Speaking of LED lights – they clearly are ‘the future’ of holiday lighting, but they’ve always been too dim and the colors just a bit off. But that is changing. While many LED strings were still too dim for my tastes, I did find a set that was fantastic. The Sylvania (made by Inliten actually) C4 LED light strings that Wal-Mart and some Home Depots had are great. I have 8 of these 60 light strings around the property. They are some of the most brilliant LED Christmas lights I have seen. One reason they may be so bright is they have three power supplies along the string in small green plastic boxes while most LED strings only have one power supply in the plug. This lets them drive more powerful LEDs and reduce voltage drops in the long wires.

Sylvania’s white strings are also very bright, but are still ‘cool white’ not ’soft white’, which I expect to change in a year or two. But the color strings are fantastic, with five colors (Blue, Red, Green, Yellow, and Orange). But they aren’t cheap ($10 for 60 at Wal-Mart). Costco had a soft white LED string, though they weren’t very bright, but they looked more like normal incandescent lights than most white LED lights.

I expect my display will still be mostly incandescent lights, simply due to cost. It’ll be a few more years before LED strings are anywhere near as cheap as current incandescent strings. Plus, while they are looking better and better each year, they’ll never have the warmth of incandescent lights – which I think will always have a place in holiday displays.

So thanks for stopping by! Sorry I wasn’t able to pull things together this year. But I’m definitely going to do this, just for the fun of building and coding everything.

I have a lot of experience with the WordPress blog software, so I decided to use that right away. Not only will it provide me with an easy to update website, but it also has a number of extension that will come in handy for the display. The fact that WordPress is becoming more of a CMS and less of a blog platform every day means I may be able to leverage things like user sessions and account for the custom software developed for the show. Only time will tell. The idea here is to leverage the site platform software as much as possible.

For now, the site is mainly for posting updates, pictures, and other information. Here’s how it is configured so far:

The site currently runs on a Dual Opteron server in a virtual linux partition with Apache, PHP, and MySQL.

As of this writing we are running WordPress 2.0.x with the following plugins:

• Adsense Deluxe – Plugin for easily integrating Google Adsense ads into the site. Gotta pay that bandwidth bill somehow!
• Bad Behavior – This is a must have plugin that stops spammers from accessing the site and wasting bandwidth and server resources. With spammers relying more and more on ‘botnets’ (groups of hacked machines) to spew spam faster and faster, it can really affect a server’s performance.
• FAQ – I expect to need a FAQ and while I could maintain a static page with the questions, a plugin makes it easier since it’ll handle all the formatting. The problem with this specific plugin is the author forbids any modifications even if you don’t redistribute the code which is silly. I may end up writing my own if it doesn’t fit my needs.
• Feedburner Feed Replacement – I’ve really come to like using FeedBurner for my RSS feeds, so this little plugin ensures anyone hitting the default WordPress RSS link goes directly to our FeedBurner Feed.
• Google Sitemaps – Great plugin to give Google additional information about your content and where to find it while your site is indexed as well as when new content is added.
• Google Sitemaps Tag Plugin – This plugin will add the tag URLs made possible by Ultimate Tag Warrior. This provides search engines more information about your site and posts.
  
• King Text Widget – A powerful sidebar widget allowing for custom JavaScript and HTML blocks.
• MarketingPop.us SEO – A plugin for Search Engine Optimization.
• Permalink Redirect – A plugin for Search Engine Optimization.
• Related Posts – An excellent plug that will list other posts related to the current one. Great way to find similar content as the number of posts increases.
• Secure Contact Form – Allows for an email contact form while stopping spammers cold.
• Sidebar Widgets – Allows for drag and drop setup of the sidebar. Excellent feature of WordPress.
• Smart Update Pinger – Ensures that we only ping sites like Technorati when new content is posted, not when content is edited (I tweak posts for spelling and formatting a lot)
• Sociable – A plugin that generates easy to use buttons for adding any content on this site to various social bookmarking and content sites like Digg, etc.
• Spam Karma 2 – By far THE most important plugin. This stops comment spammers COLD. You can’t run a WordPress blog without it. It also uses the excellent Akismet spam fighting network as part of the spam tests.
• Time Zone – WordPress doesn’t handle daylight savings well. This plugin fixes that.
• Ultimate Tag Warrior – This is the best tag plugin out there for attaching tags to content. It integrates with a few other plugins like Extended Archives, Google Sitemaps, etc. Allows users to find all posts tagged with a certain tag.
• WordPress Reports – Handy tool that grabs Google Analytics and Feedburner statistics and includes them in a WordPress administration tab.
• WP-Cache – All these plugins add code to the execution of WordPress which can cause significant load on a server during high traffic. WP-Cache will cache most WordPress content unless it changes, allowing for very fast response times and low server loads.
• WP Post Ratings – This plugin allows users to rate posts. It’s fun and also will allow for some theme changes I might implement (most popular content, etc)
• WPG2 – Plugin to integrate Gallery 2 with WordPress. Since I expect to have a LOT of pictures and videos on this site, I’m using Gallery 2 to organize them. This plugin makes it trivial to include Gallery pictures in posts and also shoehorns Gallery into WordPress maintaining the site’s look and feel.
• Xinha4WP – This is a plugin I wrote that allows you to use a very powerful WYSIWYG editor for creating posts.

As you can see, a LOT of addons make this site what it is. Of course no matter how well a site functions, it has to look good. I spent some time searching for a nice holiday theme and really like this one currently in use. The Vermilion Christmas theme from Amazing-Christmas-Ideas.com is a very nice theme that is also easy to modify and handled the addition of so many plugins with ease. I expect we’ll stick with this theme for a while. However, we likely will make some test runs of the equipment for other holidays like Halloween and maybe July 4th. We might switch to a more appropriate theme for those times. Any suggestions?

Over time the site will likely expand. I’m not 100% sure yet, but as we add custom code to the site, it may be easiest to do it as a WordPress plugin so we can use WordPress for user accounts, etc. It sure will help keep things integrated. More on that later.

Any thoughts on plugins that would be helpful? How does the site look so far? Suggestions for layout changes?

Why exactly would I want to create an interactive holiday display for my house? Plenty of folks have done it, with a couple actually forming new companies around the hardware and software they developed for their holiday light displays. Thanks to these companies (Light-O-Rama and Animated Lighting are two) and cheap webcams, you can setup an absolutely amazing display for about $1500 and broadcast the shows on the web for all to see. One house in particular was so popular due to a viral video of their show that the police had to ask them to turn it off after traffic got so bad by their house. That video was seen by millions of people. Snopes has a good write up and the owners website is WonderlandChristmas.

The trick is, most of those show displays are just that – shows. You can see them live or on YouTube. They are amazing, synchronized to music, and really make for a fun time during the holidays. But they’re still, er, static.

But what I’m interested in is an interactive holiday display where people can control the display over the Internet and watch what happens live.

"Dude! That’s been done too!"

Well, yes, it has. One of the first was Alek Komar who rigged up his light display to X-10 modules. Visitors to his holiday website could turn the lights on and off with the click of a mouse while watching it live via a webcam. Or so they thought . Turns out, in 2004, the site was a hoax. The display was real, but Alek had taken a series of webcam shots with various combinations of the lights on and off and rigged them so when a user turned on or off the lights, they saw the ‘webcam image’ change as if they really HAD turned them on and off. But it wasn’t live. In 2005, he rigged up an actual webcam and now the site IS live, but it was a free for all. The lights blinked like crazy.

There have been a few others who have done this as well. A guy in Winston-Salem, NC took things further and used relays hooked to an embedded controller to control his display, all watched via a webcam. He hit the media big time and millions of people have visited his site, ControlTheShow.com. A unique aspect of his site is he queues people up so only one person is controlling the house, allowing people to experiment without others flipping the switches.

This appealed to me since I have a background in embedded control design. Home automation has always been a favorite hobby of mine, though I haven’t had much time to devote to it lately. For a few years I ran a home automation equipment company designing various boards to help control your home. I also love Christmas and lights. I’ve toyed with creating an animated display for a few years but other things have kept me from doing it. But I always figured I’d do it one year and hopefully this is the year.

What I want to do is chronicle what goes into making the display. Most sites have a page with a few pictures highlighting what controls their display. Using the popular WordPress blog software, I hope to post articles as I work on the display’s design so there’s a whole bunch of information at the end of the year highlighting how the show works and possibly enough info so you can ‘roll your own’ of you choose. No matter what it’ll be fun!

Now, like I mentioned above, I could buy off the shelf hardware, write a little software, and be done with it. But what fun would that be? I want to ‘roll my own’ as they say. Within reason. In my next post I’ll talk about my ideas for the display, what existing hardware I may use, and what control architecture I hope to use. Posting to this site will be irregular – as I have time to work on stuff, I’ll post. So check back often, or subscribe to the RSS feed.

The site is still fairly new as I write this, so expect a number of the pages to be ‘empty’. I hope to start adding additional information soon. If it stays as cold as it was this week, I’ll have LOTS of time indoors to spend on it!