NVinNYC » Site News

New Site, New Home, New Me?

Nick — Tue, 14 Aug 2007 08:16:10 +0000

Not too much blogging going on this summer because I’ve been somewhat living out of boxes suitcases and adjusting to the working life and being back in LA. The former changes tomorrow with my new apartment (check here for the new address if you need it). The latter, well at a certain point I guess it won’t be ‘adjusting’ anymore and instead I’ll have the ‘grind’ (or some other depressing term).

Things are fucking great down here in LA though; I feel like I’m just peaking at the top of the big hill of a roller-coaster and now I get to enjoy the ride down.

What I really want to say is thanks to everyone who helped me climb that hill and get here. I appreciate you more than I let on. So here’s to some great years in LA and the end of the NVinNYC.com URL (I’ll be moving the blog to a new one as soon as all the details get sorted).

New Site Theme

Nick — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 09:00:51 +0000

I decided it was time for a new site theme when I saw iTheme by N.Design Studio. It’s pretty nifty (but not perfect, the search button works but doesn’t look right). I like the main title bar with the Home & Contact links very visible. Another nice effect is that you can move and collapse the right sidebar items to suit your preferences.

I still plan on rolling my own for ‘NVinNYC 2.0: No Longer in NYC’ (if you will) but this should serve me well in the meantime.

I still think you’re better off subscribing to my RSS feed than actually visiting the site though…

Google Maps Adds Building Projections & Sub Stops

Nick — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 02:11:52 +0000

Google Maps now shows nifty dimetric projections of city buildings when you zoom in to the highest two zoom levels. This data is obviously based on the 3D buildings that are available in Google Earth. Furthermore, in New York City (and perhaps other metro areas too?) they’ve added markers for subway (both MTA and PATH) stops.

Check it out these maps of Union Square, New York City and Portland, OR for examples.

It’s great to see Google continuing to develop this tool.

Update (2/20/07): I beat Kottke to the punch but he confirms that stops for the T in Boston and the L in Chicago are also featured on the maps.

PS: Wow, 200th post!� Yay for blogging!

New Host

Nick — Tue, 11 Jul 2006 01:46:47 +0000

I’ve recently switched my host from TextDrive to DreamHost. Unfortunately, this means my site may be offline for a bit over the next day or two. I’ll update again when everything has been reset on the new servers.

Update (7/12): The transition is complete if you’re seeing this, but be sure to let let me know if anything isn’t behaving as expected.

Back Up

Nick — Fri, 27 Jan 2006 15:49:08 +0000

Hey I’m back up and running. Various factors slowed down the move but I’m glad to say it’s finally done (for the most part at least). Moving servers and such can be a huge hassle…

Anyway, there are still a few things here and there that need to be fixed, so I apologize if everything isn’t working at 100% yet. If you do find problems, be sure to let me know. Also, the move affected the character encoding of some of the text in the posts, so if you see question marks or strange symbols where they shouldn’t be, let me know about that as well.

Update: Things weren’t working for a bit because I forgot to do something (simple, of course) but everything should be working as expected now. Some images might not show up however because I’m still moving them from my old server.

New Theme

Nick — Fri, 16 Dec 2005 15:47:15 +0000

I liked the layout of the old theme but I was really getting tired of the white: I’ve been wanting to switch to a darker background for a while. I finally did it this morning, and I decided to switch the secondary color from blue to a mild green as an experiment. I also redesigned the look of the header so that it matched in color, but it was still missing that personal element. I liked the burned outline of the Empire State Building from before but wanted to try something a little different this time (and I had lost some of the artwork assets for that anyway). So I used some satellite footage of Columbia from the new Mac beta version of Google Earth (which is really cool but seems to have been pulled from availability). I interpolated this with the background slightly differently than before and I’m not yet sure which look I like better…

Anyway, leave me your thoughts, comments, and suggestions about the new look.

Update: I threw in a color-coordinated RSS badge (check the bottom of the sidebar) stolen and modified from Command-Tab. If you can actually see it on the page and wouldn’t have known I modified the them without this post then you aren’t using RSS. So I must ask you: why do you actually visit my site instead of making you computer check it automatically? Seriously, get a news reader, you’ll thank me. On Mac OS X get NetNewsWire or NewsFire, on PC get FeedDemon since you can sync it with NetNewsWire (or at least will be able to soon).

Old Posts

Nick — Wed, 14 Sep 2005 19:37:30 +0000

I’ve been going through my old Blogger powered site (check it out here) and transferring the old posts over to this new blog. There’s a big gap between my last post on my old blog (the last one was on February 16th) and starting this site, so some of the posts might not be as relevant anymore. If you do want to browse through them however you can do a search or check the monthly archives links on the page sidebar. Enjoy.

Welcome

Nick — Wed, 14 Sep 2005 06:05:57 +0000

Welcome to my new WordPress powered blog. Thanks to Columbia University’s firewall and (lack of?) NAT setup, I’m able to host this thing on my beautiful PowerMac G5. Complete control with no hosting costs or uploading. Unfortunately, this means I’m still figuring out the kinks in the Apache installation that comes built right into Mac OS X. So consider everything In Transition or, as Google Labs calls everything new it does, Beta. Some good resources I’ve found to help me so far are MacZealot’s Guide to Installing WordPress on Tiger (they also have a MoveableType Install Guide there for you MT fans) and Petrik de Heus’ guide to Getting mod_rewrite to work on Mac OS X for that confusing “.htaccess” file stuff, which I still don’t really understand myself. Anyway, I hope you like the new format and expect to see some changes in the coming days and weeks (but hopefully not months).