so if any you happened to check the website lately, you probably noticed it was completely broken. long story short, we've moved to a new server and despite the moving difficulties everything is working again and we should start putting up some new content soon.
thanks for your patience and make sure you buy something from Amazon with our link
it only took me roughly 8 months, but I finally updated the media section - you can now find photos and videos through september here. enjoy.
some of you (all three of you) may have seen an amazon.com
why the special link? if you're gonna buy something at amazon.com
obviously this isn't a huge deal - I don't expect that we'll be turning around and purchasing a new tv or something from all the dough rolling into our account. but a few extra bucks now and again would be pretty cool when we're talking about offsetting Alexander's expenses.
thanks!
and check out this great deal on a PS3:
That's right. We've got new photos up on the site. Find them here: http://dinaandphilip.com/site/media/photos.html I think I've figured out how I'm going to make posting video work the way I want, so you should be seeing some new videos soon.
Meanwhile, the boy is well!
if you got stopped at a new splash page on dinaandphilip.com and had to click to get here, then you know what i mean. if you came right here, then you have no idea - skip to the end. i've started making some adjustments here and there to the site. the one most of you might encounter is probably that first page at dinaandphilip.com. if you haven't seen it take a click: dinaandphilip.com. you'll notice the page doesn't automatically forward you anymore - some of you may not know what i'm talking about. that's ok.
suffice to say, you may need to update your bookmarks. dinaandphilip.com/site is the URL you should have bookmarked.
like i said, if you didn't notice anything and just started reading this page, nevermind. go back about your business!
and an old shot of Alexander from back around Christmas (this series hasn't been posted - exclusive!)
Just a quick note. Both twitter and facebook are optional services that are not required for using or viewing this website. While integrating facebook hasn't been done yet, the integration of twitter is complete.
If you choose to use twitter as an additional service (and as I described in an earlier post) then you'll start to receive updates on your phone via text message whenever there's a post at dinaandphilip.com or news from us via twitter.
If you don't want to use twitter or facebook or any of those services, no problem! Just keep coming back here to check in and find out what's up with Dina, Philip and Blueberry.
Thanks again for visiting.
In what can only be described as a uniquely 21st century problem, I've been spending a fair amount of time puzzling out the best way to set up a notification system for the birth of Blueberry. While, making phone calls is fine in an old fashioned, quaint kind of way, it's not very efficient. The impetus for setting up this domain name and its various incarnations (beginning with our wedding), was to bridge the communication gap that comes from having family and friends all over the world. Right now there are family/friends reading this in the US, Mexico, Colombia, England, Spain, Germany, Italy, and Switzerland - those are the ones I'm sure of, but I have no doubt there are more. Phone calls and email are slow, delayed, time consuming, and repetitive (I doubt anyone is 'excited' the dozenth time they say, he's born! - maybe not, but I'd rather be holding my kid then talking to everyone on the phone!).
I know, back in the day, that's the way it was and we were happy!
But, it isn't that day, and we don't have to be happy doing it that way. There are solutions that are faster, more efficient at distributing the information and easier to use. So that is what we're going to do.
This blog provides us with a fantastic means of keeping all of you, the most important people we know, abreast of what's going on with our growing, soon-to-be, bouncing baby boy. But it's up to you to check up on us, read the RSS feed or (GASP!) actually visit the site.
I've got a better way - if you want more information as it happens. We're going to leverage this blog, SMS and Twitter.
(As an aside, I just had a vision of me, 40 years from now, reviewing archived posts from this blog with my son, and trying to explain to him how this was all state-of-the-art before he was born. And him laughing at my quaint history lesson - 'Oh dad, you and your Twitter talk! And what the hell! Blueberry?')
So here's the deal. If you desire more notification of posts from this blog, and periodic updates as things happen like 'Oh! The baby kicked - we saw it!' or the mundane 'Shuffling through Babys-r-us as we register for this kid. Still looking for the home theater receivers' or the celebratory 'he's here!' - delivered to your phone, this is how it can happen.
First, ensure that receiving SMS (texting) is not a problem for your phone and you won't get dinged if you get too many messages. I can't guarantee how many messages we'll be sending out, but wireless carriers are a bit predatory about this stuff, so make sure you have enough. Seriously. Don't come to us with a $2000 text messaging bill because we got a little bit crazy about how cute the socks were. Seriously. Check your plan before you do this.
Register with Twitter. Now, before you say anything, hold on. One. You don't have to actually post anything on the twitter (as I like to call it). Two. You're not required to make your twitter feed public - you can protect it and only people you allow in can see your feed if you actually post anything. And three. You can in fact, register, get your username, setup your phone to receive messages, and follow us and never do anything with it again. (There's a lot of really good stuff and information you can find with Twitter - check it out. Just make sure you don't send everything to your phone!)
Once you register for Twitter, configure your settings: protect your tweets if you want (if you don't plan on actually tweeting, protect it anyway), setup your mobile phone and verify it to Twitter so you can receive text messages and activate updates, and finally, do any other settings activity you want - upload a picture, design your home page - whatever.
Now, while your logged in to Twitter, visit this link http://twitter.com/dinaandphilip. Click the follow button underneath our image and then to really make this thing work, click on 'Device updates off'. In the resulting yellow box that opens up, turn on device updates. Assuming you've set up your phone settings correctly, this means every time there's an update on our twitter feed, you'll get a text of it. And, since I've set up the blog to notify twitter of new posts, you'll find out about that too. Near instantaneously. I hear flying cars are right around the corner. Really. It'll be like the Jetsons.
(Should you desire that getting information about the kid from this blog, its twitter feed, or from Philip's facebook (slightly delayed), you can thoroughly saturate yourself our news by adding Philip's twitter feed at http://twitter.com/oski or Dina's feed (if she ever uses it) at http://twitter.com/oskiette)
Remember, you're under no obligation to go through all this. But, if you're interested it joining the never-wait-for-news-and-information-generation and want to know what's up with this kid and his parents, dive in!
I'll be troubleshooting the setup for a bit still - working out all the kinks - but the whole system (the blog, feeding the twitter and back) should be solid very soon. You may see a few stray tweets that don't mean anything.
Questions? Email me at philip@dinaandphilip.com, direct message via twitter @oski, text me, hit me up on IM, send me a Facebook email, or give me an old fashioned phone call (if I don't answer I'm checking on the flying cars).
A little behind the scenes tour for you about what's changed. Prior to this version of the website, I was using iWeb to generate the blog and the photo/video pages. From an ease of use point of view, it was drop dead easy and made updating the site relatively quick. However, it suffered from a number of deficiencies with regard to how it handled blogging. It's not extensible, adding comments required a different setup, getting Dina on here to post was nearly impossible and posting remotely, was impossible.
So, I decided to do what I had originally done, which is use WordPress to run the blog portion. So that's what you're seeing here now. Comments are available (you'll have to register, that just helps us keep out spam and whatnot - I know it's password protected, but go with it), Dina and I can both post and I have the ability to post from the iPhone at the doctor's office, for example.
Photos and videos galleries will still be generated by iWeb, though. Handling the number of photos and videos we've been posting, and will be posting, is handled much easier through that, then via WordPress. At least for now. To be honest, there's a number of ways to change that and use WordPress, but for now, I'm leaving it as is. As such, there'll probably be some broken links moving back and forth until I figure it all out - and there's definitely some dissonance in the look/feel of the two sites; but you'll still be able to see all the images, so it's worth it right now.
All in all, the advantages outweigh the awkwardness of the system for a while - as we go on, it may change, until then, enjoy your blueberry updates!
UPDATE: One of the things I forgot to check prior to pulling down the old site was the status of RSS feed. I'm reasonably sure the old RSS feed is no longer valid - either way please make sure you update the link for the RSS feed if your using it. The link can be found at the bottom of the page.