A blog by us for our family and friends
Looks like my CSS layout has a bug that firefox picks up and causes the white area of the page to be rendered incorrectly. I’m not sure why, and IE doesn’t seem to have an issue but I’m looking into it.
Okily dokily, looks like I got the front page mostly situated. Got the facebook “badges” imported, as well as the code to mashup with the wordpress blog. It really was super easy once I did a little poking around and spent some time understanding the PHP scripting language. To me, it really looks a LOT like TCL, which is a scripting language we use in the ASIC verification world to write tests, shift strings through the registers and the like. Basically a language that have always thought could use a lot of help, since coming from a “real” programming background (aka, languages that generate object code) I like simple pleasures like debuggers, stack traces, and a clear linking hierarchy. Oh well.
I also got the navbar to work within Wordpress, which seemed to be fighting me the whole way. Wordpress really wants to control the entire site and has a lot of features to do that, but I didn’t want to go that direction. It’s a control thing, really.
Well, yesterday I made good progress. On my original welcome page I had said “check back in a week or so”, knowing full well that I work from 6.30am to 5/5.30pm on the average work day of late and didn’t really think I’d find the time to do much of anything except maybe ‘think’ about what I wanted things to look like. Of course the reality is that I’m a Project Manager who hasn’t gotten his hands dirty in about two years so even though web coding isn’t exactly my bread and butter (most of my background is in “software-enabled device verification” which is a fancy way of saying that I’ve architected, designed, and led implementation groups of large software designs whose entire purpose in life is to verify FPGA and ASIC designs before spending $2M+ to make them).
So this has been fun. Poking around my laptop hard drive while watching a Stargate Atlantis rerun I found a recent picture taken on my D200 by some nice passer by on Liberty Island. Photoshop to the rescue and 15 seconds later (with all the weddings I’ve done recently I’ve become pretty proficient at Photoshop… who woulda thunk it?) voila I have a nice 170px tall, 960px wide image to use on all my pages. Gee, I sure hope no one wants to view my site on a small monitor because, well frankly they’re screwed.
Last night I added a Contact page as well as a Links page and started to flesh out a little bit of content. I also decided the site was mature enough that I can get rid of the (or so I’m told by Meghan) ugly placeholder I had and promoted this to the main index. Wahoo. Talk about milestones. Oops, the PM in me snuck out right there.
Well, as Cornelius Fichner (narrator of the PMPrepcast) would say, Until next time.
Ok, so I think I think I got a potential layout for the site. Basically a two column format with a navbar at the wee top of the page. I will admit, I got lazy. I found a wordpress theme that I actually fairly liked and then modified the hell out of it, and made that my basic site theme. I basically like it, but there are still some things I’m not sure about. We’ll see how this all works out.
Still havn’t been able to get a mashup working. I’d really like to put the last three blog entry summaries right smack onto the front page. I know I can do this if I use WP as the backend, but for some reason I don’t really want to do that. I know it can be done…
Take a sneak peak at http://www.bartfam.com/index.php. Of course when the site goes live, this will merely be a pointer back to the front page. Oh well.
So I’ve been working on getting some new pages up and running and I think finally decided on a preliminary look for the site. Pretty much, you’re looking at it! So the question comes up, should I use WordPress as my web site (I can make pages, and whatnot so you would have no idea it was a WP site), or go with a more traditional method of having individual pages. I think either direction will take about the same amount of work. So let’s go traditional.
I’m trying to figure out how to mashup (yes, that is the actual real terminology) my HTML with WP in such a way so that you’d go to my home page and see perhaps the top two or three entires without having to go to the actual blog page. I’ve seen it done. Just havn’t figured out how. Though I have come to the realization that I’m going to need to actually use PHP instead of standard HTML so that I can access the database using the built-in WP functions and keep the code authoring to a minimum. But still a PITA.
Welp, or is it Whelp? Welcome to our new blog. Just starting to get the site up and running, it’s really only been a few days and wow has life been busy along the way. So, being a perfectionist I decided it wasn’t good enough to just use a blospot or WordPress blog, but I had to go and install it onto my server. Wow was that a pain in the butt. So you softwareish guys out there can appreciate this. See, I’m a software developer not an IT professional which basically means that when I log into my server and create a MySQL database I’m a little outside of my element. Ok so I’ve done that before, but then I went and uploaded the .php base code from WordPress.org (who know WordPress was freeware?) and then I get this:
Error: Cannot connect to database
Oh crap. So I went and checked the config files against what my host (1and1) said was the configuration, and it was good. No go. Crap. Ok, so I go make dinner and hope it fixes itself. Of course being a software guy, I wasn’t all that suprised when I came back and it was still broken. I play for an hour, looking at all sorts of FAQs and whatnot to no avail. Then brainstorm: I went in and cut and pasted the info directly from the database config page of the admin app. Voila. Life is good. But wait, nothing changed? It all looks the same? Oh well, who cares it works now, right?
Anyways, I can’t promise that we’ll update this all that often, but I can promise that I’ll try. We can also be found on Facebook and John can be found on LinkedIn. Yes, I find that LinkedIn is good for keeping your network connected. Especially at times like this when my company (Unisys) is essentialy eliminating my organization (Computer hardware development), and I want to make sure I can keep in contact with my friends and coworkers after they get laid off or leave for a new job in greener pastures.
I guess that’s about it. In an effort to reduce / prevent hacking and spamsters I have put the restriction on that the admin (ME) must add new users. So friends and family just shoot me an email and I’ll add you right in. Maybe I’ll change it so anyone can register but past experience is that it’s a bad idea to leave things open to the world like that.