Can you remove googlehostedservice.html from Server?


- Published 114 days ago | Edit

Yes you can. Once verified.

We Have Yeast


- Published 154 days ago | Edit

Wild yeasts survived SO 2 treatment. The smell is obvious. It’s been since my last entry that the fermenter has been in the greenhouse. I’m not sealing the doors at night so it gets cold and probably interrupts fermentation but I don’t think it’s a big deal. I will seal it up soon and maintain a consistent temperature once it really starts bubbling. I may need to take some out so it doesn’t overflow. We’ll see.

Some of the yeast cloud spots look grey. Only two actually and they are small patches the size of quarter. Don’t know what that color means but the contrast between those and the whole volume looks very different.

Encouraging Natural Yeasts


- Published 156 days ago | Edit

I’ve moved the fermenter into a sunny location (south side of house). Until now it’s been sitting on the north side in a very shady cold spot. Not only is it in the sun now, it’s also sitting the greenhouse. I’m not going to run a heater in there during the night so we’ll see if we can get things moving into a strong Primary Fermentation period while the temperature goes drastically up and then down.

First Thorough Mix In Cold Soak


- Published 159 days ago | Edit

After Six Days of Little Contact

Until now, only some sulfur scrubbing of the brim (Ants and Fruit Flies beware), and Specific Gravity (1.1) reading.

Last night I gave a very gentle stir to the top cap – mostly just to submerge the berries which had been sitting on the top since the 30th September. I did this just to get them out of the air. I did not and have not punched all the way down until this afternoon.

Just after picking and de-stemming on the day the berries went into the fermenter (30th September), the berries had, all in all, taken a pretty good beating but were not wholly mixed together when all in.

After the minor stir last night the taste was not very nice in that is was just very sweet and not a very complete representation of the whole volume.

After punching down today and getting all the juice and berries evened out, the taste is more complete and truly representative of what we have now overall. It tastes like strawberry jam almost exactly. If I were to make a jelly from the current free run I could likely pass it off as strawberry jam which isn’t a bad idea.

Then a Considerable Change in Taste and Color

So now that it is all mixed we see what we really have and it’s considerably better than what we thought we had last night. There is not much color separation (oil and water like effect) but it is faintly there.

What we have in the fermenter now has not been as gently managed as I originally wanted but it has been the most gently managed Pinot Noir I have seen. Hand de-stemming, extremely gently in-frequent (twice) mixing.

About the Cold Soak

It is the 6th day in cold soak and I think I’ll leave it for a few more and see what happens to the color and the taste. I’m going to begin mixing once or twice a day until I introduce some heat. I might use the green house to induce Primary Fermentation and will expect the yeast to start working then.

About any Yeast

I have not added any yeast and am counting of any wild yeasts that are present to kick off the process. If after several days of coaxing the fermentation, no yeast appears to be working, I’ll toss some factory yeast in to save the day.

First Hydrometer Test


- Published 162 days ago | Edit

Start With 1/4 Ton Pinot Noir Grapes


- Published 164 days ago | Edit

It’s Wednesday afternoon. Picked a mini-truckload of Pinot Noir grapes. Took them home and hand de-stemmed the whole lot into two 35 gallon fermenters.

  • Promptly dusted the top with 10 grams Potassium Metabisulphite N° EC 240-795-3 in each fermenter.
  • Did not mix and won’t for a couple days.

Only one cluster from the whole lot had a minor case of Botrytis Cinerea which was thrown out.

Suppendapo


- Published 167 days ago | Edit

all screwed up. Must be their product order form. :) Google once froze my Checkout account because I had a ‘buy me beer’ button.

Better luck @ Vimeo

Initial Thoughts on smd_bio


- Published 181 days ago | Edit

After some more time of selfishly considering my benefiting from this plugin The things I now pursue or desire are:

  1. Using the mem_self_register plugin to sign a new user up while allowing for for new data defined by smd_bio to be passed through that form.
  2. An additional ability in mem_self_edit to allow users (even with privileges none) to modify their new smd_bio provided data in the front side.

These would give me complete satisfaction in the area of giving users the ability to set their preferences in the front end for their site use. Exciting!

The beauty in the user setting the unlimited number of ‘preferences’ you can allow them (using smd_bio, and other txp-centric tags), is that we can set up forms and plugin tag combos to deliver things to them based on their preferences. Pair that with the multi site magic available in TXP 4.2 and you might be handing whole ‘sites’ to users. ‘Sites’ in the sense that it is their ‘space’ because they can manipulate the content in that space.

Now, I understand this is outside of the normal scope of this plugin thread. If it weren’t for having my user bases being all external (flighty, finicky, grumbly, forgetful, freaky); then I would likely be trying to manage a newspaper (managers make employee profiles) where I could use this plugin without need for more integration/expansion/re-focus.

I am thusly stuck having to depend on users/employees/customers to manage their own stake in it all. Because it is a nightmare herding users through the crumbling labyrinth of profile-management-online, an application of smd, mem, ign, etc, and txp tags can help the user experience designer display controls for dummies. Controls for dummies, in theory, will increase the quality of the content they provide.

Spreedly Paid Subscriptions in Textpattern


- Published 214 days ago | Edit

The Reason

Spreedly (Subscription Management / Bad Ass) http://spreedly.com/

edit: Maybe not bad ass at all. Maybe just more expense for the eager-enough-to-avoid-it’s-expense crowd.

The Resource

API’s PHP implications: http://www.neobudget.com/spreedly/

The TXP Plugin

Does not exist yet.

The Purpose

of a TXP plugin is:

edit: is in the interest of Spreedly – more so, than for a TXP practitioner.

  • To notify TXP of a new subscription created at Spreedly and create a new ‘account’ in ign_users.
  • Introduces question of wether ign_users can have more columns added without breaking it’s plugin. I’ve yet to try adding columns to it but want to for other purposes as well as this one.
  • Email notification of newly created account in TXP to new account holders email address (yes/no)

PHP Assignment Operators Baffled


- Published 215 days ago | Edit

“The basic assignment operator is “=”. Your first inclination might be to think of this as “equal to”. Don’t. It really means that the left operand gets set to the value of the expression on the right (that is, “gets set to”).” – Via

Found this (practical) run down on Assignment Operators of PHP more helpful then this one.