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Ever think to yourself, you know, I really like the photos on Hudin, but I could do without the articles? Is there some way that I could just have access to new photos when they're posted and not have to bother with actually reading anything?       Well friends, I now give the option to just have a feed of the photos I post, because after all, they are something like 95% of my traffic it seems. You can just subscribe to this feed or you can click on the RSS icon anywhere in the photos section.       It's clean. It's fast. I give it to you. Soon there will be a dump of quite a few more photos in there, so stay tuned to all that's good from Hudin.

There has been many a time when I put up a post and realize that it's lacking something and that my explanation in words pales in comparison to actually hearing what it is that I'm writing about. For instance, there is just no way that you can transcribe the "genius" shared by two art students talking about how much their parents suck and no one understands them. Also a problem is how to expertly draft text to convey that pinched nasal quality of princessy girls walking around, while talking on their cellphones.       I have tried as much as I can to meet the needs of having only text and image at my disposal, yet while the image may excel, the text falls short. So, given that I built this whole thing (yes, WordPress is excellent and I recommend it to those who don't code, but I have to have geek pride in all of this, since I do this for a living) I had to build a system by which to upload sound clips. After spending a good chuck of today thinking about the best way to do this, getting bored, going for an ice cream, and then a baguette for tomorrow, and then wine, and then coming back, and then eating some food to counteract the wine, I hit upon a solution.       So, here I present my first audio track on the site. Advances pardons if this doesn't work perfectly everywhere as I'm still cleaning it up. It uses a Flash plugin to play, but otherwise, it's pretty straightforward. You can listen to my most favorite track from Radiohead's, "In Rainbows" and that's about it.       I just ordered a Zoom H2 recorder, so there will be more sound to follow in the future. Hopefully good sound, or at least amusing sound. I make no promises other than that there will be future sounds. I will not ever be building a video function for the site, since that's just craziness and there are so many sites out there that handle video needs so much better...

Yeah, I know what you're thinking, "Oh where did the blue go with the little cloud thing below that made posts hard to read?" It went bye-bye, that's where it went.       I finally did what I was meaning to do for some time in that I felt a light redesign was needed to the site. I put up the previous design about June of last year while I was in Spain. Now, just as I'm taking off for a short trip to Hawaii, I put this up. Of course, if anything blows up, I always travel, laptop-enabled.       I still have some work to do on this and am not 100% on it yet, but overall, it's pretty much "there". But, more than anything I wanted to put up another sausage update pic, because I know everyone loves that.       One other small bit that people will notice are some new effects on items like the photos. This has come about because of integrating the ultra-groovy MooTools system in the site. For those developing sites, it's genius and it makes AJAX a helluva lot easier.

Well, one of my goals for the recently passed year was actually met. I managed to get all of my trip photos online. This probably doesn't seem like much of a big deal, but when you're talking about sorting through, resizing, uploading, and adding witty commentary to 8,000 photos, it's quite a process. It the last four months to finally get it done in fact.       I was going to list all the galleries in chronological order in this post, but the minute I started with Spain, I shrugged this off. Instead, there are just a couple that I'd like to mention as being my favorites: Sarajevo, Belgrade, Šibenik, General Montenegro, La Sagrada Familia, and of course Barcelona.       In addition to these, the Dogs, Cats, Tourists, and Praving galleries have all ground a great deal in the process. While these don't have what I'd consider to be my most technically amazing shots, they are some of the more amusing, especially Tourists and Praving which I started taking great interest in, towards the end of the trip. Seeing too many churches and concrete beaches will do this to a person.       Anyways, hope those who enjoy will enjoy more and keep coming back for all the Hudin goodness that is this site as there will be plenty more photos to come in the near future. I just hope it doesn't take me a third of the year to get them up.

So for anyone that's really in to it, I had to take comments offline for a bit today. There's nothing wrong with the system, it's just that some bastard spam bot has decided that I'm a very lovable target, which sucks.       There is no overall problem, because most of my mantraps seem to work well. So, these buggers just keep posting and I keep seeing crap email because of it. And frankly, due to the fact that I get so few comments on the site, I just don't want to have a new email notification every five minutes about a new comment that really isn't a new comment and didn't even get posted on the site.       But, this isn't a probably that just my site has. It affects pretty much anyone who allows the public to submit information to their site. We all have to deal with it and some of those ways to deal with it are really annoying, such as those annoying groups of letters and numbers you have to enter.       I really don't want to saddle and end user with that, so I try to take on the fight behind the scenes. This is done in four parts:       1. Get the offending IP and block that user in .htaccess. This is really useful (albeit heavy-handed) when you have a site in say, Spanish and you've got spammers coming from China. You can block whole networks and it works pretty well.       2. See if the user is just tossing data at your site. Setting up an authentication "session" for users works well for some spammers because they will try to post information at your site from their server without actually viewing your site. Giving someone a token when they visit a page and then checking for that token really goes a long way. Of course, there are plenty of ways around this.       3. See if they're human. A human being can't type a comment in five seconds, but a machine can since there is no typing going on. If you check to see if they spent that long writing a comment and block them if they did. This works well and has yet to snare any real people.       4. In rare instances on some sites, I require any comment with links to be approved. Most users on most general sites never leave link comments. Spam bots do though, since that is the main reason they're doing what they're doing. Checking for a bit of link code, or better yet, just dropping comment with five or more links can catch other annoyances.              So, that's it. A couple of the tricks I use to keep my site crap free. Now I just need a filter to run whenever I write about things that piss me off, so that I can make the site totally crap free. I'll probably enable comments again after the holiday if it's causing you a lot of pain not to have them.

Well, the moment that was bound to happen has finally happened. This, right here and now, is the site's 1,000th article. Yeah, I know, some might say, "Astounding!", "How'd you do it?", "Zads!", or "Where's the the naked pictures?" Obviously the most important thing to say at moments like these are that the naked pictures are in the Bay to Breakers sections: 2006 and 2007, as well as the Folsom Street Fair.       With cheap thrills out of the way, it's probably time to look at where the site is now, which is what I feel to be in a good shape. As mentioned before and probably will be mentioned again, there are 1,000 articles. I'm guessing that there are about 10% that are really good, 20% that are decent, 30% that are something to read if you're bored, and then 40% that are pretty bad. I tip my hat to those that have been with me the whole time. I looked back at some of the older articles and they're nothing more than my blatherings. In fact, I have been going back to re-tag older articles, and have been adding in ramblings as a tag. I might even make it so that some point in the future, if you prefer to only read the writings that I feel are prime, you could stop seeing these. And yes, I know that reading posts about the Academy of Art or how much I don't like certain haircuts can get old.       Despite all this, there were a few articles that I really liked, which if you are in an office somewhere, stuck in middle management, you might enjoy wasting some time to read:       Hey, what's up with the pole?       Dubrovnik, Dubrovnik Re-Visited, and Dubrovnik Re-Re-Visited       Balkan Buses Love to Die       Everything on Praving       How Do Budget Airlines Make Money?       Seven Rules for Contract Web Developers       That's probably enough to choke anyone. As you'll see in this list, most of these articles are relatively recent. There is a reason for this and it is my Number 1 Fan who challenges me to write articles that are more substantive and interesting. Without her, there would undoubtedly be more "80 Year Old Man" posts and really, the world of the blog needs no more of those.              Beyond the articles though, it appears that I've posted 1630 photos to the site. This is something of a bigger deal than the articles because a) I think my photos are a lot better and b) I've only been putting them up for the last two years with most of that focused on the last year and a half when I made the switch to a proper SLR.       Much like the articles, my shots have been readily improving with time. I must admit that while the vast bulk of these shots are mine, there are some from Number 1 Fan in there as well, since we travel and do just about everything together. So, if you see a wide shot that's particularly cool, that's most likely going to be hers. But, looking over all of these, I originally thought that my favorite gallery as of late was going to be Sarajevo. I do like that gallery a lot, but the one that I think is the most interesting is Belgrade. Both are wild places, but the haphazard collision of multiple empires in Belgrade really made for some interesting shots.              Well, enough of all this. Back to my day job that allows the stories to unfold. (That happens to be recounted in The Sometimes Office from time to time...) Oh, and leave a comment, so I know who is out there! People hardly ever comment and that makes me feel sad.

Good thing I looked up some stats on the site last night, because I realized that I've been at this for four years today. While it's still a hobby, it's grown a bit beyond that and has actually become something of a reference system for myself so that I can remember what the hell I did yesterday. But, it seems that people are finding some use out of the articles (for once) and also plenty of images to swipe.       I usually use these yearly anniversary posts to reflect about what has happened since the last one. This time, I really don't feel like going in to so much detail because things are going very well and it was a very good summer, that anyone can read about in The Europe section. I did turn 30 this year and with that realized that it's a kinda meaningless thing to get worried about, especially since so many things fell in to place this year.       As far as the site goes, I'm nearing 1,000 articles and 1,500 photos. The photos section is actually going to be growing in large leaps and bounds over the next month as I catch up with the 8,000 photo backlog from the trip. Obviously I'm not putting up all of thus, but a great many. So if you like my photos more than my words, you're in for a treat. As for the articles, I'll probably be slowing down a bit again. It's not that I don't have plenty to say or get on my 80-year-old man about the Academy of Art but more that I find my writing is much better when I do less. This is especially true given the professional blogging I've done over the summer and the book that I'm writing on.       So, happy day to you and enjoy the site. Hey, leave a comment every now and again if you'd like.

Ugh, I hate it when I find little things like this. I hate to admit it, but apparently the reason I've gotten no hate mail for awhile is because there was no way to send me hate mail. I go and post the contact links all over the site, but due to changing the site oh... three months ago when I was first in Spain, I never updated the sending mechanism for email. Idiot!       So, that's fixed now, as well as a few other things, so that everyone who was happy to tell me what an idiot I am for my white dreadlock rants can send me said rants again. I'm sure this will come as a big relief.       Oh one other thing, since that if you feel like you've been missing out on new comments to posts that you comment on, you can subscribe to receive updates whenever someone posts. I just hope it will encourage more comments, since I really like getting those!       Here's to version 6.1.3. Let's hope it's a good one.              Oh yeah, one last thing in that I'm going to try and balance out any techie posts with more general interest posts, because if there's one thing I've learned these last three months, it's that people like to be much more generally interested in things.

Okay, so I've made some changes to the site which have taken away from my normal writing time. This explains why I haven't been writing as much, or for the more critical out there, why my latest entries sucked. At any rate, there will be more to come as I have juicy bits from Serbia and Bosnia Herzegovina.       But, in getting all this together, I realized that the galleries were getting out of control and too lengthy. So, I integrated in the option for me to classify them in to larger sections, like Croatia or San Francisco. It's good stuff and a whole lot easier to manage, so I hope that everyone enjoys.

So, for anyone who follows my blog with any regularity, you will notice that my posts have been a bit sporadic. There is a good reason for this; I'm in The Europe. This is much like the normal Europe that a great many people go to, but the key difference is that I'm in it and using unneeded articles of speech when trying to talk in other languages.       But, in between all of this, I have managed to redesign the whole website. That's actually a bit of a lie as there are still large chunks of this that need to be dealt with, but I mainly wanted to pull all of this together so that I could upload something of a new version of the site while leapfrogging between major cities in the Mediterranean. Currently, I'm in Barcelona and loving it. Great city. Far too many tourists, but such is generally the case for great places. Hopefully I'll be able to knock out some blog posts that talk about this more than just patting myself on the back for rebuilding my website.