Dave Knight and I got Clarycam 2 back up and running today. The mounting is solid but the picture’s tilted a little bit and can’t easily be adjusted. It should last the winter however. Next spring I’ll redo the mounting and reset it.
Sometime around 5:45PM yesterday evening Camera 2 fell off the tree. It appears to be OK. I’ll get over there and remount it as soon as I can.
The Clary Lake Association has had a presence on Facebook for some time but Instagram was not really on our radar until just recently. We’re finally up and running on Instagram with the id @clarylakeassociation. One thing that makes this actually feasible is automatic cross-posting to those two social platforms and it appears that we have that cross-posting functioning now. I hope. Having to cross-post everything manually literally takes all the fun out of it.
Instagram is essentially a photo-sharing platform so we’ll be making more use of “Featured Images” because posting to Instagram requires them. You’ll notice an Instagram widget on the sidebar on most pages which shows recent Instagram posts. We’re still experimenting with how to make use of this new dimension to the Clary Lake Association on the web.
The above picture was taken by Danny Bell.
Usually the header image/banner on the website rotates randomly. Once in a while I highlight a specific banner image for a while. Today’s banner highlight is a truly ethereal sunset taken by Mark Rowe, taken looking southwest from Mark’s home on the North Clary Road.
Welcome to the Clary Lake Association website as we enter the doldrums of winter! If this is your first time visiting our website, an extra hearty welcome, and we do hope you’ll come back. If you are a returning visitor, know that your continued interest in our website and in the Clary Lake Association is greatly appreciated. The Clary Lake Association plays a vital role in protecting and preserving Clary Lake, and we very much need interested and engaged people to keep the Association functioning and relevant. We’re an all-volunteer organization and we depend on people like you who love Clary Lake to get involved and help out. Continue reading
During the petition I posted numerous articles to this website with links to files located on my Google Drive. Then in 2021 Google rolled out a security update for Google Drive that restricted access to drive files using links that used to work fine. When you click on one of these links, instead of getting the file you get a “You need access” screen like the one above. Sorry about that. I finally got around to fixing many of the broken links but there are undoubtedly still a few kicking around, waiting to disappoint someone. If you encounter one while perusing our news feed or pages, please, make use of the blue “Request access” button and I’ll fix it for you.
For a few years now we’ve been using a plugin on this website to provide a variety of features and functions. One of those functions has been collecting addresses of people who want to be notified of new posts. These have been collected by WordPress.com (not to be confused with WordPress.org) and not by the Clary Lake Association. Sadly, this plugin has become bloated and annoying, and some of the features we’ve been most interested in are going to become value-added in the near future meaning we’ll need to pay for them if we want to keep them. I’m disinclined to pay for something when reasonable (and free!) alternatives exist. Therefore, we’re getting ready to ditch this plugin and make other arrangements to implement the parts we like.
Right off we’re going to implement Post Notifications with list software we already have. This means it will be really easy to manage all your subscriptions to our lists. Any email you receive from us will have “Unsubscribe” and “Manage Your Subscription” links at the bottom. If you click on “Manage Your Subscriptions” you’ll be able to subscribe or unsubscribe to all of our available lists.
If you’ve previously subscribed to post notifications using WordPress.com (the old system), you’ll now be receiving them using our new system. If you subscribed to notifications on comments on specific posts, I’m afraid you’re out of luck. If I can implement that feature in the future, I will do so.
You’ll find a blue form on the sidebar you can use to signup for post notifications, or you can use this one:
When I get a chance I’ll put up a page where you can review and signup for all our lists.
Happy New Year!
I’ve been running a website for the Clary Lake Association since I was elected President of the organization back in 2007. The first website ran on and old 486 computer in my office with the host name clary.gwi.net. Since then I’ve changed servers several times, each time moving to newer and faster equipment. For the past few years the site has been running on a rented VPS (Virtual Private Server) and honestly, the work involved in administering a unix server has become a drag. I’m now looking to simplify my life in a big way. To that end, we’re getting ready to make one final move, to a Commercial Hosting Provider. System administration will become a SEP (Somebody Else’s Problem, my favorite kind of problem!) and I’ll be able to devote my time to the site and other fun stuff rather than spending time keeping the underlying system running smoothly. This move is slated to take place somewhere around the last week of November. Continue reading
After three days of more or less non-stop work on the website (and a couple of sleepless nights!) I’m fairly happy with where it stands. On Monday I announced I was going to install a new responsive website theme, on Tuesday I did that, on Wednesday I completely redesigned the menus (after first accidentally deleting the old ones!) and today, four days later, after making some final tweaks to the menus, I’m proclaiming the site redesign done. More or less. Sorta. One thing I’ve learned over the past fourteen years running a website for the Clary Lake Association is that they’re never done, they’re always a work in progress. Continue reading
I had a minor malfunction here in website land this morning. A simple and truly functional menu layout is the secret to a good website and I haven’t been particularly happy with the old menus since switching to a new responsive website theme. In the process of “fixing” them I managed to break them instead. Badly. I should have had that second cup of coffee before sitting down to work! Fortunately I make regular backups and I’ve restored the system. Work continues, and I appreciate your patience.
I’ve updated the Clary Lake Association website with a new fully responsive mobile-ready and mobile-friendly theme. You might recall that I threatened to do this just yesterday! In fact I had no idea that I’d be cutting over to a new site so soon but I found a more or less suitable theme that required only minor changes and those took less time than I had anticipated. Continue reading
I’ve grown quite fond of the look and feel of the twenty-ten “theme” in use on this website. It’s clean, simple and fast, but it’s NOT what they call in the website industry “responsive” i.e., it presents the same pages rendered for a desktop computer to all visitors whether they’re viewing the site with a desktop computer, a tablet, or a phone. This can make accessing and using this site hard for people using devices with small screens because they’ve got to continually zoom-in and zoom-out to get pages and menus sized appropriately. Those of you who have been accessing this site on your smart phones know exactly what I’m talking about. Modern themes can dynamically adjust the site’s pages to fit whichever device a visitor is using. It’s long past time when we should have moved on to a responsive website theme.
To that end I’ve begun looking for a suitable replacement. My primary goal is to implement a responsive theme while keeping our current functionality and basic layout, and without breaking the site too badly. Stay tuned and if you show up and the site looks a mess, know that I’m working on it!
Wait. What?
I suppose this sounds like an April Fools post. I wish it was! To be honest, I had considered a gag post for April 1st but couldn’t round up the gumption to do it. So here I was, minding my own business when I noticed that for the past hour or so, Clary_cam1 had not been uploading pictures. Rebooting didn’t help and I couldn’t connect to it with my phone. So I went to look it over and found that a critter, most likely a squirrel, chipmunk, or maybe even a mouse (given the size of the tooth marks), had chewed the end of the wireless antenna off (picture at left) allowing rain to get inside and shorting it out. Harrumph. Well it turns out the manufacturer used essentially the same antenna on this camera as on the old cameras, so I was able to swap out the antenna with a working one. Problem solved. You’re welcome! Continue reading
It has been a long time coming, but our website now supports SSL (secure socket layer) browser connections. This means that your website traffic between our server and your browser is encrypted on-the-fly. In a world that is becoming increasingly more security (and privacy) conscious, it was really only a matter of time before we were forced to take this step. You can tell your connection to our website is secure from the lock (
) to the left of the URL in the address bar. Also the URL starts with “https” and not “http.” We’ve been planning on installing an SSL certificate for some time but lacked a real incentive to do so, the primary reason being cost. I’m happy to report now that the cost of purchasing an SSL certificate has dropped considerably in recent months such that it was really no longer Continue reading
Clary Cam2 (Spy Cams as Dave Knight likes to refer to them) may be losing color attenuation, but it’s still capable of recording some beautiful pictures.
There was one regrettable casualty of the otherwise successful site migration: the list of 50+ or so people who had signed up to receive email notices of new website posts was lost. This list was maintained by WordPress so I have no idea who was subscribed or what email addresses were used. If you were on that list and want to get back on that list, you’ll have to resubscribe. Look for the “Subscribe to Blog via Email” form on the sidebar. Just enter your email address, respond to the “Confirm your subscription for Clary Lake Association” email you’ll receive, and you’ll be back on the list. If you’re viewing the site’s mobile theme on a phone or tablet, first look for the “View Full Site” link at the bottom of the main page and then you’ll be able to subscribe. Sorry for the inconvenience.
Yesterday morning I posted about plans to migrate the Clary Lake Association website to a new platform. Ironically, in the process of completing the move, that posted got wiped out. I’m happy to report that we completed the migration around midnight last night without any major problems, though as predicted, the Clarycams broke spectacularly. We got those working this morning.
We’ve made no significant changes to the content on the site, but everyone should notice a significant decrease in page load times. Page load speeds have been reduced partly thanks to faster hardware but also to site optimization. We’ll be making some additional optimizations over the next week or so which should help improve site performance. If anyone has any issues with the site, you know how to reach me.
ClaryCam2 is back in service! David Hodsdon has replaced the dead camera with a new one of the same make and model and we got it hooked up and connecting this afternoon. From the looks of it I’d say he hasn’t been keeping his shoreline mowed. You can just make out the State Boat launch on the right side of the photo. I think David is going to straighten the image just a bit if he hasn’t already.
You can see all 3 cameras on the Clary Lake Webcams page. Here’s the updated Remote Access information:
Realtime remote access is currently working for all 3 cameras. The username and password is the same: Username: guest Password: 123abc
Clarycam 1
For access with a browser: http://clarycam1.ddns.net:88/
For access with VLC: rtsp://guest:123abc@clarycam1.ddns.net:554/videoMain
Clarycam 2:
For access with a browswer: http://la9446.myfoscam.org:88/
For access with VLC: rtsp://guest:123abc@la9446.myfoscam.org:554/videoMain
Clarycam 3:
For access with a browser: http://clarycam3.ddns.net:89/
For access with VLC: rtsp://guest:123abc@clarycam3.ddns.net:555/videoMain
Because I can’t leave well enough alone and I needed something to post about. I’m testing some new software to automatically submit new website posts to Facebook. The current system I’ve been using usually (but not always) posts to Facebook OK but it doesn’t post to Google+ at all. It also uses a backend plugin that is a real pig and I’m trying to get rid of it. Slowly I’m phasing out its various functions. This publicize to Facebook feature is one of the functions I want to replace. Our Clary Lake Association Facebook page drives quite a bit of traffic to this website. I’ll worry about Google+ some other time.
Everyone have a safe New Year’s Eve and a Happy New Year!
Some of you may have noticed the “I’m not a robot” check box like you see below when you go to login to the site, leave a comment, or use one of our contact forms. The purpose of this is to prevent scripts (bots, or robots) from posting moronic comments or sending bogus contact emails, which are both annoying, and waste my time.
The authentication scheme is called reCaptcha and was developed by Google. You’re probably already familiar with it, in fact I’ve implemented it before on the site but it’s always been a little flakey. This is a new and improved version of reCaptcha that is supposedly easier to deal with. Using it is pretty straightforward. Just check the box that says you’re not a robot. Most of the time that’s all you have to do. If the backend authentication system believes you, you’re done. If it doesn’t believe you, it will pop up some pictures and ask you to click on the pictures that contain a storefront, or pictures that contain road signs or something like that. If you want to try a different challenge, click the reload button. I guess you can also use an audio challenge but to be honest I’ve never tried that. Try it out:
If you try to login, or submit a form or a comment without getting authenticated you’ll experience an error rather than a satisfying submission experience. A couple of people have left comments recently so I guess it’s working!
On another note, I’ve disabled caching on the site due to problems some people were having getting fresh content off the site. Other elements of site optimization are still in place and working.
<span style="color: #000000;">Use this feedback form to send a comment to the Clary Lake Association, or ask a question. It will be sent to the Association Webmaster who will distribute it as appropriate. You’re welcome to give us your name and email address but they are not required.</span>