And we're off! It's been really cold here lately (like -20 or colder), so I finally got some spare time to push the new layout and site to production. Please let me know if you run into any issues.
I will be going back through previous posts and selecting categories in the near future as well. Until then, feel free to use the site search to find what you're looking for!
It is finally time! It's definitely been a while, but I felt it was time to get off my lazy ass and do a serious make over on my site. I did run into a few challenges along the way, the biggest was porting my existing posts from Blogger.com and into my own home-grown CMS that you see today.
After doing some searching around for ways to backup a Blogger.com site, I ended up going with the recommended way I found in the Blogger.com help site. By changing my template and exporting the posts as a new file. I chose my own format for the file though, using a generic XML format. In about an hour I had an XML parser that would add each of the entries into my new schema.
One of the other challenges was actually working with a new framework, or one that was at least new to me. I ended up rolling with Code Igniter, as I found it extremely flexible and lightweight. There are still a few things however that I'd like to add to this site, but for now I feel like it is at least beta quality. Since my site is relatively small isn't a heavily hit site, I felt beta quality was good enough to release.
Over the next few months, I plan to finish up the things left out when I have some time. One thing is an archive. Although, I'm not sure exactly how necessarily this is with the search functionality. Previously, I didn't have search available, so we'll see how it goes for now. I might add the archive stuff back in.
I have also slimmed down the flickr integration and also improved the caching. This will mean that load times will drastically improve. In the future I will be adding my photo sets back into the mix, but for now it's just my photo stream straight up.
I've also decided to add captcha throughout my site. This specifically effects two areas, comments and the contact form. I didn't get that many spam posts on my previous site, but I'm hoping this will reduce that number even more.
If you have any feedback on the site so far, please let me know!
Just like the title says, it's been a while since my last update; a long while. After traveling for work so much last year, this year I've fortunately spent home with family and friends. It's been a great year so far!
Anyways, I'll keep this short. This site will be undergoing a make over soon. I've been trying to put together a new site in any free time I can spare (which is little). It will be a major improvement over what is here today. This site is currently using blogger.com as it's backend along with Flickr. I've decided to keep Flickr as the backend for my photography, since Flickr is awesome. However, the decision to drop blogger.com has been made.
Instead, I will be rolling my own, plus it will give me a chance to sort of start over. There is a lot of crap on this site that no longer reflects who I am or what I stand for. Hopefully the new site with a fresh back end will be ready for launch by the end of the year.
Until then, feel free to check out my Flickr page for more recent updates.
After a very painful problem at colo, things are back up. After shipping a new box to Dallas until we could get the old one in Phoenix, things have been rough. Anyways, this box has a lot of updated packages (apache, php, mysql, etc), so let me know if you run into any issues.
So, I had some work to do late tonight and figured while I was waiting on some scripts to finish, I would spend some time making a few updates to my site; since I was in a coding mindset anyways. I finally got around to making the archive listing not so long, converting it from one to two columns.
I also added something new. Below the archive you will now find the "flickr interesting" section. It fetches a current list of images on flickr that considered the most interesting photos. I might toy around with this and add it so it displays the ones from the current day, but there needs to be a lapse time and I haven't quite figured out what that is yet. For the time being, it grabs the first 100 photos in the list, but I'm toying with the idea of adding AJAX to get the next set of images once it's done cycling through the first set. Until I figure out what if I will do that, it will just start the cycle over again. At least until you refresh the page ;)