By: hamson on October 17, 2009
Jaxon has been asking to have someone in his room for months now. We have delayed because Tyler sleeps so well in his crib for both naps and bedtime that we didn’t want to mess it up. But the other day, both Norm and I noticed how huge Tyler was in the crib. He doesn’t fit sideways anymore so usually he is at some funky angle. In addition to that, we’ve been throwing around this idea of creating a toy room in the “once master bedroom, turned guest room, turned AJ’s room” room and I’m excited about trying that out.
So, we went searching for another captains bed for Tyler and ended up with pretty cool bunk beds.
By: hamson on May 26, 2009
Welcome friends and family to our new site. Please be advised that we are in the development stage and therefore it may be a bit of a rocky road ahead of us.
Norm has been wanting to “update” our site for some time. It usually comes up every time he is looking for specific pictures and can’t find them because our old site had no good way to search. We also heard it from his friend Eric, who always is up to date with cool features on his site.
Anyway, it is about time we did something about it, so after a bit of our own research we have finally settled on creating our new site using WordPress, SmugMug, and a really cool plugin called WP-SmugMug which is a super cool app that will allow us to continue on as more of a “photo journal” than a standard blog (and as an added cool fact, WP-SmugMug was created by one of Eric’s buddies (yep, the very same Eric who gives us crap about our outdated site) Adam Tow.
So we hope you enjoy the new site. And if you don’t, you may as well try and get used to it if you want to keep coming around.
If you are already a bit overwhelmed, we created an “instructional post” to help guide you. Click here to go directly to New Web Site Instruction Post.
By: hamson on May 26, 2009
This post is meant to be informative for those of you who do not particularly like having to learn new things. As we’ve said, this is our new web site and we want you to be comfortable here and hopefully (within a short amount of time) see all the benefits of this new system.
The best way to learn in this case is to just bop around the site. Click on links and see where it takes you. Check out different pages and navigate around. But for those of you who want a system, I’m going to show you some different options and you can pick what works for you. So let’s start at the top.
That’s it in a nutshell. But lets break it down with even a little more detail for you.
Top Navigation Bar
On the top right of every page is a navigation bar that will give you a drop down list of different pages.
Categories - We created 5 categories; Daily, Family, Friends, Misc., and Trips. You may notice that these categories are the same as the sections we had on the old site. (Over time we will move all the old material from each of those sections into posts in the corresponding category.)
Daily – Daily is exactly what it sounds like and what it was before. Anything and everything we do will go
under the daily category. If in doubt, check daily.
Family – When we get together with the Sulpizios, Hamsons or any other extended family for an event it will also be posted in Family.
Friends – When we get together with any set of friends, it will be posted in friends.
Trips – We don’t get to go on trips all that often these days, but when we do, you can find them here.
Misc – Just what it sounds like. Random crap that we don’t know what to do with (like this post) will go in misc.
Pages:
This site, since it is set up as a “blog”, doesn’t have lots of individual pages that are not in post form and categorized. However, we have created a few separate pages that you may enjoy. These pages are Baby Pages, the original and current site of each one of our babies during Teri’s pregnancy, Archived Site, a page that will link you to our old site, and Our Family which is a cutesy page about us.
Subscribe: If you want, you can “subscribe” to our web site and it will send you updates. If you don’t know what this is, don’t worry about it. Teri will most likely continue sending updates to friends and family who want it.
Search: One of our main purposes for switching over to this new site is about organization and search abilities. Here you will be able to search our posts and photos by typing in keywords. Of course, this only works if we identify people and places in our tags and descriptions when we post, but we are working on that.
Slider
The Slider is just another form of navigation. With each post we can upload a photo to associate with that post. That picture along with the title of the post makes up each link. The slide will show you the 10 most recent posts. You can use the arrow on the far left or right underneath the pictures or click on any of the numbers to have the slider scroll left or right to view the different posts. By clicking on any of the individual squares, you will be taken to that single post.
The Sidebar is located on the right side of every page and will be the same. The Sidebar consists of four different parts.
Recent Posts, Tags:, Archives:, and Calendar:. (There will be an exception to this when we get the sidebar on the “Category Pages” working the way we want them to. They will not show you the standard sidebar, but instead just show you a list of the most recent posts in the category that you are looking at. Stay tuned for that.)
Let’s look at the individual parts of the Sidebar.
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Recent Posts |
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Recent posts lists the titles of the five most recent posts. Click on any title to go to that post. |
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Tags |
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A tag is a non-hierarchical keyword or term assigned to a post. It helps describe an item in more detail than just the category name. Tags are chosen informally by the post’s author. Tags are like keywords that you can search on to find past posts. You can also click on any tag in the “tag cloud” (what you see on the left) to go to all the posts with that tag. |
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Archives: |
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Archives are one of Teri’s favorites. It is a monthly archive of our posts. If you haven’t been here in awhile or just want to view a whole month at once, click on the month and you can scroll through every post from that month. |
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Calendar |
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The Calendar shows the current month and all the dates that have a post associated with it are colored. |
Category Section
The Category Section is very functional, but mostly just looks cool since there are multiple other ways to get to each category.
Post Scroll:(Older Entries, Newer Entries, arrow images)
Under each individual post you will be able to scroll through older and newer posts. If you are on the home page and you view the most current post you will see “Older Entries” and you can click and back track through each proceeding post. If you click on a post you will be taken to that post (in single post format) and you will see arrow images at the bottom instead of words. The arrows function just the same and will scroll you through previous and newer posts.
Footer Links
There are links in the footer section of the web site, but they are not for navigating around our site. The links are broken up into three different categories and will take you to other pages that our family like. BLOGROLL links are other blogs that we visit (and by “we”, we mean “Norm” mostly). EVERYDAY links are (also blogs actually) our friends pages. There are some other pages we were going to list but we have a criteria that you update more than once every few months (hint hint Eryn, Gabe and Iwan).FAMILY links are… duh, links to web pages of our family members.
That sums up the home page and the features on that page. It should get you started if you are having problems. If you have any questions let us know. Remember, the best way to learn what works for you is to click around and try new things. Hopefully you will find that you like this new system.
Oh, one more thing…. YOU can make comments on posts.
Like something you see? Don’t like something you see? Did Norm make some comment on a picture that you want a chance to defend?
On the bottom of each post there will be a spot to leave your comment. What you will see and need to do depends on how you are viewing the post. Both are easy. On some posts you will simply see the words LEAVE A REPLY and then a big box with a button underneath that says SUBMIT COMMENT.
If you are viewing a post in a number non single post views, then instead of the box at the bottom you will have to click on the link directly under every post that says LEAVE A COMMENT. Click on this link and you will be taken to that single post view where the LEAVE A REPLY box will appear under the post.
And that should do it for now. Enjoy!!
By: hamson on May 21, 2009
Yesterday we got Roo’s 3D ultrasound which will most likely conclude our viewing of this baby before he decides to come out. We posted the ultrasound photos on Roo’s Baby Page but decided to make a post too just for those of you who forget to check the baby page.
Enjoy.
By: hamson on May 21, 2009
For each of our boys we got the standard ultrasounds done. The 8 week (the gummy bear ultrasound), the 20 week (the diagnostic ultrasound) and we also paid for a 3D ultrasound from an outside company just to see the baby. Tyler got an extra ultrasound at around 12 weeks because Dr. Salzetti had just gotten a new ultrasound machine and was all excited to try it out. All of these photos (plus lots of extra information) can be found on Tyler’s Baby Page too.
By: hamson on May 21, 2009
So in many (most) cases you hear people talking about how the first child has more of everything. New things, pictures, journal entries, etc. This is probably pretty true for us in general, but not when it comes to ultrasound photos. Each pregnancy we seemed to get more photos of the baby pre-birth. You can see Jaxon’s photos below, or on Jaxon’s Baby Page. Enjoy.
Family life is full of major and minor crises -- the ups and downs of health, success and failure in career, marriage, and divorce -- and all kinds of characters. It is tied to places and events and histories. With all of these felt details, life etches itself into memory and personality. It's difficult to imagine anything more nourishing to the soul.