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

Web Work

Posted on by Jordan

Wow, you blink and another week goes by.

So, what happened this week?

Heather’s parents came to visit. The occasion was the Huskers playing against Iowa State University. We only managed to obtain two tickets, as it turns out Husker fans suck up all the tickets far quicker than our planning could account for. That may have been ok though, as much as it pains me to say it, Heather is not a football fan. She would not have her moneys worth out of a ticket.

The game was… intense to put it gently, but in the end, the Huskers won it, if only by the smallest of margins.

Sunday afternoon Heather had the opportunity to take family pictures for a coworker. She was on cloud nine for hours, both during the actual picture taking, and the culling and cleanup stages on the pictures.

I would love to show off some of her work, but I don’t know that it is really proper to be throwing up pictures of other peoples kids here.

In less dramatic news, I played around with PHP and javascript to produce these. They are really rough, but I have grand plans for doing a super stripped down version of a gallery, after the program “Gallery” messed up my picture links. We shall see how long that motivation holds out 🙂

Up next week:

Nebraska Deer Season, and  The “Cake Boss” visits Des Moines. I will let you guess as to who is attending what event.

-Jordan

Gallery

Posted on by Jordan

Ok, so hopefully nobody even ran into a problem with this, but I let my hosting run an upgrade script on gallery last night.

Gallery is the program I use to manage the pictures linked from the blog etc.

It looks like all the linked pictures are now broken /sigh

I fixed the newest linked picture, and well… we shall see if I get the others fixed in a timely manner 🙂

-Jordan

RSS Hax!

Posted on by Jordan

Well… to be honest, not really hacks, I installed a plugin that (in theory) will seamlessly migrate the RSS feed to the blog through a feedburner feed.

If you don’t know what that is don’t worry about it. I just like to play with addons for the site once in a while, although this one shouldn’t really be visible.

While I am thinking of technical things, have I mentioned Lastpass?

It is a password management tool, that is frankly amazing. I was getting really uncomfortable with the number of passwords I was trying to remember, and getting more and more lazy about using the same password for “unimportant” logins. I knew that was a bad situation but I didn’t really trust a plugin to deal with that kind of thing.

Then the Security Now podcast that I try and keep up with, did an episode on Lastpass. I was really excited. I installed it, really with the idea that I could offer to to Heather as a way to help her beef up her password system. (side note, Heather HATES the Security Now podcast. Her life usually gets more complicated after I learn something new and terrifying on the podcast) So far I love Lastpass, but I don’t know if it is really something Heather is going to put up with. The fiddle-factor seems just a tiny bit too high. Also from what I can tell it would be a little hard to share a computer with the plugin running, unless I suppose you both knew the master password… I am not saying I wouldn’t tell Heather what mine is, I just don’t think she would be crazy about a 15 character password. 🙂

-Jordan

oh! I almost forgot, if you happen to be interested, the plugin I used is here:  http://flagrantdisregard.com/feedburner/

And a big hat tip to my sister, who actually told me about this four months ago, and I never got around to setting it up.

Changes!

Posted on by Jordan

I mentioned a few weeks back that I had worked on cloning the existing front page, and supporting pages, to an archive area.

Today I finally sat down and put together a new main page.

It isn’t anything fancy really, but I am kind of proud of it considering I coded it up from scratch.

The old wedding page was a free template I hacked up to meet our needs. Not to say that there is anything wrong with hacking up templates and tutorials, but I still wanted to force myself to approach the new site like a programmer. I didn’t use any canned code, and I didn’t use any graphical tools, just Eclipse and an FTP client.

Heather thinks it needs a picture of us on it…. expect some changes down the road I suppose 🙂

-Jordan

Website Work!

Posted on by Jordan

I think I mentioned quite a while back that I was hoping to get a chance to revamp the main heatherandjordan.com site.

I have finally completed step one of that process by setting up an archive of the site in its current state. Not the most exciting thing ever, but I wanted to preserve the old wedding site. Anyone wanting to look is free to check it out here, but I should warn you that, unless something is broken, it will look exactly like the main site. I guess if you find a broken page let me know… I know the RSVP page is a little goofy, but I didn’t want to bother re-writing the php right now.

Sadly that was the easy part, as now I have to figure out what to replace the wedding pages with on the homepage. Hopefully I can come up with something soon.

-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

Website Thoughts

Posted on by Jordan

I am setting here, watching it snow again. I think it’s time to re-vamp the website here.

I will move the current wedding site off to some sort of archive area, so it can still be viewed. I just haven’t figured out what to do with the base domain.

My most recent project was a website for friends of ours Casey and Carson.

That site was basically just massaging WordPress, using a theme somebody else put together and just tweaking it. I would like to do something more ambitious for my site. I just haven’t figured out what yet.

I am also really tempted to change the robots.txt settings so that google can index the blog. Not that I really desire more traffic, it just seems silly to hide from search engines.

-Jordan

A Milestone Of Sorts

Posted on by Jordan

Not too much to post about today, but I wanted to observe that, according to site-meter, there have been over 1000 visitors to heatherandjordan.com!

given the number of ways browsers can be hidden from sitemeeter, its not a hugely meaningful number, but interesting none the less.

also, Heather and I got the picture DVDs burned over the weekend. Now we just have to figure out a way to mail them safely. I also uploaded the entire CD worth of pictures to the website, but as I feared the order is a colossal mess, and we are still trying to decide what to do. Plan A would be to re-order the pictures in the gallery, plan B is to cull the album down to a handful of our favorites so they aren’t so painful to sort.

I will keep you posted 🙂

-Jordan

!!! PICTURES !!!

Posted on by Jordan

We have pictures from our wedding!

Well, ok we don’t have them yet, but they are posted on our photographers website. We expect to have a DVD with the full sized versions of the pictures for us to play with soon. For now you will just have to go check out the website, instructions here.

Heather and I are so happy to finally get to see them! There are some really great pictures, and so many we didn’t even realize got taken.

-Jordan