May 2009 | Jacob Emerick's Blog

Lake Superior Idea

One of my favorite parts of the waterfall project of summer 2008 was the planning process. Not only did I enjoy scouring topographic maps and satellite photos to find the quickest, safest, or most scenic route, but I also enjoyed achieving different goals; visiting every waterfall along Silver River or within the Keweenaw. Once the project was complete, I started looking for a new set of hiking adventures that would rival my experience.

Bryant Weathers, a student web developer at Michigan Tech, blogged about a friend of his who planned to spend a summer hiking around Lake Michigan (blog link). Unfortunately, he stopped a few hundred miles in, but this idea inspired a new project for myself - hike around Lake Superior.

This is not an adventure that I plan on tackling soon. With an estimated distinct of eighteen hundred miles, it will take me at least three months to walk around the lake. It'd be nice to have it done within the next six years, or before I'm thirty. Also, there are ...

• Tags:
• adventure,
• north country trail,
• superior hike

Style Switcher Part B

This post assumes some intermediate understanding of Javascript, stylesheets, and cookies. It will show you how to use cookies with a style switcher to remember a user's preference and load it with their (many) return visits.

In the previous post, I explained a method for allowing users to switch between different stylesheets on your website. However, after they leave your website, there's no way for your site to remember them or which style they preferred. If they liked the 'yellow' stylesheet, they would have to click it each and every time they visited your website. The best way to avoid this problem is to set a cookie when they choose a style, then read the cookie on their return to display the preferred stylesheet.

You can create your cookie as soon as the user clicks on a style, but you'll end up overwriting the cookie several times if the user clicks multiple styles (to check out the different options). A better method is to remember the last style they view before they leave the page.

• Tags:
• cookies,
• css,
• dynamic,
• javascript

Style Switcher Part A

This post assumes some intermediate understanding of Javascript and stylesheets. It will show you how to setup a Javascript-powered styleswitcher that works for individual pages.

One of the huge benefits that CSS, or Cascading Style Sheets, brought to web design was the ability to easily change an entire website's design and layout. Since CSS allows a separation of content and layout, a single style sheet can control all of the pages of a website. Some extra markup in the HTML may be needed for specific layout requirements, but colors, font-size, and normal layout options can be easily modified with a few lines.

This brings up an interesting opportunity: multiple stylesheets for a web site. These different stylesheets can have simple changes: a main one containing layout and general styles with several optional sheets with color information. By attaching the stylesheets to the document with the alternate tag, some browsers will allow users to switch between the sheets under their 'View' menu.

• Tags:
• css,
• dynamic,
• javascript

Sturgeon River

Winding through Baraga and Houghton County, the Sturgeon River is a large, well-known river system. Driving from Marquette to Houghton on US-41 brings drivers over the river twice, first at Canyon River Falls and then at the Sturgeon River Sloughs. These two spots, combined with the Sturgeon River Gorge, are popular hiking and adventuring locations for tourists and locals alike.

• Tags:
• baraga plains,
• nestoria swamp,
• ottawa national forest,
• river system,
• waterfalls

A Few River Gorges

The Western Upper Peninsula has a unique geology compared to the rest of Michigan. Ancient bedrock creates surprisingly tall mountains and highlands that trap lakes, swamps, and wetlands hundreds of feet above Lake Superior. Throughout the geologic history of the area, glacial and volcanic events have both carved deep channels and helped confine the waters, eventually leading to rivers draining the land through gorges and over waterfalls. Here is a short list of the major gorges of the area, at least the ones I've had the opportunity of visiting.

Looking across Sturgeon River gorge

Sturgeon River cuts one of the more well-known gorges of this area through the flat, sandy Baraga Plains southwest of L'Anse. This gorge is heavily forested, and good lookouts over it are hard to find. The two highlights of this area include Silver Mountain, an ancient volcanic plug, and Sturgeon River Falls, both located in the Ottawa National Forest. Most of the gorge is simply a deep river valley (three hundred feet near the falls), though there ...

• Tags:
• huron mountains,
• ottawa national forest,
• waterfalls

Modular Website Setup

After making several iterations of my personal site, I've finally found a php backend solution that has made me happy. While I have no doubt that I'll find a new system or methodology within the year that will warrent a complete redesign, my current setup is surprisingly simple and fun to play with.

As php is my primary coding language, I make it a personal goal to never use third party plug-ins. I often utilize jQuery or posted Javascript plug-ins in my work, mostly because working with Javascript and forcing it to work in every available browser can be excrutiating. I have never used Ignitor or Wordpress for a project and do not see the need for it in my near future. So, when I create new sites and applications, I might find myself copying some of my old code for a particular function, but often try to make it cleaner or more efficient during the development process.

When I tackled my personal site this time around, I tried to sketch out the data flow before coding. Not only did I want a central file to handle all web page requests ...

• Tags:
• introduction,
• mvc,
• php

Future Side Projects

In my free time, I try to keep up with web development for my personal sites. Over the last year, the gem of my side work became the 'Waterfalls of the Keweenaw Area' website, a truly complete and detailed project. Due to this project, I learned more about Google Map API, KML files, and general content management then I would have by waiting for appropriate job projects. The waterfalls site involved much more than just making a website - I had to go out and collect the data (photos, directions, GPS points) manually - and now I have several ideas for future projects stacked up.

One project that is mostly completed is a Daylight Tracker. This application will print out calendars and graphs with sunrise/sunset information based on the current latitude and longitude of a user. While it's completely functional, I've decided to overhaul the frontend to utilize jQuery and JSON as an additional hurdle.

The next project on the radar is a full page Google Maps application that I can start linking my photos, hiking trips, and waterfall ...

• Tags:
• flash,
• jquery,
• kml,
• my site

Silver River

While many people will claim to know of Silver River it's difficult to know which river they are talking about. After all, there are three Silver Rivers within fifty miles of Houghton, MI; one in the Keweenaw near Eagle Harbor, one near West Branch Sturgeon River near Alston, and the third one in Baraga County. The third one is the largest and, in my opinion, the most impressive in terms of both waterfalls in area.

Primary route of Silver River

Silver River, in Baraga County, does not flow by any population centers or industrial sites. It is not dammed along its route, and besides ...

• Tags:
• nestoria swamp,
• river system,
• waterfalls

Life After College

I was never worried about finding a job after college. Both degrees I undertook (physics and math) have severely limited job opportunities compared to other Michigan Tech degrees (computer sciences, engineering, etc), but I was too caught up in student life to worry about a career. Working through both high school and college, I figured that finding a good job after graduation would be easy.

The career fair options at the university always bombed for my degree (most attending businesses were only interested in engineers) and, with only weeks left, I applied for several jobs involving web development at Michigan Tech. The interview and application process was over in a short time and I had two job offers - and I took the more promising one. Little did I know that I'd be fired in ten months with even less opportunities available to me.

After being fired, I applied for several dozen jobs across the country. Not only was I excited about a brand new experience, but I wanted to leave Michigan and my university behind. With the bad economy ...

• Tags:
• job,
• katie,
• mtu

Using XSL for Websites

Throughout the course of my web development learning, I've always had a central problem to deal with. On a typical website, multiple pages have some sort of general, non-changing bits that stay constant throughout the site: headers, footers, and navigational bars are great examples. The only piece that changes regularly, and is arguably the most important piece of a web page, is the central container. How do you keep these two pieces separate on both the frontend and backend of the site? Also, if there are non-changing or simple pieces of a website that do not change from page to page, is there a way to keep them on the client side to keep bandwidth low?

There are several options to this problem, the most obvious one being AJAX. When a user clicks on a new link, a request is sent for an XML document that would be parsed out and displayed within the container. The XML would be much smaller than an entire xHTML document and would be easy to setup and send from a server. It would be a truly clean separation of data v presentation. The main fall ...

• Tags:
• ajax,
• javascript,
• template,
• xml