typed by Hans

Shujie & I returned home yesterday after an 11 day trip to the People’s Republic of China. I uploaded my 400+ photos and Shujie’s 115 photos.

Here are some touristy photos of Shujie and me in the Palace Museum / Forbidden City:

I learned so much about China, Shujie, her family, and also a little bit more about myself. I learned that China’s incredibly vast and rich 5000 year old history is not only found in great walls, gates, pagodas, tombs, literature or artwork, but also on the table at every meal!

It’s hard to summarize my impressions of the country or the people, but I can say that I felt completely safe the whole time, everyone seems friendly beyond measure, proud of their heritage, proud of the current pace of development, excited about the future, determined to succeed, well spoken, void of criticism, eager to make visitors feel welcome and unselfishly willing to help out whenever they can.

On the down side, traffic in the cities and towns is a mess - your life hangs in the balance every time you cross the street. Also, pollution is staggering, but as far as I can tell this will improve very rapidly over the next couple of years.

I’m finally going to China, for the first time, tomorrow. I have been dreaming about this for years!  I have seen several documentaries on life in China and have traveled a bit around the globe, so I think I have a pretty good idea what it will be like. However, I still have a feeling that this experience will still touch and change me in unexpected ways. The Twin Peaks quote comes to mind: “When you see me again, it won’t be me.”

My fiancée, Shujie, will be my tour guide. She grew up in China in a small town, Fengqiu, in the Henan province. We actually found the town on Google Earth! It’s ferry cool, and a bit freaky. Here’s the GPS coordinates of a circle in the middle of town, which Shujie says she walked past to school every day: 35.04009 N, 114.41635 E.

We’ll visit Beijing for a couple of days and then go to Fengqiu, where I will meet my future mother-in-law.  Shujie will have to interpret for us, as her mother doesn’t speak English and I speak neither Manderin nor their local dialect.  I’m hoping to take down and memorize some polite words though while we are there.

Today I went through the exercise of setting up a new blog. I prefer to install the blog software myself at a domain that I own and this begs the question: Which blog software should I use?

After a couple of web searches and skimming some results, I looked a little closer at b2evolution, Serendipity, Nucleus, TikiWiki (mostly the blogging module) and WordPress.

b2evolution looked promising, but there are little animated emoticons on the blog editor which I found rather distracting and silly. I couldn’t figure out how to hide them, and promptly gave up.

I’ve tried Serendipity before, but never tried to do any customization. The default theme was rather humdrum. Also, on their feature list they reference WordPress integration, which really made me think I should look more closely at WordPress instead.

I turned away from Nucleus because the screenshots link on their websites took me into the Gallery application. I like Gallery, but I really want a blog system that will make it easy for me to post photos inside the blogs and I reason that, if the Nucleus website doesn’t use the Nucleus software to display screenshots, then it’s probably a little too cumbersome to do.

I’ve played with TikiWiki in the past and it looks extremely powerful. However, after installation, it took me several minutes just to figure out how to enable the blog module, so the whole system seemed a little too much like Linux in the 90’s… it’s very powerful, you have full control, but you really need to put some effort into learning how to tame the beast.

So that left me with WordPress. It’s very popular and extremely well supported, but I used it about 2 years ago and remember that inserting images into blogs were really hard. So I played around for a while on the WordPress site and noticed an example of an image in the Wysiwyg editor. Very encouraging!

I’m very impressed with the wide range of plug-ins for WordPress and the plethora of themes! I settled on this very cool Paalam 1.1 theme by Sadish Bala (”made free by Web Hosting Bluebook“). Uploading my own banner image is dead simple, and WordPress even has a built in image editor to help crop the image. The default Wysiwyg editor I’m using right now (I believe it’s called TinyMCE) is also really cool. I’ve gotten so used to editing Google docs documents - editing WikiText is really awkward by comparison.

The blog research and implementation took me several hours… but I’m happy with the result. Now, lets see how easy it is to add an image to this blog…

Wow! That was fantastic! There’s a file upload form right below the editor. After uploading, a button lets you insert a link to the uploaded image into the document. It couldn’t be simpler (well, without drag & drop at least). I’d like to figure out how to make the text flow around the image (without having to edit the HTML and stilysheet), but this is a great start! BTW, it appears that switching between “Code” and “Visual” input is also really seamless in the Wysiwyg editor.