using a combination of PHP(PHP Hypertext Preprocessor) and the Javascript found at “Couloir.org”:http://www.coulouir.org. I evaluated each, and each definitely had its own set of merits, but I found that none were completely right for me. I am not alone in this search, too. I can remember when and “Barzeski”:http://nslog.com/archives/2005/03/01/digital_photo_web_gallery_software.php of “NSLog();”:http://nslog.com and “Heilemann”:http://binarybonsai.com/archives/2004/08/20/callout-for-a-gallery-solution/ of “binary bonsai”:http://www.binarybonsai.com/)both solicited comments about solutions to this somewhat complex problem.

For my needs, I require an easy way to get information from “iPhoto”:http://www.apple.com/ilife/iphoto/ to the web-based gallery. For each of the above listed options, there are ways to accomplish such a task, but none are truly simple. Their complication arises from the very nature of their audience, a wide-swath of users trying to do many different things. This, of course, leads to many options that are unnecessary to me. I almost went with my home-brewed solution, and I was beginning to code the pieces to put it together. I had the Javascript done, and various PHP pieces coming together. Finally, last week, I began work on an AppleScript to process a selection of images from within iPhoto that would copy, scale, and save the images to a folder of a name of my choosing while also extracting title, comments and keywords into a properly formatted text file.

Enter PhotoStack.

Faced with the daunting task of writing a custom photo gallery solution, I came across PhotoStack in my dealings with my soon to be web host, “TextDrive”:http://www.textdrive.com/. I found the use of PHP and lack of SQL to be big pluses. The templates appeared to be benign and simple, yet powerful. Plus, the setup offered RSS out of the box! Once I looked at the required format of the text file that gives each album is description and title information, I was sold. Add in automatic thumbnails and a smart-cashing system as bonuses, and I was ready to go. My already-written AppleScript could be easily altered to output the correct format for PhotoStack.

After some CSS(Cascading Style Sheets) work, alterations of the built-in template, re-work of the automation thumbnail creation code, and much testing of my AppleScript, I have a great web gallery solution in place. Now, to create a new gallery, I just select the images in iPhoto that have titles, comments and keywords already assigned, and I drag them to a folder that has the AppleScript attached. The rest, as they say, is history.

There are still a few issues that remain, but they are minor, and will be dealt with in good time:

* Photos are supposed to be sorted by date, but appear at random.
* The AppleScript needs to replace non-HTML characters with the appropriate, corresponding entity
* Ideally, I should even have my AppleScript FTP(File Transfer Protocol) the results directly to my web server

I have been so excited to see this go that I have been working non-stop on this project for the last few days. I have been adding new galleries like mad today and yesterday, watching them, over and over, marveling at my creation. I must give credit to Dave Bowman for inspiring the use of the double roll-over trick that allows for those of you using a modern browser (i.e. “Safari”:http://www.apple.com/safari/, “FireFox”:http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/, or “Opera”:http://www.opera.com/) to see chevrons pointing forward or back upon moving your mouse over the main image or the previous or next thumbnails. He referred to this as “Progressive Enhancement”:http://css-discuss.incutio.com/?page=ProgressiveEnhancement, where those of you that have the foresight to be progressive in your choice of software see remarkable enhancements to your experience (i.e. like the web experience). I must say that Dave has an “impressive photo gallery”:http://dbowman.com/photos/ that he covered extensively in an article at “Stopdesign”:http://www.stopdesign.com/ entitled, “New Photo Galleries”:http://www.stopdesign.com/log/2005/01/17/galleries.html, but I could not fathom forcing the use of WordPress or MoveableType for the management of photo galleries on the web.

My unique combination of managing my photos locally with iPhoto 5 and exporting to PhotoStack via a custom-built AppleScript is working wonders. Painlessly, too.

Although the “recent clean-up”:http://www.sensoryoutput.com/archives/2005/02/01/much-better/ removed a number of items from this blog’s to-do list, I have found other areas in need of revision and fixing. Particularly, as this site was built over eight months ago, I have learned a great-deal more about semantic XHTML(eXtensible Hypertext Markup Language) and proper CSS(Cascading Style Sheets) coding since sensory output’s inception. My sense of organization of code has been refined a great deal, and I think it time to show such practices in this blog.

I do not plan to make any drastic graphical changes, but I would like to refine a few elements that I have always felt lacking. With that, I also plan to overhaul and streamline the CSS(Cascading Style Sheets). Fortunately for me, “WordPress”:http://www.wordpress.org/ has already done a fantastic job at keeping the XHTML(eXtensible Hypertext Markup Language) nice and clean.

By the way, the “improvements I made earlier this week”:http://www.sensoryoutput.com/archives/2005/02/01/much-better/ have been quite nice, especially the removal of the QuickTag buttons from the admin editing page! No more spinning beach ball of death in Safari.