Hopefully, the old saying is true, and will make up for my largess in the writing department as of late. Don’t worry, I’ll be turning out the tripe again soon enough. Until then, enjoy these photos of:

• Elixir of Love - a very well recieved production of this classic opera, set in a 1950’s west Texas diner. Think of it as opera infused with a Grease-esqe panache. The show just closed last night.
• Carmen - yes, again.
• SoCal RV Rendezvous - I presented a seminar on aerobatics at this gathering of RV pilots. If I recall the numbers correctly, more than 50 aircraft showed up. It made for some impressive photos of the ramp…
• Wild Animal Park backstage tour - this is probably the best way to get up close and personal with the cheetah, tiger, lion, and other cats while seeing how things work behind the scenes. Well worth the ~$20 cost.

From one house to another… a quick shout-out to my college roommate, Rich, on the relaunch of his sports commentary site, House of Sports Blab.  I don’t know about the name, but the content is first rate.

We spent the afternoon putting some fine touches on the Wordpress template design, tweaking the style sheet, and so on.  The main thing he wanted was a location for Google AdSense advertising.  The spot we dedicated to it is directly below the tagline on the right-hand sidebar.

Speaking of AdSense, for a long time I’ve frowned on such advertisements and vowed that I’d never put such junk on this site.  I’ve got nothing against Google, but we’re bombarded with ads from the time the radio wakes us up in the morning until we go to bed at night.  It’s in our postal mail, email, radio, television, it’s on buses, cars, billboards, pens, packaging, and everything else we touch, see, or do.

But even that doesn’t spur my intense dislike of online advertising.  The crux of the problem is that advertisers are resorting to more dishonest methods for pimping their wares.  Adware, spyware, and outright deceptive advertising — anything to get you to click on that ad.  I’ve no doubt that American enterprise loses millions of hours of productivity to it.

I know I’m not alone in believing that there should be some place that’s free of overbearing communiques on Leptoprin, day trading secrets, and free iPods.

But lately, I’ve been rethinking my aversion to some web-based advertising.  For one thing, AdSense doesn’t stoop to the malware level.  Also, their stuff is highly targeted, so presumably any ads that appeared here would be aviation related.  Flight training, charter, aircraft manufacturing, part suppliers, and so on.

Of course, I’d be remiss in not adding that there’s another reason I’m rethinking things:  money.  Does that make me a bad person?

My site gets thousands of visitors per day, and every time I turn around there are guys getting four, five, and even six figure checks from Google for doing nothing but running their web site.

To be honest, I’m curious about what sort of money a site like this would bring in.  Will I join the AdSense tidal wave?  I’m undecided.  But if you’d have told me five years ago that any small-time web site would be able to generate that kind of revenue without dealing in something a) illegal or b) pornographic I’d have said you were crazy.

I’m starting to think I’d be crazy to not at least look into it.

I’ve added some new aviation-related blogs to my links page. It’s about time, too. I periodically search for sites like these, but find them few and far between on the internet.

Thankfully, I found a way to leech off the research of others! I simply looked up the Bloglines lists of some people who subscribe to the RSS feed here at The House of Rapp.

Among the discoveries are an official Boeing site for the flight test program of the new 777-200LR jetliner, two sites written by airline pilots, and another which is penned by a freight dog here in California.

In the never ending battle against comment spam, I’ve implemented a change in the way comments are verified.

First, the comment form now requires users to answer a simple question when posting a comment: “This site is called the House of _____”. A human user will hopefully be smart enough to enter the name Rapp. A spambot, on the other hand, will choke.

I wish I could take credit for this elegantly simply fix, but the credit must go to this guy.

The other anti-spam measure is the Three Strikes plugin. If a comment is posted with a) more than 2 links, b) no referrer, and c) at least one match from my spam word list, the comment is automatically obliterated. It doesn’t go into moderation. It’s not marked as spam. It simply ceases to exist.

In view of these changes, I’m eliminting comment moderation. I’ve never liked having to hold every single comment, ping, or trackback in a queue until I could personally approve it. That sort of thing punishes the user rather than the spammer. But a few months ago there was simply no alternative — the site was receiving hundreds of spam comments per day, and I’d be damned if I was going to reward their efforts by letting that stuff get picked up by Google.

Just added about 100 new photos to the gallery:

L.A. Gold Cup aerobatic contest - photos courtesy of Katherine DeBaun. It was a great learning experience. For example, I learned never EVER to book a hotel room facing the highway. I also learned never to trust Gray’s judgement when it comes to bars. Oy.

Northern California Aerobatic Challenge, better known as “the box inside the triangle”. Nothing like a return to sea level to make a guy feel good about his flying. (Again, photos by Ms. DeBaun).

A family wedding up in Seattle, my first time up there in quite a few years. I wondered why I hadn’t been up there in so long. And then I got on the airliner, sat in that tiny cramped seat next to the barfy kid, and suddenly I remembered: I hate to fly. Commercially.

The Fremont Festival - akin to a miniature San Francisco right in the heart of Seattle, Fremont is the artsy part of town. Tim and I spend the afternoon watching an entertaining yet bizzare parade, complete with lots of naked people, conspiracy theorists, communist party members, and other related, uh, ‘paraphenalia’.

It’s been a few months since I switched from Movable Type to Wordpress as a CMS solution.

Overall, I’ve been happy with Wordpress. However, there was one large bug I was never able to squash: it didn’t want to play well with Gallery. For some reason, I was never able to call Wordpress functions from within the photo gallery pages. I wanted to make these function calls in order to have the side bar menu (which contains recent posts, comments, and other Wordpress data) remain consistent on all the pages.

A simple server-side include should have taken care of this, but it never worked. I’d end up with the following error message:

Fatal error: Call to a member function on a non-object in /home/ronrapp/public_html/wp-includes/wp-l10n.php on line 37

The file referenced in the error message, wp-l10n.php, enables Wordpress to operate in different languages. Since it’s one of the first things Wordpress does, that’s where the functionality broke down.

Normally a Google search will turn up the answer to just about any coding issue, but this one was a rare exception. I posted several messages to the Wordpress support forum, but always came away with the feeling that I wasn’t explaining my problem clearly. Either that or the folks replying had no experience with Gallery, which is an admittedly wonky piece of open source software (the next iteration, dubbed “G2″, is supposed to be much better).

Anyway, I’m glad to report that the fog has finally been lifted. The answer: add the following line to the beginning of Gallery’s init.php file:

<?php
require_once('../path/to/wp-config.php');
?>

I’d swear that this is one of the first things I tried four months ago. But apparently not, because it’s working like a charm now. F*%$#ing computers…

I updated the colophon page to read a little more like a personal narrative and a bit less like a legal brief. The only things it was missing were the double spacing and line numbers.

Hopefully it’s now more entertaining, easier to read, lower in calories, and will cause the reader to buy the world a Coke and teach them to sing in perfect harmony.

I’m all about setting reasonable expectations.

Speaking of harmonies, today is closing night for Turandot. Which is a bit of misnomer since we close with a matinee. Nevertheless, I’ve enjoyed this production. It’s been somewhat of a meat market backstage, but that’s what happens when the cast is young and nearly 100 in number. The audiences have given standing ovations every night, rare for an Orange County crowd. I have a feeling the next production (Mozart!) won’t produce the same response from the populi…

And with that, I’m off to the theatre.

I took a page out of Jon’s playbook and made a few minor modifications to the House of Rapp CMS code.

Now, when you leave a comment, you’ll notice that there’s a checkbox titled “Subscribe to comments”. If you select this checkbox, the system will automatically notify you when someone posts a subsequent comment on that entry. This fixes one of the major drawbacks of the comment system, the inability to have any kind of timely conversation due to the fact that you never know when someone has responded to what you’ve written.

If you’re worried about a deluge of email, don’t be. Anytime the system emails you a notification, it will include a link you can use to unsubscribe yourself from that entry, as well as the option of blocking all notification emails from the House of Rapp if you so choose.

I added the subscribe-to-comments feature because as I look over the 233 entries and 422 comments currently on the books, I’ve come to realize that the comments section is a great way of exchanging thoughts and fleshing out ideas with others. The recent Election Results entry is a good example, as is the Thunderbird crash post.

Knock on wood, I haven’t had the problems with comment spam, flame wars, etc. that others have had to deal with. The database is clean. As a general policy, I leave comments open on all entries regardless of age. So if you want to get in on the discussion, try the subscribe-to-comments tool.

Hello again. It’s just me, your friendly neighborhood housekeeper, sweeping six weeks worth of cobwebs from the House of Rapp. Six weeks. I guess I really can walk away from the keyboard, eh?

I’m not addicted.

Really.

I suppose I should have written something when I returned from vacation. It was lovely, by the way. There are about 100 photos from the trip over here. I’d love to write more about it–maybe I’ll backdate some entries from the trip journal Lesley and I kept.
(continue reading…)

Well, after talking about it for something like two or three years–maybe more–this site has finally been revamped, redesigned, rebuilt, and relaunched.

So what do you think?

There are a lot of new features. The biggest change (besides the new design, of course) is that everything is dynamically generated. Many of people are using the same software I am, but I don’t know of too many that are incorporating all the bits in quite the same way.

The textual portions and templates are pretty much controlled by Movable Type. I love this thing. After looking at PHP Nuke, PostNuke, phpWebSite, and a dozen other CMS applications, I just couldn’t find quite the right software. Even Movable Type didn’t have everything, but it was the easiest to adapt.

The photo gallery, previously managed by software from ImageFolio, is now running under Gallery, which is not only free but incorporates a lot of neat features like slide shows, image transitions, online print ordering, improved administration, and most importantly, automatic thumbnail generation.

Anyway, Gallery was been embedded into Movable Type so that it shares the same look and feel.

As if that wasn’t a tall enough order, I also wanted the ability to have multiple designs that were user-selectable. If you look the in the lower left corner of the page (at the bottom of the menu bar), you’ll see a “style selector” that allows you to pick from five aviation-themed designs. Give it a try! The system will also set a cookie to remember your preferences for the next time you visit.

One of the biggest problems with the old site was that it used frames–which I have learned to despise–and a million table tags. Using tables to control the design of the page is a trick as old as the Web itself. Alas, that’s not what tables were designed for. The result was a lot of very messy, spaghetti-like code.

No bueno.

The answer was to build the new site so that it used standards-compliant cascading style sheets and XHTML. Now the code on each page is compact, clean, and easy to edit.

So that’s the story. There’s not a lot of content here at the moment, but the tough work is done and it should be all downhill from going forward. The photos–all 1500 of them–have been moved over, and I’m finally starting to write.

The “Flying” and “Stage” pages are blank for now. Eventually those will contain some details about my lives in the aviation and theatrical worlds.

I have to add one final note of thanks to David Dasinger. I’ve worked with him on several sucessful projects in the past, and this one will certainly get added to the list. He’s the guy who made all this happen. Thanks, David!