Insanely Great
Statistics show that as of today, there are about 71 million web sites running WordPress. Those sites publish 500,000 new posts per day and are viewed by more than 320 million people every month. Mind boggling, isn’t it? Kind of like the national debt or the number of stars in the cosmos, it’s difficult to even wrap your mind around a figure of that magnitude. I’ve been a WordPress user for — what, probably seven or eight years by now. Before WP, it was Movable Type. Remember that one? Yeah, it still out there. Let’s see, prior to Movable Type my site was developed and maintained using nothing more than Windows’ built-in Notepad program and an ancient version of Photoshop. That goes all the way back to the site’s...
Read MoreA Fresh Coat of… Code
You’ve probably noticed the new look-and-feel here at the House of Rapp. What do you think? There are still a few kinks to be worked out here and there, but hopefully you’ll find it a refreshing improvement and not a step backward. It’s surprisingly difficult finding a design which is suggesting of flying or even remotely aviation-themed. Re-doing the joint took some time — and that’s not something I have in abundance these days, so despite the fact that I was getting tired of looking at the old design, I was going to just let it slide. But then suddenly I didn’t. My thought process boiled down to the idea that perhaps if the site looked better, it would inspire me to write more often. Also, a good friend and former college...
Read MoreChanges
Well, my friends, it’s 2009, and with it I’ve made a few changes to the House of Rapp. For one thing, you’ll notice a new theme. Let me know how you like it! I wanted something a little more up-to-date than the 2005-era code I had cobbled together before integrated themes became popular for WordPress. The background image I’m currently using is a photo of my Pitts S-2B on a vertical upline over the old El Toro MCAS base here in Orange County. Second, I’ve password-protected the photos section. For some reason, a lot of my site statistics and referral logs were showing huge traffic coming from sites like Myspace. Thousands of hits per day! Turns out people there were using my photos as background images. While I’m glad they...
Read MoreA Picture is Worth a Thousand Words
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...
Read MoreAdSense
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...
Read MoreAviation Blogs
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...
Read MoreFighting Comment Spam
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...
Read MoreThe Latest
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...
Read MoreWordPress / Gallery Integration Problem Solved
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...
Read MoreUpdated Colophon
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...
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