John Lagomarsino
Video · Photography · Music · Motion Graphics

Somewhat surprisingly, my last entry about Evernote and Instapaper/Readability has been getting a consistently large amount of traffic. I guess it makes sense; I use Evernote for just about everything, so why shouldn’t everyone else? So, to that end, I’ve made a little improvement to the site.

Now, you can clip directly from this blog to your Evernote account. Just click the little “clip” icon on the top of any entry, and a popup will appear from which you can clip the entire post to your Evernote account. This window will also show you what other articles you’ve clipped from this site in the past.

I use Evernote to store all my bookmarks, so hopefully this will help someone else who does the same. If you’d like to learn how to implement it on your own site, check out Evernote’s Site Memory section!

It was suggested to me recently that I describe why these square photos show up next to my posts, and why they often have little to do with the content of said posts. Simple, really: I do a Google Image Search for (usually) the title of the post, and choose an image from the first page of results. Naturally, I aim for the most preposterous of the lot.

And sorry, if you read this blog through an RSS feed, you’re not seeing the images. It has to do with how the site works – I don’t need to manually resize my images, but the tradeoff is that they don’t show up in the feeds. Sorry!

I haven’t written here with much substance in a very long time–last summer, almost. And so, in the spirit of writing things, I’m giving something a try.

Plinky, recently acquired by Automattic (the WordPress people), is a site created to alleviate writers’ block. They basically provide an essay prompt every weekday as a way to spark blog entries. I’ll give it a try for a while and see how it works out. So if you see entries marked “powered by Plinky,” that’s what’s going on.

Also forthcoming: an entry explaining the images in these posts. I promise there is some rhyme, and maybe even some reason, behind them.

Well, well, well. If you’re reading this on johnlago.com, you’ve probably noticed the new look around here. I chose to upgrade because the old theme was really just a blog, where this site should really be more about, well, me. This design puts emphasis on the static information, and moves the blog to the periphery, where it should be. What do you think? Does it do the job? Is it as attractive as I think it is?

In other news, I’m now involved in the exciting production of Jon Fuller’s new album. I’m playing producer/engineer, and it’s quite the undertaking. So far we’ve got piano and bass, with a drum session tomorrow. Check out his site for more up-to-date blogging about the project.

Just FYI, this site may be going a little crazy for an hour or so. I’m rolling out an entirely new theme (yay!), and I’ll need to do some tweaking on the live site to make it look right. Sorry for any inconvenience!

Well, maybe not, but this is still pretty cool news.  I just set up a new music section, and it’s actually hosted entirely by Bandcamp.  If you haven’t heard of them, they’re a startup that streams, hosts, and sells (kind-of) music for independent artists.

The way my Bandcamp site is set up, you can download the Ditties, and the other random songs I’ve posted here, under the “album” called “Unfinished Business.”  You can stream and download individual tracks, as well as entire albums there.  And more interestingly for me, if you feel compelled to pay for any of the content there, you can.  That’s right – download all my music for free, or name your own price if you wanna help out.  Also, for you audiophiles, the music is available in a ridiculously varied collection of codecs and bitrates, all the way up to completely lossless.

So go poke around, and let me know if there’s any way you think I can improve the offerings over there (or even if you think I should scrap it altogether).

For those of you who may recently have been met with an obscene (and terribly-designed) spam page, or a static “under contruction” page here, my apologies.  This site was hacked over the weekend, and it took some time to get it back in order.  I can’t yet say for certain it won’t come back to bite me again, but I have taken measures to prevent it from ocurring again.

A big thank you to Bluehost, whose tech support seems to get even better every time I call up.  I’m never on hold very long, and every tech I’ve ever spoken to there has been helpful, knowledgeable, and generally intelligent.  And thank God they keep backups, because I would’ve been in real trouble without them.

In that vein, just a quick PSA.  If you’re running a WordPress-powered site, make sure to a) always keep a backup of both your WordPress directory and database, and b) always upgrade quickly to the newest version of the software.  Apparently, a vulnerability in my outdated WordPress install was probably the root of my woes, and don’t I look stupid now for not having prevented it.  So, please, do better than I did, and keep on top of it.

So apparently I have a blog or something. And I haven’t updated it since the summer. Whoops.

Anyway, that’s about to change, as I’ve updated the layout completely, and I’m going to (re)start posting here often. Let me know how the new look works out – I can change it pretty easily now, and I think it’s much cleaner than it used to be, at least.