Facebooking and twittering seem to be all teh rage these days. For the benefit of people who I happen to be friends with on Facebook, I’ve added a configuration to the site that will post updates to my wall when I put new posts on here.

I’d expect most people who read the site and want to know about updates already have subscribed to the e-mails, but its another way people can know whats going on.

Assuming it works when I click “Publish” in a few seconds …

I’m going to write two quick posts tonight, first this one with some updates on this website and another with a quick update on work I’ve done on the car.

First things first, I’ve added a custom Google Search to the site. On the navigation bar in the right column, click “Search Factory Five Information”. This right now only indexes a few sites, but I’m adding them as I find good sources of FFR information.

I finally got the Gallery integration fixed from when I broke it a few months ago. As part of doing that, I also added PicLens support to the gallery. If you click down into the galleries themselves from the posts or via the “ReplicaBuilding.com Photos”, you should get the PicLens buttons if you have the browser plugin installed, or you can use the “Start PicLens Slideshow” link to use a Flash version. Its pretty slick. The plugin can be installed from the PicLens button on the right navigation column as well.

I added a Videos link as well to the navigation. That page has links to a couple YouTube videos and downloads for HD versions. Right now its just two videos from the Factory Five 2008 Open House. (A post about that is coming, too…)

Finally, the logo up top got changed. A guy on the FFCobra forums was doing these computer renderings for people. The one in the logo is a color combination I asked for a rendering of, and is at least in the same vein as what I’m thinking for my car right now.

I added a new page to replicabuilding.com this morning. This adds a search page, which will find information both on this site and on a list of sites I’ve found useful information at in the past.

I’ve been doing these searches manually on Google for a while to find information because their search engine tends to be better than the ones on the sites in question, and I found I could do this which is a lot faster and easier.

The link to the search page is on the right of the website.

I made a small change this morning to the code I wrote that is producing the live camera image. There have been times lately that there have been a dozen or more people watching the camera at a given time, and at a peak I’ve had several times more than that. Previously the code on replicabuilding.com would pull an image from my garage once per user, which was both inefficient and was slowing things down for everyone during those times.

This morning I updated the software so it only will pull a image from the garage once every ten seconds no matter how many users are watching. This should mean two things — first response should be much faster if more than one person is watching and second you may note the timestamp in the image may be up to ten seconds behind. Hitting refresh on the image will not update it any faster than once per ten seconds.

This should make both my web server, my network here and the viewers happier.

I apologize in advance for any screwiness you may see while browsing around replicabuilding.com.

I upgraded to the new version of WordPress, which has been out for a few months. Unfortunately the Gallery plugin I use to manage the photos doesn’t work with it and the authors of it don’t seem to be in any sort of a rush to get it working, apparently because they disagreed with some of the changes.

I’m trying to figure out what options I’ve got for managing photos going forwards, but posts for a while may be just image dumps like the last one until I figure something out. You may find older links may no open correctly into the larger images, as well.

Annoying…

This morning I’ve upgraded some of the software running replicabuilding.com. The biggest change you may notice is that the resizing of the gallery images that are embedded inside of posts is dramatically better now. Previously the resize was making the pictures look grainy and pixelated. It appears now that this problem is fixed, so both throughout older posts and going forward the photos included on the pages should be a lot clearer.

Its been a few days since I updated anything on the site. We’ve been pretty busy getting the garage straightened up and starting work on the car.

Last weekend we did get started on the sheet metal work — pictures are uploaded in the Photo section of the site, but I haven’t posted a journal entry yet.

Also, today I got a live camera set up in the garage. Click the “Live Camera” link on the right to see it. Right now you’ll need to hit refresh to see updated images with it, but I’m working on a more dynamic feed.

I added a plugin today to WordPress which will send e-mails to subscribers when new posts are put online.

If you are interested in getting notified when new posts are added, use the E-Mail Subscriptions link or click here.