All Entries in the "Administrata" Category

Must be time for my quarterly update

I feel like a deadbeat father whenever I think of MyTampaLife. Despite all of my attempts to make time for it, to “get out there” and to be an active part of this once-thriving community, I’m simply exhausted.

Since buying the house in Clearwater, a lot in my life has changed. Every dollar I make goes into something for the house. Every moment I have where I’m not working my day job is spent doing web design, odd jobs and house work so I can progress toward fixing my fixer-upper. It is, to say the least, an overwhelming endeavor.

So, what’s to happen with MyTampaLife?

I wish I had an answer for you. Ideally, I’d like a set of people who are passionate about Tampa Bay and who like the format and want to continue with it to sign on as contributors and contribute. This way, the content will keep coming and the site will thrive on.

If that doesn’t happen, there will likely be bursts of updates here and there but nothing consistent.

So, to my loyal readers, I offer you this. 2010 may bring more updates or it may not, but I have to get past some immediate issues with my dwelling before much else can be done here. Thank you again for your patronage.

A note about slowness in posting and other changes recently

A lot of people have been asking me if I’m closing up MyTampaLife, as I don’t have a lot of time to update it anymore. Nothing could be further from the truth.

What is true is that I’m moving out of Tampa. I just purchased a house in Clearwater and am in the process of closing and renovating.

What is also true is that I now work full time in Largo for a company outside of my house, a departure from how this all started when I worked from home. With the 45 minute commute each way working 5 to 6 days a week, you can imagine how much that cuts into my time to work on this and other “fun” projects. With the move to Clearwater complete, I’ll once again have the time (over 10 hours/week of extra time I now spend commuting) to update regularly instead of the once-a-month pattern I’ve followed the last couple of months.

Another grain of truth is that I recently had to sell a good chunk of my camera equipment to deal with some transportation issues. While I do still have both my iPhone and my point and shoot, you can imagine how difficult it is to do the kind of photojournalism I like without a digital SLR. In the next few months, I will be corrected this with the purchase of a Canon 5D.

The last grain of truth is that, while this is a labor of love, I now have to consider the new house and all of it’s expenses and thus will only have time and money to do these reviews when I’m not doing web design for my clients, working for my day job or otherwise working on the house. Running a site like this isn’t expensive, but participating in all of the reviews is. In an average review, it isn’t unrealistic to run up a $20+ bill eating out or paying cover fees to get into showings or parties. While this income was available regularly when I started the site, I’ve had to make some budget cuts internally to make the house happen.

All of that said, I want to continue to thank my regular readers of MyTampaLife.com. You guys keep me doing this and I appreciate your readership and your feedback. Look for the posts to become more regular as of the end of October when the move is over.

Yours,

Denis Baldwin
Editor and Contributor
MyTampaLife.com

The Move to Wordpress, and things to come

Faithful readers, I have to make a formal apology. While I believe whole heartedly that the move to Wordpress from Blogger was a solid move with a great and important set of reasons backing the decision, the implementation has been less than stellar. Add that to my last week at my old job and moving into a new job and you’ll see that I’m running out of steam on this. Never the less, the site will be back up to 100% soon and I thank you for your patience.

A few things that went horribly wrong:

• The blogger import tool is, at best, sketchy. It did a wonderful job of moving words and pictures over, but it did a number on things like URLs, trackbacks, categories, tags, etc.etc. Basically, it wiped out most everything I meticulously built. Two weeks into it, I have about 65% of this corrected, but I’m going to be cleaning up dead links and 404s for a long time.
• The new template I’ve been working on isn’t well documented and has been giving me fits. While I like the new design and it’s very powerful, it’s taken a lot just to iron out some of the basic navigation kinks.
• All of the page rank and inbound links I had to individual pages died with the lost URLS.
• The RSS Feeds have changed. Please make a note of the new ones, as they are still being moved over in feedburner, TampaBLAB and a bunch of other services that used the feeds.
• I lost some of the gadgets that I really liked in Blogger that don’t have a wordpress equivalent, including the Blogroll that auto-shuffles as new posts are made, the members/readers section and the sidebar google calendar.

A few things left to do:

• In a word, Rebuild the traffic and status that My Tampa Life once had.
• The new framework requires adding thumbnails to each post. I just did it for the front page for now.
• Better Google Calendar Integration. Right now, I have it iframed as a Page. It really needs to be a sidebar item.
• Fix the Authors link in each post. For some reason, the php call to make it work is broken for every author I’ve added. I’m thinking an updated author’s reference should fix this.
• Lots and lots of administrative fill-in, particularly to pages. I simply need to find the time to create copy for it.

Some of the new features:

• Sort BY LOCATION. Every post for an event or something going on or a review of a place, regardless of what it’s about, now has a location tracker.
• Separation of Sections and Tags. Only want Restaurant Reviews? You won’t be bothered with other topics. Just wanna see music? social gatherings? You can go directly to those sections without being weighed down by things that won’t interest you.

Some new things to come in the next couple of months:

• Google Maps Integration for the BY LOCATION section.
• Star Based ratings for reviews. I’ll be using the Wordpress Review Site Plugin as soon as I have $97 to purchase it.
• More authors. As this site has come to fruition, it’s painting me into the corner of “can’t be everywhere at once”. I’ve uncovered thousands of things to do, see and be a part of in the Tampa Bay Area. I’m going to let in a selection of bright minds, brilliant authors and amazing photographers to help cover it.