Archives for July 2007

How’d I get so mixed up?

July 4, 2007 by Tricia

Time has been thrown off for me! Does that ever happen to you? You think it’s Monday but it’s either Sunday or Tuesday?

Earlier in my post about my new camera I said that I’d get my new photos on my computer and maybe post some for Wordless Wednesday tomorrow. Uh as far as I know it’s still Wednesday today, although there isn’t much left! LOL

I’ve been so busy working on my sites since early Friday morning to cure that stupid CPU resource overuse problem that I’m still having with my web host that I’ve totally lost track of time!

It doesn’t help that our Canadian holiday was on Sunday (Canada Day) so Chris had Monday off work. He also took Tuesday off work because his brother from Chicago had told us the wrong dates that he’d be coming to Toronto so Chris thought he’d take an extra day off so he’d have more time with his brother but it turns out his brother isn’t coming until this weekend.

No wonder I’m all off kilter!

Oh well. If I do manage to get to the photos that I took on my new camera I will be posting one or two of them so you can see how nice my new camera works.

Make your own photo art at Photo Fiddle

July 4, 2007 by Tricia

I have to tell you about this really cool site called photo art. It’s a site where you can take one of your photos and using one of the 50 great styles they have to choose from – oil painting, collage, warhol pop art and so on – and turn it into wall art!

Obviously with my new SLR camera I’m going to be very much into photography for the next while so I can see myself playing around with some of my photos on photofiddle.com.

The site seems to be very easy to use. Just sign in or create a membership and then you can begin uploading a photo to apply a design style to. Remember there are over 50 design styles to work with so you are bound to create something unique and interesting when you work with your photo.

Here’s an example of what you can do with a scenic photo:

Once you are happy with your new design you can create a canvas or art print. According to the FAQ it takes about four days to complete your photo to photo art request, but once it’s done you’ll have some new art of your own creation to hang on your wall.

Until July 10th you can use this coupon to get 20% off your purchase price – promo code: SUMMER07 That sounds like a great deal to me!

PhotoFiddle has been discussed in PC Magazine, Better Homes and Gardens, Yahoo Tech Editor, USA Today and even made the Oprah O List.

Check it out for yourselves if this sounds interesting. I know once I upload my latest photos to my computer I might go and play with them on PhotoFiddle.com and see what I can do with them. Who knows, I might end up getting some new artwork!

My new digital SLR camera

July 4, 2007 by Tricia

The other day I mentioned that I got a new toy. Well … I was able to get outside and play with it for a little while this afternoon.

My new toy is a new camera! Of course … what else did you think it might be? Another laptop is the only other new toy on my list right now and considering how much money Chris and I spent on our respective toys on Sunday I don’t think I’ll be getting a new laptop anytime soon.

Ok so I bet some of you want to know what kind of camera I got? It’s a Canon EOS 30D digital SLR camera. It’s my first SLR camera so I didn’t want to go to crazy, but I feel that I managed to pick out a pretty good SLR camera to start out with. The CNET article is pretty good, giving the camera and 8.5 rating.

Since I’ve been working on upgrading my sites and trying to get their use of the servers CPU resources down I haven’t had much chance to blog, answer email or play with my new toy.

I did take a few photos Sunday night after I put the camera together and I could see right away that I’d be happy with it.

Then this afternoon I went outside while it was raining lightly and took photos of my flowers. I’ll upload those onto my computer in a little while and see how they turned out. Perhaps I’ll use some of the photos for Wordless Wednesday if they turned out as well as I think they did.

I still plan on using my Sony Cybershot DSC-H5. I love that camera! However when I really want to take a fantastic photo I think the new SLR will be the one I pick up first.

If any of you know of any pro’s or cons of the Canon EOS 30D I’d love to hear about your experiences.

The Bahamas would make a great vacation spot

July 4, 2007 by Tricia

I’m still dreaming of a fantastic vacation. I think sometime in the next week or two I’ll be booking a holiday. Summer is fairly nice here in Canada so I don’t think I’ll go outside of the country in the next month or two, but maybe a nice island getaway in late September would work.

I’ve been checking out all the Caribbean islands to see which one I’d most like to visit and the Bahamas sounds like a nice place to visit.

I’ve never gone diving and snorkeling, but I know a few people who dive and they’ve told me that the waters around the Bahamas are just beautiful for diving. There are a few areas of the Bahamas that have world renowned Diving and snorkeling.

Oh wait, I have snorkeled but that was a very long time ago! Still it would be fun to try again. I’d love to swim among a school of tropical fish. Perhaps I’d even see a sea turtle. I’d love that!

The Bahamas has a rich history. Did you know the island was once favored by some famous pirates? I think if we went to the Bahamas I’d try to visit some historic sites or museums. I believe that when you travel you should learn a little bit about the country you are visiting.

Naturally I’d also want to try out some native Bahamanian food! I love seafood and I’m pretty sure they’d have some tasty seafood dishes. Plus everyone knows that some of the best rums come from the Bahamas so I’d bet that they have some fantastic rum based drinks.

Have you been to the Bahamas? If you did, what sites did you see while you were there?

My sites are using too much CPU resources? Help!

July 1, 2007 by Tricia

I’ve gone through a nightmare in the last few days!

I got a message from my web host on Thursday evening stating that my sites/ domains were using too much of the web hosts resources on the server that they were on and that they had moved my sites to a non-production server until I could either figure out what was causing the drain on resources or until I decided to upgrade to a VPS hosting plan or a dedicated servers hosting plan.

Well, both of those options are more expensive and while I know my traffic has gone up recently and continues to rise I’m certain that it’s not high enough to warrant upgrading my hosting account just yet.

So I stayed up Thursday night and worked on my sites. Looking over all the stats to see if I could figure out which files were being used too often or if there were any files or folders in my domain directories that shouldn’t be there.

I didn’t find anything abnormal but I did deactivate a few plugins that I thought might use more of the servers resources than the others. That’s all I could think to do.

I’ve also upgraded the Google Sitemap plugin that I was using to the newest beta version as that one is said to go easier on CPU resources than the last stable version.

So today … well today is Canada Day. We had a friend over for the weekend so I left my sites alone briefly last night and earlier today. We’d been supposed to go out of town, but that wasn’t going to happen when there was the possibility of me losing my sites or of them going down. You see I was still waiting to hear back from my web host. I’d written to them twice since I got their message on Thursday evening and didn’t end up hearing from them until today! Grrrr.

Unfortunately the message that I got from them today was that my sites CPU usage had increased! Aaaah! It shouldn’t have increased! What the heck????

They also told me that they’d disabled the index.php file for this site because:

We have been forced to disable your script(index.php) located in
(/home/thewe22/public_html/feverishthoughts/index.php) as they appear to have
been exploited.

Well what does that mean? Was my site hacked? Did someone try to access my site with a script?

I have no idea, but the result was that Tricia’s Musings was down for the count.

I was advised to again search for any scripts of files in my directories that didn’t belong (didn’t find any) and to upgrade my software.

So I’ve upgraded Tricia’s Musings to the most recent version of WordPress. As I said earlier I also upgraded the Google Sitemap plugin. I’ve turned off Bad Behavior (now I’ll be hit with spam!) and I’ve installed WP-Cache.

I still have a number of plugins running. I’ve turned off a number of them, but I do still have several activated.

If CPU usage is still high I’ll turn off all but Akismet and see how that goes.

If you have any ideas for me as to what else I might be able to do to limit the CPU usage on my sites I’d love to hear it.

How’d I get so mixed up?

Make your own photo art at Photo Fiddle

My new digital SLR camera

The Bahamas would make a great vacation spot

My sites are using too much CPU resources? Help!

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