Change In Programming

Posted on by Jordan

Well, not a drastic change, but still.

My goal for the year was to keep posting to this blog, and to avoid every post being a recap of the somewhat predictable saga of raising a toddler might be.

It occurred to me as I wrote the above line that one of my favorite blogs The Bleat, happens to be largely recaps of the mundane, but I won’t kid myself about his writing talents and my own. I don’t think I will venture down that path.

No, what I had in mind was giving fair warning that I may be doing some more reflective posts rather than just recording the day to day events in our lives. This is in part due to my fear that it would be really boring, and because I don’t feel comfortable talking in any detail about my job or Heather’s here, so that basically leaves the adventure found in mopping applesauce off Hannah. Some days there is adventure there…. but I don’t know if I can really do it justice.

So, reflective posts it is! I will aspire to avoid controversy and or politics, because frankly there are plenty of other places to revel in exploration of ether (or both) and I doubt I can provide anything new to the conversation there.

-Jordan

New Location, Same View

Posted on by Jordan

I suppose people are tired of hearing about my website adventures, so I will just summarize:

  • Heatherandjordan.com is now hosted by site5.com, and the move went really well
  • They have Django installed by default, with MySQL drivers already configured, but it’s Django 1.3, and I developed against 1.4 so I need to do a little tuning.

 

Beyond that, I thought I would share one of the unexpected amusements I sometimes have sent my way:

I am not the only Jordan in the world, nor am I the only Jordan Nelson in the world. This means that having used my name as my e-mail address sometimes means slight typos result in my getting mail intended for another Jordan.

So, what adventures are being had by another Jordan today you may ask.

Apparently my doppelgänger is enrolled in some sort of online class that required students to submit a “Competency Goal Statement” also many students have been using Google to write their statements. This greatly vexes the teacher who has now made threats of administrative action against those who would plagiarize such an important assignment. On the one hand, I have a hard time faulting students for not knowing what one of those statements might look like, on the other hand I would rather my remote namesake didn’t resort to cheating.

I would feel more sympathy for the instructor if she had time to respond to my nice note asking that she stop sending me class material.

-Jordan

Running Django On Godaddy

Posted on by Jordan

Don’t, just don’t

/sigh

So I really really didn’t want to give up on this, but frankly after killing most of my weekend trying to hammer out the MySQL versioning issues and getting more or less nowhere I think I am going to just give up.

One option would be to just use another database for my backend, but considering the systems I normally work on are backed by DB2 and Oracle databases… I can’t bring myself to shift to an option even less substantial than MySQL

The other obvious option is to just migrate this site to another hosting company. A proposition that is looking more attractive by the day, but still gives me headaches thinking about the potential disasters along the way. Just tweaking some settings last weekend wiped out a post here, and I can imagine loosing all images, comments or some other substantial chunk of the site.

Readers of this blog will be among the first to know if and when I decide to make some sort of leap I suppose 🙂

-Jordan

Website Status

Posted on by Jordan

So, I actually wrote a post for Memorial Day weekend, and it went up.

Then I also requested a change to my hosting configuration that is step one of getting the site I built hosted somewhere behind HeatherAndJordan.com.

The change required the site to be migrated to different servers, and apparently my newest post never made it out of limbo… so… I guess I will see about reconstructing it soon 🙂

 

-Jordan

Feature Complete

Posted on by Jordan

I am sure everyone was eagerly waiting for news about the website project, and I guess I have some.

The site is fully functional. I actually had all the major pieces working at the end of last week, and spent my project time over the past week applying the style elements to make it look like an actual website instead of just a test project.

Just for reference, this was the log in screen a week ago:

It does everything a log in screen needs to do, but it certainly doesn’t look fancy. The log in screen wasn’t complex but it’s an easy example. Here is what it looks like today:

There is a lot more I could do, just in the area of the appearance, but I am working with a deadline of roughly “have it working by June” so I am trying not to get too lost in the weeds polishing up the parts that don’t have to be there in release 1.

Speaking of things that still need to get done, here is the project board as of a few hours ago:

 

As you can see there is a lot left in the “To Do” column, and I can promise some of it isn’t ever going to get done, but having it all listed out at least lets me apply some form of priority when I look for the next thing to knock out.

I should say a little about Trello. It’s meant to be an approximation of the sticky notes on a dry erase board that are so popular when planning projects (software or otherwise). Most of the coolness of the system doesn’t come into play when I am the only person using the board, but I still have found it to be somewhat helpful.

We use a product on my current project at work that provides far more features, none of which do we actually use. And the features come at a cost both in money and in a clunky interface. I keep have been pushing to use this instead, but there is a lot of attachment to the idea that we will someday use all the extra features (and I suppose the fact that we are already paying for the current solution). Anyway if you are looking for a way to organize a few people and a few dozen tasks, Trello might be something to play with.

going back to the website, my next task is to get my actual hosting setup such that I can deploy  a Django app there. Also I just realized I don’t have any tasks on the board for that… but I know what they are 😉

With any luck you will all be able to read this post, meaning I haven’t managed to break wordpress or any other major component of the existing website!

-Jordan

More Website News

Posted on by Jordan

So… I discovered Monday that my nifty little HTML5 solution to doing a slideshow on the front page had one minor problem.

It doesn’t work on Internet Explorer 7 and older. Then I started watching the logs and quite a few page views were coming in showing MS:IE7 making me feel kind of guilty for having gone live with that.

For good or for bad, I don’t have a great way to test older browsers when I am not at work… so the fix I just deployed may not work as well as I think it should…. Assuming it works though there is at least a static image while I try to pound out an AJAX solution with more legacy support.

-Jordan

The Front Page Is Live!

Posted on by Jordan

As previously mentioned, we have a new front page!

Note: I the following while waiting on sign-off on the image set being used. What I didn’t know at the time was that the slide show has a nasty image load delay related hiccup, and that my “just drop in files” slide show plan only works if the image is exactly 800 / 600 px. Other than that though, WHOOHOO IT’S LIVE 🙂

Initially I was planning to build the look from scratch, but I quickly realized that things like picking colors are not my strong suit. Also I wanted to get onto poking at some sort of scripting so I fell back to the go-to “hack up a free template” option I have used in the past. I am pretty happy with the resulting look.

As for the scripting, you may be thinking “it’s just a slide show, I have seen those before.”  Yes, I am sure you have, but I built this one from scratch! It only has one transition, and I think I may be causing the javascript engine to work a little harder than other implementations do. On the other hand, I can just dump images into a folder on the server and they will instantly be included in the slideshow.

My initial plan for the slide show was going to be some sort of AJAX + JQuery thing, but directly drawing to the canvas sounded more interesting. The downside I suppose is that this probably doesn’t work at all on IE6.

The end result though, is that we have a new front page, it isn’t as ugly as the one I did last year, and because it features pictures Heather is about 500% happier with it than the old one.

 

-Jordan

Development Note

Posted on by Jordan

Putting the finishing touches on the front page overhaul, and felt like I needed to make this explicit:

When you are looking for javascript documentation, Google is often going to point you to w3Schools or any number of other almost useful sites. I think those sites must put more energy into being ranked in Google than having useful information.

The place you should go, and I mean the only place, is the Mozilla Developer Network. I wish I had figured that out months ago, but at least I finally have a good reference for the javascript api (and they call out things like best-practices too!).

Anyway, I think things will be ready to push live later today, so that’s pretty exciting! **crosses fingers**

-Jordan

Weekend Thoughts

Posted on by Jordan

Not a whole lot to say this week.

It feels like winter is finally here. Heather has worked hard to fight off any sign of cabin fever by inviting people over at every opportunity.

She entertained a group of women from her office, and then the next night we had a group over from church.

I had hoped to be able to post the updated build of the heatherandjordan.com front page, but I discovered again that CSS hacking is not my calling. I say hacking because my attempts at starting from scratch quickly reminded me that I don’t really have an eye for that kind of design. After having drop[ed back through plan ‘B’ and on to ‘C’ I have managed to hack up a template into something I like. There are just a few more touches I would like to incorporate before it goes live.

In somewhat related news I have had the chance to be part of a team conducting technical interviews at work. I wouldn’t say I am great at it, but it’s nice to feel like I can provide some guidance as to who might be joining my team. At the very least this gets me thinking about my own skill-set. It would appear that I have a very solid technical understanding of my little corner of the IT world. On the other hand, I am painfully aware that I haven’t really done anything interesting for a while.

In theory I can and should be doing a little bit of hobby programming just to keep learning new things, but it takes time and energy that I don’t always want to devote to the task. I think I start to understand why people work on open-source projects though, it lets you poke at problems wildly different than the ones at work.

This kind of loops back around to the web site overhaul, as the hold up is trying to something interesting with an image loading script project, but I spent way too much time in the CSS weeds over the weekend. Hopefully with that done I can dive back into java script and PHP to pound out the rest of this arguably simple feature.

If you have any great ideas for a little programming project that wouldn’t require a thousand hours of developer I might be interested… most of my project ideas suffer death from scope-creep before I have the first line of code saved. 🙂

-Jordan