Joe and Jamie's Blog

With all the excitement of storms, Christmas, and fooling around with this blog I almost forgot to mention the car accident. Nothing major, so don’t fret.

Jamie was rear ended (again) in the Acura. Maybe that small car just has a sign on the back bumper that says hit me or something. I don’t have a post of the first time this happened, it was before this blog started. The first time Jamie was sitting at a light and someone on their cell phone didn’t notice traffic was stopped and ran right into her. This time it was unfortunate for both Jamie and the other car. Some idiot in the center lane of a three lane road crossed over the left lane into a parking lot without signaling, cutting off Jamie to the point where she had to slam on the brakes and come to a full stop and barely avoided him/her. Sadly the lady behind Jamie didn’t have as great of breaks/reaction time and hit Jamie. To me it was no one but that idiots fault, but he/she kept on driving and wasn’t found. Now the car is in the shop awaiting to be fixed again.

As you can see the damage isn’t that bad, but what sucks is that it bent the exhaust forward, so that has to be replaced as well. All you see in the picture is the muffler tip being bent, but it really jammed the whole exhaust pipe forward. Oh well, guess we’re getting our money’s worth out of the insurance.

Bumper and exchaust damage

More bumper damage

Way back in October I told everyone in this post that I was creating a new website for www.joeandjamie.com. Well I finally got around to doing it…somewhat. The previous post talks about getting the URL of the blog updated and changed. That was step one. Step two is the picture gallery, which I have set up and configured. I just have the grueling task of putting descriptions on the categories and the pictures, as well as updating the naming structure (maybe) of the files , uploading all of the files which takes days, AND looking at each picture, rotating the ones that need to be rotated. Doesn’t that just sound like fun? Easy, but horribly redundant and boring work. Gee I wonder why I put it off for so long…..

So the picture gallery is there for you to look at, along with the simple main page to the site with a choice to the blog or the gallery. Go to www.joeandjamie.com and choose either site to enjoy.

Not sure if the average reader would notice this, but the domain name and URL has changed of the blog. Don’t worry, all the old links will still copy over to the exact posts with the new domain.

So here’s the change:

http://www.josephhannigan.com/blog2

is now

http://www.joeandjamie.com/blog

Update your links – www.joeandjamie.com

This is something that always has bugged me since day one. I don’t know what took me so long to do this, would have been much faster if I had done it when I had three posts and a small database.

Over the next week you may experience different looks of the blog. I will be testing some new themes. Quite frankly I have grown board with this one. I did put a lot of work into making it what it is though, I remember all the long nights tweaking the page code.

Since this was a bit of a daunting task (more me worrying about screwing it up more than anything), I want to share the articles I found that were very helpful.

http://codex.wordpress.org/Moving_WordPress -This article is hands down the most important. It is narrowed down to each specific type of move you could be doing. Whether you are changing subdirectories or servers, this is the document for you.

http://codex.wordpress.org/Changing_The_Site_URL – This article goes deeper with the database changes to be made. I found it just as easy to backup the database, edit it in a good text editor (not notepad) to update the links, then restore it.

http://codex.wordpress.org/Backing_Up_Your_Database

http://codex.wordpress.org/Restoring_Your_Database_From_Backup
The trickiest part was figuring out how not to lose the old links. I am sure most will drop from the search engines, but I do have a handful of direct links which I didn’t want to lose. I found documents on .htaccess redirect rules which did the trick. The following site from Apache has all the mod aliases you can use. The RedirectMatch worked best for me.

http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/mod/mod_alias.html

This is the code that I have in my old blog’s folder .htaccess file.

RedirectMatch 301 ^/blog2/(.*)$ http://www.joeandjamie.com/blog/$1

This keeps everything after www.joeandjamie.com/blog/ and puts it after www.joeandjamie.com/blog/ essentially pointing all old links to the new URLs, which is exactly what I wanted! I couldn’t be any happier.

Another important step was getting the image URLs updated. This wasn’t done during any other step because they are part of the content in the post. I very luckily stumbled across a wonderful plugin to take care of this for me.

http://www.velvetblues.com/web-development-blog/wordpress-plugin-update-urls/ – This plugin allows you to enter the old URL and the new one and presto-magico its done…I wish everything were that simple…

I learned a bunch of neat stuff tonight. Feel free to ask any questions and I’ll try my best to help.

Today the first winter storm of the season hit. The ice last week really didn’t affect Poughkeepsie. It hit us hard but it melted pretty fast; no power outages either.

I just got back from being outside doing the first round of snow blowing. It’s coming down hard. I really do love the snow though, just the other day I was wondering why it hadn’t snowed yet. Now I’m up past my boots with it. I popped my head out the windows when I came back in and took some shots.

Shot of the storm from the front of the house

Shot of the storm from the back of the house

While the tree was being decorated Sunday, my father and I hung the icicle lights on the house. It wasn’t too cold out, compared to Saturday. Lights went on the gutter nice and easy since they gutters are brand new seamless gutters.

After Jamie was done with the tree she came out and helped me put the colored lights on the railings. It went fairly smooth, just had to use zip ties because we weren’t allowed to staple into the freshly painted house (painted just this summer). Jamie left to go bring my sister to work and I put up the last strand of white lights that went around the wreaths and over the door. The pictures aren’t as great as seeing it up close, but that’s what I get for dropping my camera right before taking the pictures. Come drive by and enjoy!

Christmas lights on the house

Christmas lights on the house

Today we went out and bought our Christmas tree. Since it had rained for two days straight and was below freezing we decided to just get one off a lot somewhere, rather than go cut it down. We had to the same last year and the tree was great. Our family likes the short and full trees. Ceilings aren’t too high in my house, plus its a pain decorating a 7 foot tree when you are 5.5 feet tall.

My father and I put the lights on it after cutting the base and getting to to stay in the tree stand. The next day, my mother, sister, and Jamie put all the decorations on the tree.

After the tree was set, Jamie and I wrapped up our gifts to get a jump start on things. More or less we had nothing better to do, but its fun wrapping gifts.

Check out the tree!

The chosen one.

Jamie holds the chosen one while I step back to take a look.

Christmas tree with lights on it.

Larger wreath on the front of our house.

Wreath on the front of our house.

Christmas tree all decorated.

More of the decorated Christmas tree.

Closeup of the little dog ornament!

Jamie adding candy canes to the tree.

All done decorating!

Jamie wrapping Christmas gifts.

All the presents are wrapped!

Who put those there already??

Sunday the 7th was our four year anniversary. To be honest, it seems like it has been so much longer. We can’t believe all that we have done in just four years, and how much we still can do in the years to come. We kept it simple this year, just nice little gifts for each other and going out to eat. Jamie came up with a cool gift of getting me some chocolate covered strawberries from Edible Arrangements. She knows how much I love to eat fruit. I got her a new Fossil watch to replace the one I got her last year; it was really scratched up from using it at her job. She likes the brown color metal they are making now.

We decided to eat at Greenbaum and Gilhooley’s Steak and Seafood House in Wappingers Falls. We have never eaten there before so we gave it a shot. One of my new things lately is trying to eat someplace new each time we go out, enough of the same places over and over again. Greenbaum and Gilhooley’s has a very Irish homey feeling to it. It is styled just like every old Irish house I have ever been to. The food was absolutely delicious. Jamie ordered the poached salmon and I had the chicken marsala; best marsala sauce I have ever tasted. We played some Quick Draw while eating, just something to do for fun. We didn’t win anything.

Besides the night being incredibly cold, we had an excellent night. Looking forward to another great year together.