For the last year or more, I’ve been trying to spend time in the evenings working on writing content and creating websites, as well as get fit, cook dinners, do housework, read books and magazines, and a whole lot more. But evenings are very limited – I typically get home from work somewhere between 6 and 7 (sometimes later), and by the time I’ve gotten home and eaten, I have only a short time to spend on getting anything else done before I should be heading to bed and sleeping.

And then, its hard to start something and stop, then to try and pick it up again the next night – so much time is lost in trying to remember where I was up to. The result is that I end up staying up later than I should (and then getting less sleep than I need), and then by the weekend I’m not interested in doing anything except be lazy.

So, now, I’m going to try a new plan. In the week I’ll try and relax in the evenings, and limit the time I spend ‘working’ to about a 30-45 minute task. Then I should be good to spend several hours on Saturday and Sunday to do the bigger things.

One step is to work smarter, and not harder. For example, I find writing is easier if I am doing it in a long session, and so instead of trying to write a blog post two or three evenings a week, I’ll write in long session at the weekend (today, I’ve spent about 2 hours on it) and queue up the posts (I got this idea from my friend John of SixLabRats). That is opposed to the hour or so I’d have spent on each blog post on a weekday evening because of trying to gear up and focus after spending a day at the office (invariably tired because I had been up late the night before trying to get something else done again).

If the experiment is successful, then you should see more content here and at RandomTweak, as well as a new theme at RT next week, and hopefully the Drupal‘d version of HK a couple of weeks after that (with content).

I’ve just spent the last week switching RandomTweak over to Drupal after trying it out on my development box for a couple of weeks beforehand.

It wasn’t quite as easy as WordPress is to get a the site using the same features as it was before (tags, syntax highlighting, adsense, etc), but it does offer a lot more flexibility and options for enhancing the site (user/author profiles, contact forms, etc).

Most of my time was actually spent on fixing up the content published under WordPress and fitting it into the new site – there were a couple of automated tools for this, but they were a bit flakey and caused a couple of problems which would have needed more editing again. I’m looking at a way to improve the automated migration so that it’s more useful and more under control.

The next site will be this one – there’s more content here to deal with, but it’s simpler (mostly). The tricky part will be migrating the image and photo albums over – although, I might not be able to do that automatically, either, and may end up just doing it progressively. The main reason is that I always had a vision of how these albums should be organised, and the best gallery plugin (NGG) for WordPress forced me into a different system. We’ll see, anyway.

I reckon it’ll be a couple of weeks before I’m really ready to switch HorusKol over, as I need to get to grips with Drupal’s themes and blocks system, and then there’s the galleries. Still, I’m looking forward to it, and it should be good learning experience for when I start using Drupal on client sites.

I’ve mostly finished setting up the NextGen Gallery by Alex Rabe, which is a pretty good album plugin for Word Press, and will let me publish photos easily on here.

I bought a Sony A200 D-SLR last week because it was on sale at about half the recommend retail price. It came with an 18-55mm and a 75-300mm lens, which made it a pretty good steal. After taking a large number of pictures of the inside of my house and then erasing them, I needed to go and find some real subjects.

So, what do you do when you have a new camera and want to give it a field-test? Well, I headed on up to Cleland Wildlife Park, which is up by Mt. Lofty. This was also a way to keep cool, as the temperature up at that height (500m or so) is typically about 5°C less than down on the flats, and Sunday was looking to be another warm day.

I had a pleasant walk, and had gotten there early enough to beat the crowds, who started arriving about lunchtime. This meant that I pretty much got the animals all to myself, and was able to get some great shots without having to spend a lot of time setting up.

This visit was mostly a brisk walkaround, just to see what was there and what I could get out of the camera. I plan to return again in the future (especially now that I have an annual pass – works out cheaper than three visits), and focus on certain animals there.

Anyway – the links for the new album/gallery:

• Photo Albums
• Cleland 2008-10-19 Gallery

I was pretty pleased with the results – although I’ve only posted about a third of the photographs I took. Some shots I would like to have another go at when I’m more used to the camera – for one thing, I need to relearn about setting apertures, ISO and shutter speeds, and all the rest. It’s been too long since I’ve had an SLR, and I relied mostly on auto for this shoot.

Even after I’d culled a number of shots from the original set I’d taken (I found that the auto-focus has an annoying habit of picking on the wrong object at times – like a blade of grass!), I had 1.2 GB of RAW photo data (I’m glad I bought the 4 GB card now – if only 2 hours of shooting would gain that many images). This caused a problem for me – I didn’t want to work on the images until I’d made sure that I’d saved the images onto read-only media (to prevent losing them from changes), but had no blank DVDs. In fact, until this evening I’ve never burnt a DVD before in my life (lots of CDs with albums on my shelves though).

So, I had to get DVDs and then find some software – I got this from SourceForge, which is typically my first stop for finding tools and applications. I downloaded the latest version of a tool called cdrtfe which is a flexible little program and can work with most CD and DVD formats – it is pretty well-ranked at SourceForge, which is a good indicator of a polished product. The only thing I had difficulty with was setting up the correct format for writing the files to DVD – but it didn’t let me start burning until I’d made the right choices, and it pointed me in the right direction for these.

I also had to get another application to view the RAW image files, as IrfanView, which has been my mainstay for the past few years, doesn’t support the Sony .arw format. Thankfully, the IrfanView support forum acknowledges this, and points you to FastStone, which is also free. I also find it to be a much better image browser/viewer, although I will still use IrfanView as a “quick editor”.

If you’re wondering – when I converted the RAW images to JPEG, I reduced the total filesize from 1.2 GB to only 24.5 MB! Although, I did resize the images considerably as well.

The more observant among you might have noticed a change in the the site.

Given the rather stalled status of the blog development for Horus Kol, I’ve decided to take something off the shelf which gave me access to the features I was after. I decided on WordPress, as I’d had a little experience with that when I trialled it for my Random Tweak site. I had also had a look a couple of other alternatives, such as b2evolution, but they were either lacking in functionality, or were a bit too nuts and bolts (yes, I’m a developer, and I eat nuts and bolts for breakfast, but I’d much rather be posting on a personal blog and developing something else rather than continually tweaking something from off the shelf).

So, here we are. Getting the template to work took all of about an afternoon, and that was starting from zero knowledge on how to do it. No doubt, I will be making adjustments and pasting patches on the paintwork over the next few weeks.

I have added a gallery plugin, which I still need to tweak before I start showing any pictures off, and I have also found a neat little map plugin, but I want to play with that first before I can see how it might be useful. All of that will have to wait, however, since I’m tired and I don’t want to be cranky at the office tomorrow.