So today is the day to vote for the Canadian federal elections. I do hope that all eligible Canadians got out to vote today, if not earlier at advanced polling stations. These elections are important, with a possibility that a majority government will be elected this time around.

Having lived outside of Canada for almost eight years now, it’s easy to get disconnected to the political issues, wranglings and manoeuvrings that go on at “home”. Although it’s more of a challenge to follow the political news, I’ve had the opportunity to vote in by mail with special mail-in ballots. For those who haven’t seen such a ballot, have a look here.

Yesterday’s service at our church, the Evangelical Church of Bangkok (ECB) was a celebration of the Resurrection. I had the great opportunity to take some photos at the second service, which started at 10am. We had a full house, as you can see in this photo – Pastor David King got me to take this photo from the stage.

A view of the congregation from the stage at the Evangelical Church of Bangkok (ECB) during the Easter service on 24 April 2011 in Bangkok, Thailand. Easter service was a full house.

When doing photo gigs, whether at concerts, weddings, church services and events, photographers usually attest to being wrapped up in elements of taking (or making) photos. This thinking through of any technical details (which is made more difficult if flash photography is involved, not that I know much about it, nevermind mastering it) consumes the photographer – meaning we don’t fully listen in to the message or content. However, there are times when we’re fully engaged in what’s going on without missing a thing. This Sunday started with me being engrossed in photo taking, then realizing I was missing out on the celebration that was going on. I gradually became engaged by the celebration worship and then the photo taking became a backdrop to what was going on.

The slide show is below, you can click on the image to download and/or purchase prints. Click through to the photo gallery for those on iDevices or any other mobile devices.

“Hello again, world”.

So what happens in almost 3 years since my last blog post? Life has gotten busy, work has become more challenging, other activities consuming my spare time – if not spent investing on my (relatively newly-) married life.

I’ve been wishing and dreaming and planning to redesign my website, blog and photo gallery, as well as the top-level tshin.com site. Art and I have a ton of photos that we’ve been wanting to share (and showcase) to friends, family – and the world, and it would be great to return to writing, too. The winds of web technologies are changing with XHTML is giving rise to HTML5, so it was quite shameful my top-level site had just GIF text in a table-based layout.

So, “too bad”, for my blog languishing in disrepair, as my hopes and dreams (or grandiose plans) of reviving it slowly became dormant, possibly because the scope of my imagined redesign was over-ambitious. There had been some familiarity and comfort in having a voice online, whether for sake of soapbox or whatever, but with the advent and continued rise of Facebook (followed by Twitter and other social networks), it was more effortless to “have a voice”. Facebook et al. make it easy to micro-blog, but is what is blogged and tweeted all that meaningful?

“Content is king”; that I knew since having started blogging in 2002 as my blog posts were scoring quite highly on search engine hits – even without having to do any search engine optimization (SEO) work, which is now a multi-billion dollar area of work.

When I had started blogging, it was being hosted on a home-built server running OpenBSD; later I decided to use a hosting service by Dreamhost. Even after that migration, I hadn’t managed to move the photos in a bunch of my blog posts over it. Later on, I had dabbled in a photo gallery, using a custom MovableType template, but it was only a half-hearted attempt. Now as a user of PhotoShelter for my archives, there’s a great opportunity to “put it all together”.

So over the last month or so, I have:

• migrated my blog from MovableType to WordPress (actually it was done quite a while ago, but the MT system was still live)
• integrated my blog with my PhotoShelter image gallery,
• started initial clean-up of the top-level tshin.com site.

The details of such an endeavour are numerous and very technical. Without spilling too many beans, I’ve had to learn to master some domain (DNS) stuff to get a WordPress MultiSite installation going (Ruth and Ben‘s blogs are also running WordPress and will get moved over to the main WP installation in the next month), SSL for secure access, juggling caching plugins to make the site render faster, customize sites with themes from Graph Paper Press, write a long htaccess script to redirect over hits from my old URL and some more hacky stuff that belongs in geekdom. So maybe I’m now more qualified to be a highly-paid WordPress consultant… ha ha.

So, I’m back… I’ll be introducing galleries from my photo archive, which will have accompanying stories. There is still much to do, so little evolutionary changes will happen along them way. So, sure, stay tuned.

I've just uploaded a new website about how we can reduce our carbon footprint. We all can do our part by employing these simple tips everyday.

Please share the 12simplethings.org website with your friends.

There are localized translations in:

• Chinese (simplified)
• French
• Hindi
• Bahasa Indonesia
• and a Thai translation which will be published shortly.

In the short while since Ben has started blogging again, one of his last posts has picked up a good track of comments, which seemingly groks the issues between two of the major blog "systems": Movable Type and WordPress.

Now, guiltily, Ben is right that I have been blogging only nominally as of late. (Shame on me, but I think I'm redeeming myself as I have started up again last week after being clueless about where my round tuit had been for the last 9 months, which is the topic of my last post.) So it's fittingly coincidental that this thread comes when I'm renewing efforts to start blogging again and also to update the tools and systems.

Ben is well informed enough on user interfaces to take MT to task for their clunky user interface, although I've found the latest version of MT (version 4) is much improved. This blog is still MT 3.x, however, I have just migrated Art's blog over to MT4 (although she hasn't posted anything in about a year!). This blog post was composed with ScribeFire, a Firefox plugin, so I am dealing with a completely different user interface, which I find useful for composing off-line.

In the last two years, seeing WordPress take the blogging system lead, I've considered whether to stick with MT or make the move myself. One major consideration is that I had invested a lot of time learning and customizing my MT installations. I even started a test WordPress blog to learn about WP. I found the lack of a centralized
plugin directory for WordPress, slightly frustrating. But I'm not sticking to MT out
of inertia or sheer laziness; MT4 is actually a great product. Of course this can digress into some religious war pitting MT against WordPress, but I won't go there. With my prior "investment" - it should be
easier to edit the hacks, hard-coded links and template customizations
when I migrate to MT4 than move wholesale into WordPress, given the
seemingly scarcity of round tuits in my life. I just read
about on the upcoming 4.1 release, and I'm hoping it'll be out when I
start upgrading my own MT installation.

Personally, the licensing issue that SixApart waddled through was a
blunder on their part, which probably alienated many MT users and
developers, as Ben indicates. Although perturbed, I didn't migrate.
I give a lot of credit to the MT community, which I've found to be extremely engaged and a great
resource in developing my own sites.

In the meantime, the Tshins will blog with both MT and WP.

Technorati Tags: WordPress, MovableType, ScribeFire, blogging