Jun 3rd, 2011 by Erik
In order to fight comment spam on our blogs, we were using reCaptcha. It's not the funnest thing in the world, so I removed it in favor of akismet. Akismet is a cloud-based solution (ie. they host the stuff that decided whether it is spam, and we just check each time a comment is posted). I've been using it on my erikbriggs.me blog for a couple of years and it has blocked 100% of spam. Hopefully that makes things easier.
May 31st, 2011 by Erik
It took a bit of work, but our site is now running the latest wordpress. This means that anything that is available for wordpress (check out wordpress.org for plugins/themes) is available for our site. This wasn’t the case in the past. They were two separate tools, and the MU version (MU = multi-user) was always lagging behind the others. This also meant that not all the themes and plugins worked. Take a gander at what you might want there and let me know. This would be for things like a better post-editor, better picture/video uploading, etc.
Jun 3rd, 2009 by Erik
So I was doing the annual stuff for our website, and decided we should move it to a permanent place. My house was working well enough, but my internet speed isn’t made for hosting websites. Add in the fact that I am (*was*) hosting like 6 sites, an email server, and an irc server, and you can see why large images took a long time to load.
As of last night sometime between midnight and 3:30 am, Briggsfam.com and all our blogs are now hosted externally. I will be scheduling backup jobs to dump to my server still, so we have a safe copy still, but things should be much zippier. You will notice the difference most when opening the full-size images that we post in our blogs. Some of you may notice a much quicker uploading of your photos as well.
I found a super duper deal. I was about to pay $6 a month for 2 years when I decided to price shop. I found another competitor that gave me $2 a month if I paid for 3 years, and just before checking out, I decided to google coupons for them. I found an additional $25 off the cost, so I paid $47 for 36 months. We get unlimited space, unlimited sites and unlimited bandwidth. Let me know how it seems (speed, etc) via comments or emails.
May 3rd, 2008 by Erik
So, I mentioned in a comment on Dad’s latest post that I was going to setup a wiki for us. It is here and all setup. Go take a look at http://wiki.briggsfam.com/ to see it. The purpose is to have a place that has a bunch of How-to’s or Tutorials on how to get your Briggsfam.com emails, how to edit posts, upload photos, videos, etc.
Also, as you request more things, we will add more things to it. I will be posting the latest things from there up here, or I will make a widget here that displays the latest wiki pages or something. Enjoy!
Apr 17th, 2008 by Annelise
Briggsfam.com is my homepage, so I always come here first, but I’m not sure who actually reads this!! We will find out, I guess. This is my first attempt, so next one will be emails if this doesn’t work.
Anyway, let’s talk vacation! Of course it can be difficult for us to get to CA since it’s such a long drive, so we like to make it “worth it” by seeing hopefully everyone and doing fun things! (I am totally pulling for the beach this time! We have somehow missed out on all the other family trips to the beach.) We will most likely be heading out there Memorial Day weekend. We don’t know the exact days yet, but are working on it.
Also, talking to Linda the other day, she mentioned a family trip to Idaho sometime this summer. We are 100% for it, but we also realize our opinions don’t count the same with only 1 kidlet in tow, and driving the shortest distance, a nice change! So that’s why, if everyone else is on-board for an Idaho trip we are super flexible with dates and our house is wide open for anyone wanting to break the trip up, whether it’s just a potty break or an overnight stay.
So I think now is a good time to start talking about this. As Erik pointed out yesterday, he’s not the only control freak. And really he’s not. We are just control freaks about different things. Planning is one of my things. I just figured I’d get the ball rolling!
Erik, do you want to set up a forum where we can talk about this? That might be the easiest way to get everyone’s ideas, opinions, and schedules . . . just an idea!
Jan 16th, 2008 by Erik
So, Rebecca’s recipe sharing got me thinking, and I’ve been wanting to get forums up for some time, so without further ado, the Briggsfam.com Forums are up. You can go to http://forums.briggsfam.com or http://recipes.briggsfam.com to get to them. You will need to register and answer a simple mathematical question to be able to see them, but once you do, and log in, you can post anything you want.
Please comment with your ideas for more forums that we can add. I am sure we can come up with a lot of cool things to talk about. I can even add a section here on briggsfam.com that displays the most recent forum posts so we don’t have to check them every time to find out if there has been a response.
Jan 9th, 2008 by Annelise
I found this at lds.org Elder M. Russell Ballard gave this speech at December graduation at BYU-Hawaii. Clearly the leaders of our church are staying with the times, and have an excellent grasp on what is going on in our world today. It’s interesting and worth checking out. http://newsroom.lds.org/ldsnewsroom/eng/news-releases-stories/apostle-urges-students-to-use-new-media
Nov 7th, 2007 by Erik
Well, not really, but it sounded good. For anyone interested, I told google to remove us from their search engine. I couldn’t find anywhere on yahoo to request it, but they should all no longer be cataloguing anything we do. I put in something that tells their robots (and that is what they are called, I’m not making a euphamism) to stop “crawling” our site. This was in response to a request I had about internet predators and our children being on here, etc. Best just to err in the side of caution.
Oct 22nd, 2007 by Erik
Since the most active blogs here are all from Mothers, I figured you all might like this:
For the Mom’s out there:
Sep 16th, 2007 by Erik
So, you can now post videos to your blogs. Once I show Annelise how to convert our home videos to a more compressed format, she will be uploading like crazy, so just watch out. Essentially, most video hosting sites (like youtube, or whatever) give you a few lines of code to copy/paste into a webpage so you can display the video on your site. Go look at my blog and you will see what it should look like. What you need to do is copy their code, take it to your blog, click the code tag at the top, and paste it in as code. Then, once you submit your blog, it should work just like that. You can click back to visual and continue writing, or whatever you want, just like normal.
Have fun and enjoy!