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

Small Steps To The Revamp

Posted on by Jordan

Well, it took me 45 minutes of digging around to get this done… and you probably haven’t even noticed the difference yet, but I actually made some changes to the site!

If you look off to the right, you should see a little site meter bar (unless you are reading this via RSS…. and then well pff)

I used to run site meter on the blog, but I had hacked it into the side bar code. During a WordPress upgrade somewhere along the way, my *ahem* edits got lost. I really wanted to do something closer to respectable this time around.

I undertook to write a side-bar widget, and ended up gutting a hello world tutorial as my foundation: Tutorial: WordPress 2.8 Widget API. My changes only caused the entire blog to display as an error message for about two minutes. I suppose I shouldn’t test on the live blog, but what fun would that be?

It’s kind of sad that my finished product does considerably less than the “hello world” example 🙂

If I can stay motivated maybe I will clean it up a little and set it up such that you could drop in another site meter key, but I haven’t had much luck sticking with hobby programming projects as of late.

Speaking of hobby programming, I found A slick little setup for doing local source control called Mercurial.  I guess I could setup a full blown revision control system, considering I already run a server, but this is a nice local method for tracking changes to source code. It does a whole lot more than that, but that is beyond the scope of this blog.

One final note on website changes, I opened the blog up so Google / Bing / Yahoo / whatever else can see it. It isn’t like the blog was hidden before it just wasn’t indexed, and it seems silly to hide it from search engines. (especially when I want to be able to search the page for things using something more powerful than the built-in search).

-Jordan