June 2011 | Jacob Emerick's Blog

Cascade Falls

The parking lot for Cascade Falls was surrounded by a warm green mugginess after the morning's rain. It was easy enough to find, just off a well-maintained forest service road, mere minutes from Norwich Road. I stepped out and quickly put on a jean jacket and baseball cap in anticipation for the black flies that love this area and weather. A well defined and blazed footpath led away from my car into the deep green woods.

Early fork on the Trail to Cascade Falls

I didn't do much research on this hike beforehand and was surprised to find a fork in the path after a few minutes of walking. A sign for 'Bluff Trail' pointed to the left. Unable to turn around from a promising name like that I headed left. The climb was short and steep and I soon found myself on top of a rocky outcropping with views to the south and west.

Trap Hills to the West

Green Ottawa Forest stretching to the South

The views of the Trap Hills to the west were pretty amazing. I've heard good things about this rocky area of the ...

• Tags:
• north country trail,
• ontonagon,
• ontonagon river,
• ottawa national forest,
• ravens nest,
• trap hills,
• waterfalls

Why You Should Build Your Own Darn Framework (Usually)

I've always been a big fan of writing my own website frameworks. It's how I learned to code, writing and re-writing a specialized PHP framework in an iterative, agile-like development process. There have been times when I've worked within standard systems (Zend, Code Ignitor, Wordpress, etc) but I try to avoid them on personal projects. PHP has a lot of flexibility in terms of allowing a developer set their own standards and I have a very unique style and approach to custom projects that I bring to my code. Also, I have some issues with using a pre-built framework.

Too Much Functionality

Some frameworks are very abstracted out with functionality for multiple data source drivers and DOM helpers (cough cough Zend). While it is impressive how much thought went into these large, comprehensive frameworks, there is often far too much logic there for a standard web project. As an example, one of the previous systems I worked with (heavy-traffic, front-facing site) was based off of the Zend Framework. Each page load included over 300 scripts ...

• Tags:
• best practice,
• mvc,
• php,
• security