Picture Update

Posted on by Jordan

A number of people have asked about viewing the pictures on our photographers website.

To my knowledge she hasn’t actually posted anything. You can see the text “Heather and Jordan” listed under weddings there, but its not a link.

As soon as I know more I will let people know, and probably post something on the blog as well as the main wedding site.

I also hope to get a note about the pictures not being up yet on the main site, but it might be a few days before I have time to sit down and do that 😦

-Jordan

50 Days!

Posted on by Jordan

The wedding is just 50 days away now!

(actually 49 if you use the count I have been using in the past… 49 days and 7 hours remaining right now….)

its still a long time, but starting to feel like its going to be here soon. I am also starting to think Heather and I might actually make it. She has been in Blair for over a month now, but we have managed to find reasons to make the drive one direction or the other pretty frequently.

Heather has a whole gambit of showers lined up, I don’t know for sure what I will be doing those weekends, but I am sure I will think of something. Did I mention I am playing WoW again? “leaving” only lasted like 48 days or so, but thus far I haven’t really gotten into it as much as before. Yeah, so back to the wedding countdown…

There is a *LOT* of stuff going on between now and the wedding. People have kind of made fun of us for having so much of the wedding planned months in advance. When you realize there aren’t any more open weekends between now and the wedding, it starts to seem pretty practical. As much as we have done, I still expect some frantic last minute things come January. At least for now we can feel like we are mostly ready and enjoy everything that is happening in December.

The other fun thing that has started happening is people are RSVPing, and just using the website more. Its exciting for me to see the increased activity, although perhaps I am too easily entertained.

-Jordan

Invites Mailed!

Posted on by Jordan

I had nothing to do with it, Pam (Heather’s mom) did all of the work to get the invites sent out. All the same I am really excited to know that has happened. For starters I think the invites look great. Pam hand-addressed all of the invites, and the ones I saw looked absolutely amazing. On top of that, we have a great picture included in the invite. I suppose it might be a little narcissistic to be sending people pictures of myself, but Heather is in there too, and I think the picture looks so cool 🙂

If all that weren’t enough, mailing out the invites basically means this website is “live”!!! Granted its been online for months now, but only a few people knew it existed. We will find out very soon if my PHP hack was good enough to handle the RSVP section, its more or less out of beta though… should be fine 🙂

I guess maybe I am excited about nothing, all the same its another milestone. This has the added benefit of starting the process of getting RSVP’s in, everyone says they aren’t too reliable, but still we can sort of see how many people to expect.

-Jordan

Website update

Posted on by Jordan

As of today the website is shall we say out of beta. All pages are completed, the last one to get finished was the registry, and that is done, complete with nice deep-links straight to the online versions of our lists.

I am toying with the idea of adding a second section to that page, or a sub-page with a few things listed that just can’t go on a registry, but managing that list could be hard.

-Jordan

Mid week website update!

Posted on by Jordan

Managed to find some time last night to make some quick edits to the website.

  • Every reference to the reception now says “Johnny Cascone’s Italian Restaurant in Overland Park, Kansas” instead of just “Cascone’s in Kansas City”
  • Filled out the lodging page, that should be done now.
  • changed the RSVP page to request number of guests, and hopefully be clearer
  • changed the PHP script that sends the RSVP info so the message is easier to understand.

My proofreader and picture captioning expert was way too sleepy to do much by the time that was all done, so the pictures still lack captions.

At this point I am just happy that my enthusiasm hasn’t dropped off… I was afraid it would be painful to keep tweaking things at this point, but I still enjoy getting things going.

-Jordan

Accommodations!

Posted on by Jordan

I probably wont get the website updated until Thursday, but we have a hotel holding a block of rooms for the wedding.

Heather talked to them, and they got us a block of rooms at a discount, so I think its going to work out pretty well.

looking at reviews, trying to answer my moms question on the phone last night, it looks like:

  1. they have a “kid oriented” pool
  2. they do not offer free breakfast, but do offer a discount at the attached Perkins

its one more thing checked off the list for the wedding, and another section of the website I can count as done (as soon as I *do* it).  I find it fairly satisfying, even if it was a simple thing 🙂

-Jordan

The website, and eight pounds of chicken.

Posted on by Jordan

First off, lets see how I did on that list yesterday:

  1. Update the groomsmen pictures.
  2. Try defaulting the directions page “from” box to null.
  3. Fix the formatting problem on the directions page.
  4. Split the directions page into 2 pages so we have directions to the reception in KC.
  5. Add text to the front page talking about the KC reception.
  6. Add a “home” link to the gallery.
  7. Fix the width of the text boxes on the RSVP page for FireFox.
  8. Add a “special thanks” page?
  9. Replace the default 404 page.
  10. Setup the accommodations page, assuming that information is available.
  11. Captions instead of file names showing in the gallery.
  12. Look at adding extra text to the black space in the gallery.

Gallery is kind of a maze to figure out how its building pages, I think I have found where it constructs the main page you see when you click the “gallery” link from the front page, I just have to find a way to inject a link back to the main page from there. I am not optimistic about adding text in the unused space, but maybe I will change my mind once I understand its page creation code a little better.

the other things on that list I simply ran out of time for, perhaps because I was being lazy and didn’t get started right away 🙂

I also tackled the frozen chicken I had piling up, for over a month now I had been buying a bag or so each time the store had a sale on frozen chicken breasts. Ever since Heather and I started our workout plan I have been using the approach Heather used, where you cook a bunch of chicken, and freeze it in proper meal sized portions. Buying lots of it raw, and then procrastinating before cooking it meant I had four bags, or eight pounds of chicken to deal with. I normally use a vinegar and pepper marinade, but I didn’t have a big enough container to soak that much chicken, and I wasn’t sure I wanted that much in the same style. So after trimming it all, I settled on four different kinds:

starting at the top, and going left-to-right, we have: BBQ, lemon pepper, plain, vinegar-pepper. I was pretty happy with the results. the BBQ didn’t come out as well as it has in the past, but I think I did something differently then, I just cant remember what. After cubing and bagging all of that I ended up with 22 bags of chicken, enough to keep me in quick lunches for quite a while 🙂

Hopefully today I can knock out the rest of the website stuff, and maybe even get my room cleaned a little bit before I completely loose this productive streak I am on 🙂

-Jordan

Website TODO

Posted on by Jordan

With Heather gone this weekend its a good time to make a final push to wrap up the website. I figure if I publish my to do list here I will feel obligated to stay on it and maybe overcome the Saturday-afternoon lethargy that sometimes kills these projects. 🙂

things that still need done:

  1. Update the groomsmen pictures.
  2. Try defaulting the directions page “from” box to null.
  3. Fix the formatting problem on the directions page.
  4. Split the directions page into 2 pages so we have directions to the reception in KC.
  5. Add text to the front page talking about the KC reception.
  6. Add a “home” link to the gallery.
  7. Fix the width of the text boxes on the RSVP page for FireFox.
  8. Add a “special thanks” page?
  9. Replace the default 404 page.
  10. Setup the accommodations page, assuming that information is available.
  11. Captions instead of file names showing in the gallery.
  12. Look at adding extra text to the black space in the gallery.

The sad thing is I am sure there is a fair amount I can’t remember right now, but the list as it stands should give me something to shoot for at least.

-Jordan

Broken

Posted on by Jordan

Hi, so it seems something is broken on the blog if your using Internet Explorer. I think its related to the last Moab post, but I can’t seem to find a broken tag…

I will keep looking, in the meantime, try Firefox, or the Chrome Beta is fun too!

I should also point out that the rest of the wedding site looks a little better in Firefox than IE, for some reason IE is lazy about properly following the CSS being used, leaving things not-quite lined up.

**** update 3 minutes later… found the offending tag… IE still makes me sad

-Jordan

Comments

Posted on by Jordan

I was somewhat caught off guard by actual comments here, so I dug through the wordpress settings and made it a lot easier to post comments. We will also see how well the anti-spam plugin works, but then again I think for now this site is safely below everyone’s radar, meaning the spambots shouldn’t be a problem 🙂

also, I really want to build one of these: Ruben’s Tube

-Jordan