Jacob Emerick's Blog

Opening a New Chapter of Hiking

I was soaked. It was mid-morning, and I was following Bluff Creek downstream trying to find Rock Bluff Falls. The rain had finally stopped a few hours ago, but the twelve hours before that had been a steady downpour. Now the sun was slowly heating the woods into a steaming sauna. Everything around me was dripping, each step stirring more mosquitos and raining more water down on me. One slow mile of wet, mud, and insects was all I could take. I turned back towards the road and my car.

My adventures in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan started just over three years ago. I was living in Houghton and had a simple plan - I wanted to visit every waterfall in the area. This definition was a bit fluid but enough to fill a solid ten months of exploring. Living and working in Houghton meant that I could easily hit up several falls on weekday evenings. Hiking three to four days a week got me in great shape, and the simple goal of finding and documenting waterfalls was enough to keep me moving.

Young Logan at Rice Lake

Once I moved to Appleton, WI my hikes become much more sporadic. If I was lucky I'd spend a weekend once a month exploring the Upper Peninsula, driving and camping during the nights and hiking during the days. I continued to push myself for longer, ...

• Tags:
• introduction
• resolution
• wisconsin

Another New Year

Snap. Where did 2011 go?

Yup, last year was a bit busy. I've barely mentioned this on here, but I now work at DealerFire in Oshkosh. We mostly create custom websites for automotive dealerships, but there's a good mix of digital marketing, social media, and app development mixed up in there too. I'm the director of the production department, so I'm in charge of the majority of new products that go out the door. Last year that was about 200 websites. That's four sites launching every week. So yeah, 2011 was pretty dog gone busy.

There's been a lot going on outside of my job as well. I finally proposed to Katie Reynolds after five years of dating - we're going to get married in August! We also attended two big family weddings this year, one from each side, and got to make a lot of new introductions. Not everything has been good - there was far too many funerals and sad happenings for that. Overall 2011 has made me thankful for my friends and family as well as the time we have together.

So, what's the plan for 2012? What resolutions am I planning on making? Simple answer... none. I'm excited for the next year and am looking forward to things happening, but I'm just not feeling the resolution vibe. There are areas up north that I'm planning on exploring and ...

• Tags:
• resolution
• wedding

The Ives Exploratory Trip

This exploration turned into the best camping experience I've had in the Upper Peninsula. When I started the hike I was only interested in doing some exploring around Mount Ives area, a large chunk of land I previously thought to be within Huron Mountain Club borders. What I found was a beautiful campsite with captivating views that I eagerly look forward to revisiting.

Sunset over Ives Lake

After a long drive west from Dodge City, I parked off of the Northwestern Road at a gated logging road. I was less than two miles from where Faith, Bryan and I parked for the Burnt Mountain hike, but this short section of road is impassable to most vehicles. Thanks that previous hike I knew there was some logging north of me, so I shouldered my gear and headed up the road. My hope was to follow the recent logging clearings northwards and set up camp once until I got tired.

While the Huron Mountain Club owns both Ives Lake and Mountain Lake (or at least the majority of the surrounding shores), there is a narrow finger of public CF land that separates the two lakes. Bordered by Ives Lake to the east, Mountain Lake to the west, and Mummy Mountain to the north, this land is relative flat with a few small rocky hills cropping up. To reach this finger ...

• Tags:
• campsite
• fall colors
• huron mountains
• old growth

Responsive Web Design and Duplicate URLs

Duplicate content is a well-known issue that members in the search engine optimization (SEO) and web development communities keep a close eye on. This issue can lower the relative value of a page in the eyes of search engines, due to their being multiple instances of the page's content. The address, or URL, of any page on the internet is meant to be a unique identifier for the page, and if there is an exact duplicate of that content located on a separate URLs than the pages are not as useful for end users. A great example of this is the www vs no-www duplication that many sites have... Both versions of the URL may render the same page. GET parameters, tailing slashes, and other types of dynamically generated pages can also generate duplicate content issues.

I wanted to address the opposite issue in this post. Duplicate content can be easily fixed using a variety of solutions, but there are other practices that are starting to pervade the web development community that could potentially confuse users and search engines alike. Let's call it 'duplicate URLs'. This practice has been around for a while in small doses, although responsive web design has the potential for much larger ...

• Tags:
• best practice
• seo

Wetmore Hike Part D - Wetmore Pond

The wide path down Hogsback Mountain led me back to the railroad grade a short distance south of where I left it earlier. While the path continued ahead of me something of interest drew my attention to the right. The large, swampy Wetmore Pond stretched out to me along the railroad grade, luring me away from the path. I turned south on the grade again, walking along the western edge of the pond.

First view of Wetmore Pond from the grade

The views from the grade were pretty amazing. Wetmore Pond is a great example of a Huron Mountain swamp, with thick grasslands, rocky outcroppings, and a few deeper portions of water with lilies clustering on the outskirts. While the grade was lined with a thick cover of brush, there was several clear portions that offered me great vistas of the wetlands. I'm unsure if the main trail to Hogsback Mountain, which goes along the northeastern shoreline, offers similar views with the grade in the background.

Eastern outcroppings on Wetmore Pond

I continued south along the grade even as the pond started to end to my left. A culvert underneath the grade connects the pond to another swamp further to the south, but the majority of the water skipped the culvert and just sat on top of the grade. Inching along the shallower edge of the ...

• Tags:
• pond
• wetmore

Wetmore Hike Part C - Hogsback Mountain

The sound of crashing waves slowly died away as I headed inland away from Wetmore Beach. Taking the parking lot route out to County Road 550, I was unsure of how I would make it to Hogsback Mountain until I noticed a small two-track across the road from Wetmore's parking lot. It was marked as part of the Harlow Trails. I took my chances in headed westwards along the trail, inland, hoping to find my next climb.

Two bridges along the Harlow trail

The two-track started out wide enough for a small truck but quickly narrowed down after a few fallen trees blocked the path. It crossed a creek flowing into Harlow Lake with two separate bridges, both in disrepair. I was not paying attention to my direction, mostly looking around and enjoying the woods, and found myself heading northwards away from the mountain by the time the trail met up with an old railroad grade.

While the northward trend had taken me away from a direct path to the mountain I wasn't too far from my destination. I headed south down the railroad grade past a tiny waterfall along the straight and narrow path for a good distance. There is at least one trail that leads up Hogsback Mountain and I hoped to bump into it along the grade and take it uphill. I almost missed it at first, carried away ...

• Tags:
• huron mountains
• waterfalls
• wetmore

Wetmore Hike Part B - Wetmore Beach

After climbing Sugarloaf Mountain, just a few miles north of Marquette, I headed down the eastern flank towards Lake Superior. With Wetmore Beach to the north and Partridge Bay to the south I stepped out of the cold, soaked woods and was greeted by an amazing view of waves pounding against huge, black rocks.

Waves crashing on the rocky shoreline

I carefully crept out on the slick boulders until I could feel the spray of the waves as they crashed onto the shore. My hike had been rushed to this point... I woke up early, quickly packed up my campsite, and scrambled up a mountain. This was a great time to catch my breath and really enjoy the scenery.

Cloudy skies loomed angrily over Lake Superior, with a few whitecamps visible far off to the east. I was on a bit of a point, and I could make out both Presque Isle and Little Presque Isle along the shoreline (in opposite directions). The black rocks I were sitting on were ancient, with lichen-covered crags and deep, worn grooves. Some of the waves barely curled over before hitting the shore, while others thundered and splashed me with foam and a refreshing mist.

Presque Isle to the South

My route took me south from these rocks, away from Partridge Bay ...

• Tags:
• sandy beach
• shoreline
• wetmore

Wetmore Hike Part A - Sugarloaf Mountain

Just a few miles north of Marquette is a small collection of interesting locations that I had ignored for far too long. Casting them to the bottom of my list as 'easy tourist' stops, I've driven past the Wetmore area to more appealing remote locations beyond Big Bay numerous times. I rolled into the Sugarloaf Mountain parking lot on a cold, damp morning with an ambitious plan to visit several of these locations in one fell swoop.

Looking north towards Wetmore Beach from Sugarloaf

My first destination was an easy climb up Sugarloaf Mountain. It had been a rough night camping near Diorite, with high winds and freezing temperatures robbing any chance of a restful sleep, and I was thankful for the wide paths leading up the mountain. There are two trails leading up the mountain, an 'easy' and 'difficult' route, and I took the difficult route uphill (I'm pretty sure it's shorter). Both trails were well-trod and easy to follow with stairs built on the steeper sections.

The air was cold and damp with a thin fog clinging to me as I followed the trail up. Tall trees surrounded the trail and slick rocks stuck up on the rugged ground, giving the entire climb a nice rustic feel. The path was not exceptionally difficult, even when the flights of stairs ...

• Tags:
• huron mountains
• north country trail
• shoreline
• wetmore

Best Practices in Development

Over the last few days I've been working on a relatively large change to my image linking logic. This change involved some reorganization on the server side, adding name-spacing, changing the url structure, and placing 301 redirects to all 1200+ of my photos. I made this update both in hopes of keeping some relative SEO content on the photos linked in my blog and because I wasn't happy with the original implementation (especially the data storage). This post isn't about the update, though. I wanted to talk a bit about some of the principles I used on this and other projects I work on.

Incremental Changes

This update was a rather large one to my engine. I needed to change more than just a few image links - I upgraded my entire image storage system to a relational setup. Eventually this will turn into a dedicated photography site (photos.jacobemerick.com, mayhaps). Trying to change everything and push it live at once would have been asking for disaster.

Instead I broke down this change into five steps. Each step could be tested and pushed live independently, with easy rollback capabilities. I was able to visualize each step completely and debug them easily. By the time I rolled out the final piece, checking and testing the step on the live site was a ...

• Tags:
• best practice
• mvc
• my site

Levels of Impossibility

As a novice web developer I often thought that many site functionality ideas were impossible. Without experience or working knowledge of a variety of web languages even the most basic Javascript animations or ajax features throughout the internet lived in the realm of dark magic and mystery. Now, after years of developing web sites for clients, I understand much more of how things work, or at least how to duplicate it using more familiar technologies. When a client throws a unexpected feature request at me, I can normally figure out a way to add it into their project. However, I still believe that some things are 'impossible'... it's just a matter of how impossible they are.

Level 1: Truly, Undeniably Impossible

Even with all of the amazing things web developers can do these days we still have one solid restriction: the browser. A browser instance cannot affect other browser instance (unless they are linked). One domain cannot directly read another domain's cookies. Web sites cannot affect a user's computer unless the user allows it. This level of impossibility is usually not reached, since most clients want to duplicate web functionality that they've seen on the web instead of invent brand new ones.

Level 2: Sensibly Impossible

This level ...

• Tags:
• best practice
• optimization