Came across this old advsertisement on YouTube today. Was looking for something completely different, but it was fun. The second one I’m not sure if its Australian or New Zealand, but its dead funny.

I’m working through all the pics from Cambodia.  Its a real challenge as there are over 700 from the last cull, but here is one I really loved.

I was just talking to a really great friend on MSN and starting working on an anology of cancer survival. Why am I going on about this subject, well, if you want membership to this particular house party that is something you really need to undestand.

One of the reasons that I switched my site to Serendipity is that I installed it as part of a new subsite for the house remodelling at Shimoda. A really great friend of mine has purchased an old house down there (150 years old at last count). When you see the first pic’s of it, well our thoughts were Soweto. It really is the worst house in a great area. The Sotoura valley has this lovely little community that we have become familiar with over the last year and really loved.

So now my entries will be split up abit as I will be writing about me and Shimoda. The site is

www.shimodahouse.footsteps.co.nz

Have a read and hope you enjoy. Here is picture from the new underwater camera. Pentax Optio W30 – bloody brillant.

Something to brighten up the place.

An this is what he caught!

I’ve spent the last three nights redating all the imported entries from my blogger site.  It was supposed to automatic, but I think I got the date format mixed up and the intructions were a little vague, however its done now.  It has also been a really great experience reading back on them all.  The entries I wrote during my cancer treatment seemed at the time something to do, but not a ‘high priority’.  On reading back I am so glad I did talk with my blog as its provided a great insight into how I felt at the time and lets me see how things have changed since.

My writing is always fairly personal but then if it wasn’t what would it be worth.  The entries have made me laugh and cry all over again, but in a really great way!  Now that I’ve settled on a really great blog system, and also seen how important it is to write at the time I’ll be continuing to keep it up. And hey if you do read it, leave a comment!

As part of the transition of the blogger site over to the footsteps site is that I’ve had the opportunity to re-read a large number of the blogs leading up to and during the cancer and partway through the chemotherapy. Its been a really interesting retrospective look on what I was thinking at the time and all the information I didn’t know at the time when I wrote the entries.

Serendipity has the abilty to import blog entries from other systems, but the instructions are a little bit out of date.  I’ve managed to bring over all the old entries from Blogger, with pictures linke back to the old site which is great, however it brought in three entries for each entry and the dates are all wrong.  So I’m now slowly working back bringing them all back into the right date, then I have to bring all the old Joomla entries in, but I think it will be worth it

Many of the entries over the last two years show a great depth back into what I went through adapting to the country and also dealing with cancer here.  Basically I don’t want to lose those entries, so a few nights slow work ahead of me, but hey I think its worth it. When its finished the last two years of my life will all be back on the footsteps site!

After a lot of tossing and turning and I mean literally (check out the time – I can’t sleep) I convinced myself that the site would be better off using Serendipity as its CMS system instead of Joomla. Why?  Well after setting up the Shimoda House weblog and using Serendipty I was really impressed with how easy it was to setup.  Then add in a few issues with Joomla not working for me!

To try and resolve the problems with Joomla I tried the RC2 of version 1.5, and while my site sorta came back online, all the plugins had to be redone etc, then to add insult to injury the one module I really used ‘Myblog’ was now a commercial component.  So do I spend money on having a site that will need more work etc to just do what I’ve discovered Serendipity can do out of the box?  Plus I can email Serendipity from my mobile with picture support, dead easy, it looks like it can link into Coppermine for images, and well its just simple to use!  So bye bye Joomla, hello Serendipty.

I still think Joomla is a great product and it has a great many supporters, but it was just way to complex for what I really wanted to do and I suspect the upgrade to 1.5 is going to cause them a great deal of problems as its easy.  Right now that I’ve upgraded the site, written the first message, I can goto sleep!