Blogs from 2009
Hiking With Daniel
On Saturday 12 September the weather was great and Karen and I decided to take Daniel Hiking. We had a backpack carrier he could ride in and the overcast skies were perfect for spending time outside. Initially we were going to go to Great Falls, but when we got there they were still taking entrance money and we didn't know how long Daniel would last. We had passed a trial along the side of the road, so we went back there. Difficult Run, the stream parallels the Georgetown Pike road. As a hike it wasn't too tough. We started heading Northwest, but as we passed another hiker he told us the foliage got pretty thick and the trail thin, so we headed back the other way. I skipped a few stones on part of the river and we had a great time. Daniel smiled almost the whole time. 
The hiking pack is nice, and I think we will be able to use it a lot. The toughest part is making the size so either Karen or I can use it. For me it wasn't low enough on my hips, and for Karen it was a bit back heavy and not high enough. It was a fun way to spend about 45 minutes. We had a bit of a time constraint because I had to get home and clean up to go to a Stake Priesthood meeting that evening. Everyone had a good time.
A Visit to Pittsburg
I had a career fair recruiting trip to attend at Carnegie Mellon University and since it was only a few hundred miles from home Karen and Daniel came along. It wouldn't be a vacation for me, but I would get to see Karen and Daniel at night and they would get to have a good time. We drove out on Monday night, 14 September 2009 and the career fair was on Tuesday.
On Tuesday while I was busy Karen and Daniel went to the Pittsburg zoo. Karen had a fun time taking some pictures and being a tourist. Daniel enjoyed it some, but I think he had as much fun in the hotel as anywhere else. He was fascinated by everything new. Getting him to nap was nearly impossible and at night when he would wake up and scream until we left our dark room. He just wanted to look around and was all excited. One night Karen was down in the lobby with him, and another eveining I was down there. Everyone else thought he was so cute. We agree of course, but we also value sleep. We felt bad for whoever was in the room next door. Karen said they turned on their TV during the night, probably to drown out Daniels cries. He didn't like us telling him he had to sleep when there was so much interesting stuff to look at.
At the zoo Karen got some cute pictures, including one of Karen and Daniel and a Mom and baby elephant.
New and improved website
17-01-2010 23:51
I've been working for several days on changes to the website. Obviously there are visual changes, but the bigger changes have been under the hood.
I'v abandoned PHP in favor of static html pages. I wasn't using most of the real features of PHP. THe extent of my dynamic pages was to assemble included portions of pages on the server. I'll explain more in a minute, but I do the same thing now with static pages, I just assemble the pieces at my house and upload the static resulting pages. The other reason for doing so was I started having lots of problems with my custom functions in PHP. My pages were working on my home computer development environment, but once uploaded to the webserver I was having problems. This new way is simpler and if there is a problem I will know right away and can fix it easier. This also allows me to create a static snapshot of my site that can be saved on a CD or such for historical interest. Such content would be in a usable form for as long as web browsers can read html files.
As for the architecture, I am using txt2tags for my raw pages and it takes care of generating the html. It has a simplistic feature set, and there are some limitations, but they can be worked around for the most part. It allows nested file inclusions, it floats pictures to the left or right, and it allows easier to read articles.
To assemble everything I've created a custom Makefile. I defined all of the rules by which I would turn my text files into html pages and the commands required by txt2tags and other utilities. Make takes care of all of the dependencies and the build order. If I cange any pages, only those pages that have changes are regenerated. I will continue to refine it, but I like it so far.
The blog section is requiring the most work. Basically I am rewriting all of the dynamic PHP that used to assemble blogs into scripts that create static page equivalents. It just takes some time, that is all.
More to come.
