Although I wish the app supported Markdown format (rather than just HTML) I’ll take it.

Just in time for our trip to Ireland too.

Update: A small, yet very welcomed update, is that the Posts tab is now the default tab rather than the Comments tab. This makes things so much quicker. Again, a very, very nice update to WordPress for iOS.

Calling it a launcher application is sort of limiting. Alfred can help you play music, give you quick access to your clipboard’s history, and even help you attach files to your emails. Its absolutely great and version 0.9 is packed to the gills with new features and updates.

• Photo and video uploads now work on iPad 2
• Made the post status (such as “Draft”) more clear in the posts list

I use my iPad to write posts and, now that I have iPad 2, I hope to do it a lot more often while on the go. WordPress for iOS has been making very steady progress lately and this update is a very timely one.

Why are these updates key for me? Because iPad 2 would instantly crash when trying to add a photo to a blog post. I was able to work around it by using iPhone but it was pretty frustrating. Also, I write posts, save them as drafts, and then schedule them for publishing all from my iPad. This allows me to pick the time that a post gets published regardless of when I feel impelled to write it and also gives me time to edit them (which I did poorly on yesterday’s post). Being able to see which posts are in draft right in the posts list is a very welcomed update.

Thanks WordPress for iOS team.

Today I’m going to focus on audience. I haven’t really talked much about audience since I began. To be honest, I wasn’t really focused on it. I was tracking it but I wasn’t worried about where the audience would come from or actively trying to grow the audience on my own. I didn’t buy any ads, share any links, or do anything special whatsoever. I simply focused on making a gallery that I would like to visit. In fact, the only update I gave regarding audience was back in August when I said:

“I have many, many ideas for The Watercolor Gallery and I’ll be working on them as the site gets more and more of an audience. Right now, after only a week, the audience seems to be near 50 people per day. I’m extremely happy with this.”

Well, the Watercolor Gallery has found an audience. Since that update there have been several surges in both traffic and people ‘following’ the gallery on Tumblr and Twitter. The two most notable surges amounted to thousands of new people being ‘members’ of the gallery. And if I was happy with 50 people per day I’m very happy for thousands. The two main surges resulted from a painting going ‘Tumblr-viral’ and, yesterday, The Watercolor Gallery being featured on Tumblr Tuesday.

By the way, having a single post go Tumblr-rival seemingly has more legs than being featured on Tumblr Tuesday. However, being featured is only 24 hours old so I’ll withhold firm judgement until the dust settles.

I have reason to be happy with The Watercolor Gallery gaining so much momentum in such a short period of time. As I said in August, I have plans for the gallery that would be utterly fruitless without a fairly large audience. So far I’ve added two new series to the gallery in addition to the paintings.

The artist interview series has been a smashing success. It isn’t easy, and took a bit of work from me to get rolling but so far the interviews that have been published are just great and the upcoming interviews (of which I have 12 in the can right now) are just outstanding. Watercolor artists are part of a global community and this fact shines through these interviews. So far I’ve published interviews with artists in Bangkok, Thailand, Waxahachie, Texas, Scarborough, England, Los Angeles, California and Jerome, Arizona. These interviews have not been the most popular (in terms of “likes” or “reblogs” on Tumblr) posts on the gallery but – I think – they add a certain professional nature to the gallery as a whole. The Watercolor Gallery isn’t just a Tumblog that reblogs every watercolor painting that passes by my desk. It is a serious look at how artists can be inspired by looking at and learning from other artists, their paintings and their workspaces.

Which leads us to the Artspaces series. In a word, this series has been a flop. I’ve gotten absolutely zero submissions since I began this series on the gallery. Zero. The artspaces that you see on the site have been gathered by me personally. I’ve searched for them, asked for permission from their respective owners to publish them, written the posts and published them. But I’m not giving up. I believe we have a lot to learn from the workspaces of every artist. I believe every artist should want to have their artspace published on The Watercolor Gallery – for two main reasons. First, I think it is an easy way to be seen on the gallery (whether or not the artist specializes in watercolor). With the audience growing every day it now means something to be featured on the gallery. Second, I think it is a fun series and who doesn’t like to have fun? I might be wrong about the Artspaces series but I’m going to give it a little while to catch on before I make that decision.

I believe the Tumblr community is one of less interaction then online communities of the past. They’d rather simply click a “like” button on a photo then read an entire post, submit a photo to your site or compete in a contest. At least, that is the way that it appears. I plan on overcoming this challenge by, hopefully, providing something valuable to everyone that joins the gallery. I hope The Watercolor Gallery becomes a notable moment in an artist’s journey when they are featured there and for it to be another tool for artists all over the world to be inspired by others.

The future of The Watercolor Gallery looks very bright. Some of the things I thought I would have to wait months to be able to try I believe I can do sooner thanks to these boosts in audience. I’m looking forward to working even harder on making The Watercolor Gallery a truly special place for watercolor artists and those they inspire to gather together and enjoy each other’s work and company. I’m extremely happy that so many people have thought it worthy of their “follow”.

To celebrate hitting this milestone I’ve begun posting interviews with artists from all over the world. I’ve been collecting these interviews for about a month in preparation for hitting the big One Oh Oh. The first interview is with Kannika Soonthornyankit from Bangkok, Thailand. I figured where better to start than half-way around the globe?

Future interviews will be with artists in New York, Texas, England, Switzerland and even some with artists that seem to have no permanent address.

The entire purpose of The Watercolor Gallery, as stated on its about page, is to help inspire me and others to do great work in watercolor. The artist interview series is just one more way that I’m trying to accomplish that goal.

I’ve got plans for how to celebrate reaching 250 and 500 works of art in the archive but you’ll just have to wait and see what those are.

To anyone that has subscribed to The Watercolor Gallery’s RSS feed, followed it on Tumblr, or followed @h2ocolor on Twitter – thank you. Thank you for being interested and hopefully inspired. Stay tuned, there is much more to come.

Last weekend I rolled out an updated theme for this site when your browsing it with an iPhone. The main reason for this is my mobile photos. When I post a mobile photo my site automatically Twitter’s a link to it, like this, and a lot of people flood in to view the photos and some of them are on iPhones. I wanted this site to load a lot faster than it did before for these mobile photo pages and this definitely solves that problem.

However, another reason to do this theme came up last weekend. Someone asked me about fishing, particularly this fairly large bass that I caught this summer, and I had trouble, on my own iPhone, on my own site, to find that photo. Turns out I hadn’t posted it yet! It was taking forever to search the site and I got fed up with it. But, now I’ll be able to find stuff quickly given that this new theme works site-wide and has a really great search option right at the top.

Those of you without iPhones may be wondering where your theme for this site is? It is coming. I’ll be working to add all Webkit enabled mobile browsers first (e.g. DROID) this weekend and then will be moving onto other mobile browsers until I squash the majority of them.

Happy mobile browsing.

It is summer and that means its time to reach under the bed, pull out the boxes full of shorts, tee shirts, snorkeling equipment, and frisbees. Time to get away from the TV and computer screens, get outside and enjoy the sun.

That same spirit is what spurred me to give this site a slight refresh. It isn’t all about color and the photo on top either. There are literally hundreds of small edits that I’ve made (which I’m very happy with). Changes to note is the new mobile photos page, the way mobile photos display, and the home page showing the latest photos from both the mobile photos and photos categories.

I’m not going to enumerate all of the changes here. I’m going to eat my own dog food and go fishing instead.

Today it changes again. I’ve decided that my personal blog being ‘named’ my name just wasn’t working. I’ve known this for a long time but I didn’t do anything about it because I wasn’t sure what to do. Finally I got sick and tired of thinking about it and just decided to name it after what it has already become, rather than naming it something I’d like it to become. If that makes any sense.

As of today this blog, which is still going to be my personal Web site in all of the glory that it has come to be, is known as First Initial, Last Name – The official Web site of Colin Devroe.

For several years I have admired the ‘blogs’ that have been branded with their own names yet are run by one or very few people. If you read this blog with any regularity you can probably guess the forthcoming list, but here it is anyway: Daring Fireball run by John Gruber, Waxy.org by Andy Baio, Avalonstar by Bryan Veloso, Waking Ideas by Daniel Nicolas, Monday by Noon by Jon Christopher – and many, many others. I’m listing my friends who are good examples because, well, they are my friends and this is my blog and I can do that sort of thing.

This doesn’t mean that I put my own personal blog in this same line up. I don’t. It isn’t worthy. Also, some of these examples shouldn’t be classified as blogs. Daring Fireball is a business. It is the way John feeds his family. It just so happens that John’s business is “blogging”. This site will never be a Daring Fireball.

So First Initial, Last Name it is. I may grab an appropriate domain name for it, at some point, but I’ve always done more than fine with cdevroe.com so I don’t see that happening any time soon. Who types in domain names more than once or twice anyway, really? You should have subscribed to this site by now.

Side note: I’ve recently added the Share This button to my site (come to this post to see it). If you feel that anything I share on this site is worthy of letting others know about, please consider using this button to make it quick and easy to share the post, photo, or video on your service of choice.

Thanks to all of you that subscribe, read, and participate on my site. I really do appreciate it.

Which is a great thing to see!

So, I’m both sick of waiting and terribly excited to take advantage of the offerings that WordPress 2.7 brings to the table – so much so that I’ve now upgraded my site to the latest version – which is 2.7 RC1.

RC stands for Release Candidate. This means that the software I’m running is, in the minds of the developers, ready to be used by the masses. It is – more than likely – the exact code that will be released as an official update to the WordPress software.  The only reason the code will be updated from RC1 is if anything rather high-priority is found (like a bug or security issue).

Upgrading to RC1 was painless (I came from version 2.6.3 I believe). I’m looking forward to fully kicking the tires on this new release and writing up a general review of my thoughts on this latest release. First impressions are incredibly positive.

The most notable updates about version 2.2, for me, are:

• Walking directions in Google Maps – Although I use the driving directions in Google Maps as much as any feature on the iPhone, I’ve found myself wanting more accurate walking directions when visiting bigger cities.
• Podcasts are downloadable in iTunes – I’m not sure how often I’ll use this feature since I sync my phone every day to get the latest content from my computer to the iPhone. I’m hoping moreso that the iPhone now displays Podcasts in reverse-chronological order.
• Display the address of a pin – Another update to Google Maps that I’ve wanted to see since day one. When you drop a pin on the map, you can now see the street address of that pin.
• And last… updates to Mobile Safari.  Any updates to Mobile Safari are good updates.

There is one feature I’m leaving out because I would have loved to see it done a bit differently. In Google Maps you can now share your location via email. Google Maps will now construct an iPhone friendly URL and email it to anyone of your choice. This is an excellent update and I’m sure many will use it. But I would rather have seen Google Maps send the URL via SMS. Someone get on that, will ya?

Oh, and Google Maps has Street View too now. I have no idea why I’d ever use this. But, who knows.

Source: Apple – iPhone – Software update.

Weighing in at a 13.7mb zip file this update has been one I’ve anticipated for a very long time.  Upon launching Delicious Library 2 I was prompted to update my OS to the latest version.  I didn’t even know I wasn’t running the latest version!  I’m guessing the Delicious Monster crew had to wait until 10.5.3 was released to get this out.

I’ll write more about Delicious Library 2 later – for now, just go grab a copy.

Source: Delicious-Monster.com

Update 8:56am EST:  Turns out that Wil may have jumped the gun here.  According to Software Update, 10.5.3 hasn’t been fully baked yet, or at least it hasn’t been released yet.  It doesn’t appear on the Apple downloads site for Mac OS X updates yet either.

Here is how things are going down now, how each category will be used, and what the next steps are.

• Notes have been here since the beginning. I struggled with the name of this category ever since I created it, but since I don’t feel I ever write anything worth of the name “articles” or the like – I decided Notes was sufficient.
• Photos is a photo gallery of some of my choice shots. Before I can fully take advantage of this section of my site, I think I need to work on how I process my photos. In other words, I need to make publishing photos a little bit easier than it is now.
• Mobile notes and photos need the most work to be sure. But at least I have the process of writing/publishing them down fairly well where it is very little work for me to do. Mobile notes may need to be published differently as the iPhone mobile admin for WordPress is far too slow to use very often.
• Links is something I am going to a lot more of going forward and I’m still toying with leaving commenting on or off, but I’m really enjoying this new section.
• Videos will probably end up being the last section of the site I work on, since I have a lot of backlogged videos on Viddler, that I would eventually like to have represented, permanently, here on my site.

Now begins the process of redesigning this site to fit these new sections. The highly-customized theme I am using now is simply not cut out for having so many areas of interest, and for displaying them each in their own unique way. Besides, I’m sick of the site’s current layout and so it is time to begin redesigning the site from the ground up with these new sections in mind.

Most of the new sections are not represented, in any way, from the front page of the site. Many of them do not display the way I’d like them to, and the index pages for each section are not customized for each of their purposes. For all of these reasons I’m going to design each and every page to be significantly different than what you see now.

I’ve also ditched Feedburner. They are having a slight outage this morning, which caused me to even remember I was using it, and so I’ve since turned it off. I never looked to see how many people I had subscribed to this site, I never used the built-in ad system, and so having it on has done me very little good. If you could, take a moment to see if you are subscribed to my feed URL. If not, update it, so that you are sure to continue to receive updates.

Now, for the biggest challenge of this process yet – designing the site! Please bear with me as this process may take a little while, and there are a few bugs on my site now since I’ve been cramming all of this junk in.

Two factors spurred me to get back on the diet. The first was a trip to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania with some friends to see a Monday-night Steelers vs. Dolphins game (you may have seen it on TV, it being perhaps, the worst Monday-night game in history). While in Pittsburgh we enjoyed going to a few restaurants where they seem to serve fries with everything. Have you ever been to Pittsburgh? Trust me on the fries thing, never order a side of fries with your meal. After a weekend of eating, drinking, and football, we all decided we need to shed a few pounds.

When I got home from Pittsburgh I jumped on the scale and I was 212.2 pounds. I weight I hadn’t read on the scale since July of 2006. So, I got right back into being on the diet by increasing my exercise and lowering my calories. The same simple plan I’ve had so much success with in the past.

Fast forward about a month. I began to slow down on the diet again, though I wasn’t gaining any weight, and my brother calls me up and we get to talking about challenging each other to get rid of the last few pounds. We chose 15 pounds, though in hindsight I should have picked a little less (more on this in a second).

So, now it is the 26th of February, have I made any progress since November 28th? Today I weighed in at 195.2 pounds, for a loss of 0.8 pounds since last week, and loss of 17 pounds overall since the trip to Pittsburgh.

My new challenge is to stay between 190-195 for 3 months. I’m going to attempt to lose another pound or two this week, and then maintain it for 3 straight months (all while building a little muscle and hopefully losing a little fat around the edges). It seems I never really have trouble losing weight, but I do have trouble keeping it off and staying focused. I’m charting new territory for myself here, I’m not sure what I need to do to stay motivated, to lose body fat (I assume I need to cut carbs a little and increase protein intake) – but I’m up for the challenge. I never want to see the scale read 200+ again.

An update on “the diet”

One of the things that continues to surprise me is the number of hits, google searches, links, and people in general that end up coming to my site to find information on the diet. A lot of times people find the BMI calculator post, or just the diet page, but there are still people picking up the reigns and beginning their weight loss journey as recently as a few days ago.

One person that comes to mind is Doug Meade, who wrote Becoming less repulsive wherein he states that he’s starting on the diet. Another one is David Meade (are these guys related?), where he’s already posted a few updates on his progress. Keep it up fellas, I can’t wait to see you two progress.

Every single week I get emails from people asking about information on the diet, or to be put on the list as participants. Over the next week or so I’ll be updating that list, but I’ll only be including people that have documented real, tangible, results. “Good examples”, if you will. By the way, this doesn’t mean you have to be losing weight to be on the diet, this just means you have to be documenting it – whether you lose or gain.

There is no time like the present to get on-board, so don’t hesitate to contact me if you would like to begin your road to health. There have been many that have benefitted from this public display of goals, reaching them, striving for them, and even failing just to get back up and try again. Particularly me. I have benefitted a lot from it, and I’m looking forward to the next three months – and trying out my new goal.

What is your goal?

“The index page is no where near completed but I wanted to have at least a dozen posts published prior to me working on it. It will be a page showing off the title and thumbnail of the photos that have been published. Nothing too fancy but definitely a little nicer than what is currently there.”

Over the last four months I’ve managed to publish more than “a dozen” photos, so perhaps this small update is a little overdue but I wanted to get something out because, let’s face it, the old index page was absolute bleh. Although I have even more plans for what the Photo section should include, I think this version should serve its purpose until I have at least a few hundred photos up and tagged.

Left: Old Photo index. Bleh. Right: New Photo index. Yay!

How it works

For those of you that will no doubt end up asking me how I pulled this off, here is the incredibly boring and simple details. The Photos section is still running a fairly vanilla version of WordPress – it is just that I’ve now added a custom field value to each photo post (namely: thumbnail) and created a thumbnail for each photo (about 45 at the time of this indexes launch) I’ve published.

A side note about creating the thumbnails: I had a ton of fun creating the thumbnails for each photo. Each thumbnail is not just a smaller version of the photo, it is a re-cropping of the original photo. In some cases, I’m actually happier with the way the thumbnail came out than the photo itself. It is like having a second crack at editing the photo – with only your distance from subject changing. Anyway, I’m showing my photo geek side.

There really are no secrets behind the new index page except that I’ve managed to produce some custom HTML output for the Photos category on this blog and am obviously pulling in the thumbnails accordingly and styling them differently.

Known issues

As with this Photo section’s history so far, there are a few things that I want to change over time. Being that this isn’t the final version of the index itself, I’m looking forward to sprucing it up again in four to six months.

There is also the question of beating WordPress into submission regarding the URL for the second page of photos. I’m having trouble not having the word /category/ in the URL (if anyone knows a work around, send it my way). Once I fix that, I’ll be much happier with the index pages.

The second main thing I hope to fix in the coming days/weeks is the fact that the thumbnails on each page show up a little oddly due to the fact that I’ve chosen to show the most recently published photo a little larger than the rest. Being that I’ve made that decision, and I’m sticking to it for now, I will have to play with the number of photos show per page in order to pull off the grid properly.

So, that’s all for now. I am hoping now that when people come across my Photos section they aren’t turned off by its appearance quiet so quickly and actually take the time to explore some of the photos. Let me know what you think!

Update: So I had to make a few adjustments already. But one thing I want everyone to be sure of – if you are using Safari, be sure to hit refresh once or twice on the Photos section. For whatever reason Safari does not love to show you the latest version of the page without forcing it to do so.

If only Safari’s over-zealous caching would trickle its way onto the iPhone’s mobile Safari.

“hey, i think twitter might have switched something up on you, on your blog your twitters are there but the time isnt”

After doing a little sniffing around I’ve found that Twitter has indeed updated their JSON output for my personal timeline on Twitter and removed the ‘relative_created_at’ values (which would show things like “3 hours ago” on a specific status). My best guess is that by ripping out this value Twitter is saving themselves an immense amount of calculations on their end. They still provide you with the date and time that a particular status was stored, so you can still do the math on your end.

I am not sure when they will make this public, or if they are still making subtle changes like this and want to make one update to cover all of the adjustments they are making but I thought I’d give everyone a heads up that might be using Twitter’s JSON output(s) to show status on their respective sites or applications.

Update April 5, 2007: Twitter has announced API updates as well as written up documentation for their API.

[tags]twitter, api, json, update[/tags]
[slug]twitter-json-update[/slug]

He took the time to write what he did, and didn’t like, about the plugin and why he chose to fix it. Read his entry where he introduces Slugger+.

To me, this is the perfect example of why I love writing these little plugins. I may not personally be the best person to write some of these plugins (due to my inability to watch for things as detailed as someone like Justin obviously is), but I did have the idea and at least I was able to “get it out there” so other people could improve on it.

And that is exactly what Justin has done. He took what he thought was a good idea for a WordPress plugin, fixed what needed to fixed, and offered a better version of it to everyone for free.

Thanks for updating the plugin Justin. I’ll use it religiously.