Well I’ve bit the bullet and finally admitted this site is a “blog” :idea:. I really hate that word and had been avoiding looking at any of the blogging engines to power the site, sticking to CMS packages such as postNuke and the most recent Mambo.

Recently however, Sue has expressed interest in putting stuff online. While Mambo was nice for me, it just wasn’t “easy” enough that I thought sue would be confortable using it. I don’t think this was really a fault of Mambo, but more that I am running a blog (whether I like it or not) and was trying to shoehorn it into a full blown CMS.

In case you haven’t guessed, I’m no longer using Mambo. I have switched to Wordpress. The conversion made is painfully evident that this is indeed a bloggish site, as it was completely painless to get setup the way I wanted.

Anyway it is what it is. You may also notice that the site has a different name (at least in the header). kitzke.com is expiring, and I’ve gotten sick of constantly explaining to people what it means. Why OsakaNYC then? Easy: Sue is from Osaka, we live in NYC, and this is our space (plus it was the only decent name that wasn’t taken).

The URL switch will occur over the weekend and kitzke.com will continue to work until mid-June.

You may have noticed that the gallery had disappeared from the site for the past few weeks and wondered what happened… I guess it’s time to fess up. I upgraded to the latest Mambo version around that time and since I was installing stuff I decided to upgrade to the latest beta of z00m gallery. The upgrade dropped all the old gallery tables and created now ones. Since I didn’t bother to read the readme, I hadn’t backed up my data. I didn’t loose any pictures though. Of course the component is a beta, so there are bugs… many bugs as it turns out. Rather the spend time (which I didn’t have) ironing out the bugs and since I was too demoralized to roll back to the previous version I disabled the gallery. However, since I’m now on my trip and am taking a bunch of pictures to share, I enable it again. I have not re-added the old images yet, and as I said, the version is a bit buggy, but it should suffice for you to check out my Japan pictures until I fix things.

You may have noticed a difference in the Gallery. I have switched from the menalto gallery package to zOOm gallery. I’ve used menalto for years and it has served me well, however I wanted a few features that it did not provide. One was search integration. I received some code for a searchbot for menalto gallery, but it’s still a work in progress, and I don’t have the time to debug it right now. zOOm is also a native mambo component, so integration is just easier.

One thing to be aware of, you can no longer click an image to get the ful size version. Instead you can add the image (or a whole gallery) to what is called the lightbox. Think of the lightbox like your shopping cart. Once you have the image you want in the lightbox, you can download the full size image in one convient zip file.

Nothing is perfect though so please let me know if you come across any bugs