November 2010 | Jacob Emerick's Blog

How Many Tiers for a Clean View Layer?

An interesting possibility cropped up for my MVC a few weeks ago. I've been working with microformats on and off the last few months (you can read about one of my first adventures with them when I created a microformatted resume). I started to wonder where else my site could use this new feature. An easy place to add microformat tags are links - you can add a 'rel' attribute that describes the relationship of the link to your site. Also, if I added a layer of abstraction to my links site wide, then I could easy add behavior rules (target="_blank" and whatnot) that would affect an individual link across all of my pages and sites.

This idea would involve creating a table of all my links, internal and external, that could be mapped to meta information about the links. There would be a helper class on my site that would pull a link based on an alias, give it attributes based off of the meta data (including microformatting), and spit out a final link. No where on ...

• Tags:
• abstraction,
• mvc,
• my site,
• oop,
• template

Canyon Lake and Burnt Mountain

Time had taken it's toll on the Northwestern Road. Faith, Bryan and I bounced up and down in the Jeep heading east from Big Erick's Road through large potholes and deep ruts. I had driven on this road only a few years ago in my Ford Taurus, but there was no way I would risk a car on it today. We finally pulled up to an overgrown two-track about a mile past Cedar Creek in the thick wooded valley between the northern Yellow Dog Plains and Huron Mountains.

Rain had dampened the vegetation along the path and all three of us were soaked after a short distance on the two-track. We were on our way north to the fringe of the Huron Mountain Club's southern boundary, using a maze of logging roads along the way. The first road we were on had not been used for years, but we were surprised to stumble upon a fully active logging operation up ahead.

Logging south of Burnt Mountain

After walking down the wide, sandy road past numerous stacks of logs we cut off to the left. If I had known about the active logging operation we probably ...

• Tags:
• burnt mountain,
• bushwhack,
• faith,
• huron mountain club,
• huron mountains,
• managed forest

Katie and Jake 2010 Move

Katie and I lived with her parents from the summer of 2009. After I lost my job at Michigan Tech they graciously opened up their doors for us until I could get a solid income again. What we hoped would be a several-month period grew to 18 months, since my SparkNET job wasn't enough to afford moving out. I finally got a solid job at DealerFire over the summer with enough income for us to seriously look at moving out on our own.

Living room in our Wheatfield duplex

It was hard to find a place in our price range that was still suitable for two adults and their pets. We spent much of September and October looking at different duplexes in Menasha and Oshkosh, turning one down after another because of location (active train tracks in the back yard is a definite no) or condition (sagging floors is another red flag). We finally got lucky with a place in Appleton - a last minute cancellation, landlord who loves dogs, and decent price for rent all aligned for a small, but relatively modern, duplex on Wheatfield.

Moving happened ...

• Tags:
• dealerfire,
• katie,
• wisconsin