I was recently looking for a decently priced VPS where I could host a couple of small to medium sized websites. I actually signed up for a few random ones that I found on Google and tried them for a few days, but they didn’t strike me as working very well. One of them actually crashed after about an hour, and it took about eight hours for support to finally restart it for me. Eventually I started looking around the internet a bit more, and ran into a relatively new company called Digital Ocean. Digital Ocean VPS I realize that not all web companies have nice looking web pages, but whenever I ...

One of the first things I did when I committed myself to travelling around the world was to set up a blog. Indeed, I recently just assisted two other people in getting theirs up, one for a trip around the world, and one for a yearly RV trip down to Arizona. This post will give you easy instructions for how to set up a blog using WordPress. Part of the motivation I find with most people is the desire to share some of their experiences, both positive and negative, with others. Since so much of travel research is done these days via the Internet, the desire for most people to contribute to that wealth ...

Piggy Bank, Photo From 401kCalculator.org While I’ve tried off and on to make a little money from my website over the years, it’s never been something that was really important to me, primarily because I have another full time job that makes me more than enough money. Another reason is that I personally am not a huge fan of most advertising, as I find a lot of it to be intrusive. That said, travelling around the world and writing about it isn’t cheap. I likely spend anywhere from $6,000 a year or so on plane tickets, and lots of other money on tourist attractions, subway tickets, bus rides, ...

As you can see, things around here have changed. I finally got around to doing something I’ve wanted to do for quite sometime – I’ve removed all my old entries. Obviously I have backups of everything I wrote, and can reimport things at a later time. But truthfully, pretty much everything I wrote in the old days is all over the map, and I’ve been thinking about starting to write consistently in a few different areas. In terms of the look and feel, this is the default 2010 theme with WordPress 3.0. I debated spending some time re-theming this site again, but just don’t really feel like ...

I don’t do it very often, mainly because my fingers are not iPhone friendly, but i have the wordpress iPhone app which allows me to blog from anywhere pretty much. So here I am in bed, working my iPhone. Today was a long day, and tomorrow will likely be as well. Good news is there’s a light shining at the end of the tunnel (hopefully it’s not a fuse). Not sure what I’ll do this weekend. I’d like to hit the gym a few times if possible. Other than that, probably catch up on errands and maybe catch a movie in the theatre – haven’t done that in a while. That’s me on the iPhone, signing ...

Pretty good article I read today about the importance of slowing your life down. I think it’s relevant since it’s basically been the direction I’ve been taking my life for the last seven months. Read the goods here. ...

Well, thus ends Blogathon 2009 – it was quite the adventure, one that I’m glad I was a part of again. The official Blogathon website shows approximately $40,000 raised for the various charities this weekend, which is totally awesome. Of that amount, approximately $1,250 was raised by the content on this blog, and by the people who supported my efforts and the BC Children’s Hospital Foundation. So once again, you guys all have my sincerest thanks. But while the donations and money are obviously appreciated, this event is about more than money. It’s about a group of people banding together ...

I was talking to a few people on the weekend about this current iteration for my theme, and it seems there’s enough interest that I might eventually set this up as a download, or add it to the WordPress theme repository. But, I’d like a bit more input from some photographers about features I can potentially add. One thing I was thinking of incorporating was a stand-alone microstock service. For example, beside each photo there would be a “Buy” button that would take you to PayPal. Once you paid your $5 or whatever, you’d get an email with a large version of the photo and a license to ...

I’m going to overhaul this website again, most likely starting in July. To be perfectly honest, writing content just isn’t as satisfying as it once was, partially because I don’t have as much to write these days, and partially because I am just enjoying other aspects of my life more (such as going outside to hit some tennis balls around or heading up to the lake for lunch). Something I’ve always wanted on this blog, and that I’ve never really been able to achieve, is to have something that’s predominantly photo-centric. So my goal in July will be transform this blog into something ...

Somewhere in Vancouver. ...

I haven’t really had much to say on here in a while. Other than maybe a camping trip this weekend, and WordCamp San Francisco at the end of the month, the next six weeks or so are pretty booked up solid with some client projects. After that I’m going to take a bit of a break for the summer and do some camping or maybe even head over to Europe to visit some friends. So on that note, I’m going to take a break from traditional blog posts and do a week or so worth of photo entries. Comment if you like, don’t comment if you like 🙂 But enjoy! ...

As you can see, I changed my theme around a bit tonight. I actually had something different going a few days ago, but decided to abandon it and go a slightly different route. I’m still tweaking the colors a bit and going through my old content and cleaning it up, but most of the functionality is here now. If you hit anything that’s broken, please let me know. ...

Raul *finally* moved off of WordPress.com, and has a shiny new self-hosted one up at HummingBird604.com. Make sure you swing on by and take a look. ...

As most of you know, I really enjoy photography. I have been fortunate enough to have received a bit of recognition for some of the shots I’ve done, and even managed to attend the 2008 Canadian Juno Awards as a photographer. I thought I’d post a few of my favourite shots here for those that are new here. Most of these shots make use of a technique called high dynamic range (HDR) photography. This entry was written for Blogathon 2008, and in support of the Union Gospel Mission charity. If you’d like to donate to the cause, please visit the blogathon donation page and fill out the form ...

For those of you who actually come to my site from time to time, you’ll have undoubtedly noticed my little counter in the right corner of the sidebar. What that tracks is how long my website has been active in the corner of my living room. If you’re on a paid hosting account, fire me off an email whenever your server goes down so I can keep track against how mine’s doing. So far I’m at 17 days straight without any downtime. If you check out Media Temple’s status blog, you can see that they’ve had 50 minutes of outage during the last three days. Based on their own blog entries, they ...

Up until about a year ago, I used to comment entirely using the name “Duane”. There wasn’t really any big motivation for doing so, it was simply something I was used to doing from my old IRC chats. At one point though, I realized that it seemed a bit weird leaving big, technical comments on web-sites but not having my name associated with them. At the bare minimum, it felt like it lessened the impact of what I wrote if I use only my first name, or if used an alias. After a year of going by “Duane Storey” pretty much everywhere I write or comment, I can say that without a doubt it’s ...

I spent most of the last hour on the couch, just thinking by candlelight. It was a nice break from the norm, having a dark apartment sans the sound of computer fans spinning or other randomness that goes beep in the night. Looking out my window, it’s hard to tell just how many people participated. It seems slightly darker than normal I guess, but for the most part it looks like business as usual in this city. For those of you who missed it, I took my site down for a few hours in support of the event. Here’s a snapshot Rebecca took: And lastly, I just want to mention that WordPress 2.5 was ...

After setting up my RAID 5 array last night, I decided that maybe I would take a stab at self hosting my blog again. Up until two years ago, I had always run my blog from home. It’s not really that hard to set up your own Apache server, and Linux can literally run for months or more without requiring a reboot. The downside of course is that home internet connections can be flaky, and most co-locations and hosting companies have UPS backup when things go wrong. I recently upgraded my home fiber internet connection to a small business plan, so my internet connection at home is actually fairly ...

Today I took the plunge and quickly upgraded my WordPress installation from 2.3.3 to the Beta for 2.5. In terms of look and feel on the front-end, I doubt you’ll notice any major changes (especially on sites where you don’t have to login). However, they’ve completely overhauled the administration section in the back to make things a little easier to find. I’m not going to really review it, because in all fairness it’s not quite done yet. However, the back end does seem a bit slower, maybe due to the new additions. Also, I have been completely unable to add media using the new interface. ...

One of the changes I made on the site the other day was the inclusion of wordpress related entries plugin when viewing single posts. Unfortunately wordpress has completely overhauled their folksonomy system in the 2.3 version, and not all my posts are tagged properly. In fact, I’d say only about 20% of them really are. I’m going to try and do about 10 of my old posts a day or something like that to try and get them up to snuff, but it’s a fairly boring process, only made possible by this bottle of pinot beside me. In other fairly exciting news, Boris Mann, everyone’s favourite Vancouver ...