New Website Design

New website design = new pictures coming soon. We've recently upgraded our storage and backup solution. I've also made a purchase of a new toy, but am still making the transition from our Windows environment.

Now we can use both Picasa and iPhoto to play with photos and upload to both this site and Facebook.

It's all very exciting stuff. We have a ton of Bella pics and even though the actual picture-taking of our house addition has slowed, there are still a few updates to post.  Stay tuned!

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We're Still Here

We've been pretty busy. Don't worry, everybody is healthy and happy. Between getting out for the summer and continuing our house addition, there's a lot to do and keeping up on the web site seems to fall to the bottom of the list. The cold weather is coming which should increase the chances for more updates. In the meantime, I'll go back and do some retroactive posts just to highlight some of the things that we accomplished this summer.

From Bella - Year 3

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New Website Home

Well, we moved our website. We have made the leap from pretty intricate, but full featured, open-source apps (Wordpress and Gallery) to much more basic blogging and picture storage solutions (Blogger and Picasa Web Albums). Unfortunately, we couldn't import our old posts and have to re-upload the pictures in the gallery, but it was a good decision. Three reasons prompted the change: cost, maintenance, and ease of use.

With the house addition looming, adding up all of the projected costs is pretty sobering. It has definitely made me want to eat more peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for lunch instead of going out. It has also caused the family to try and trim some unnecessary expenses. Sure, hosting didn't cost that much, but you can't beat "free".

Maintenance is soooo much easier. With the Wordpress/Gallery design it seemed like I would just get the site the way that I would like it and a new source update would come out. Usually the updates were for security exploits that needed patched, but once I upgraded I had to go back and re-customize the entire thing again. It was tough remembering all of the hacks. Not to mention setting up my own databases and manipulating code, etc. Now I let Google do all of the work for me and just have to have faith that they will keep our site secure.

It is just too simple now to upload pictures or post to the blog. Picasa is a great free program to manage your pictures and with a click of the button I can upload to our site. No more special programs for uploading and then running another program for manipulating the image and then worrying about the size, etc. Then posting was interesting when you wanted to insert a photo. Who knows where or how the image would show up. Text wrap maybe, maybe not. Link to correct photo in gallery, maybe, maybe not, etc. It's so easy now that there is no excuse for Inga not to post and keep the pictures updated ;-)

So now all of the major changes are done. I will be re-uploading most of the images that we had on our old site and hopefully, since it's easier, posting more. So stay tuned.

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About This Site

This site is designed to update Poletto friends and family on events big and small. Our rather ordinary life is pretty hectic sometimes and it's not always easy to keep up with correspondence - even with today's era of instant communication. With pictures and videos (when we get more storage and bigger bandwidth, they will be bigger) you can't capture exactly what it's like to be there, but you can get the idea. For every event we always insist the more the merrier and this is a pretty good way to include everybody.

This is also serving as an online repository that allows our memories to be accessed from anywhere and at any point in the future. So we don't just use it to show curious relatives or friends our pictures, we use it for ourselves whenever we need a life reference or need help to remember an event or person that affected us. We encourage anyone that has a chance to do this, to give it a shot. With picture phones, online picture studios, camera docks, bluetooth and wireless technologies, etc. it's becoming easier to document your life.And our lives leave us nothing to really complain about. We have fantastic friends and family, good jobs and live in a great town. Sometimes it's just tough to keep all that from being overshadowed by the small things that pop up ...

So we use this collection of videos and images to help remind ourselves. If this site had an official mantra, it would probably be paraphrased from the following, which appears in an old birthday card from grandpa:

He achieves success
who lives well,
laughs often, and loves much...
who leaves the world better
than he finds it...
who always looks for
the best in others
and gives them the best he has.

Thanks for checking out our site and if you have pics, videos or links that you want to share, send them to us and we'll put em up. Also please feel free to leave comments, on both posts and pictures, as you explore our site.

La Vita E Bella

The Polettos

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