Hiking, web development, best practices, and general awesomeness
Earlier this week I had the pleasure of learning about Sculpin, a sweet PHP tool, from Ben Benesh at the local PHP meetup. Sculpin is a static site generator that takes a bunch of Twigs and/or Markdowns and compiles them into a set of static HTML files for easy deployment. There are some rather cool…
My legs were sprawled out on a flat rock, a timid autumn sun slowly seeping into and drying off the wet patches the thick woods had left behind. There was no way to get completely dry - my boots were far too soaked through for that - but I held some hope that the damp clinging to my calves would…
Rain never came that night. Instead the sky cleared, letting the full moon's light and icy air cut through the forest like a sharp wintery knife. When I finally pulled myself from the lukewarm cocoon into the freezing predawn air I was greeted by a thin sheen of frost covering every surface in…
The straps cut deep into my shoulders. I was carrying a very heavy pack, filled with food, warm clothes, and extra supplies, much more than my usual haul. This was no simple in-and-out camping trip. My destination was White Deer Lake of the McCormick Tract and cold temperatures and rain were in the…
The road wound and bucked like a living creature trying to lose me in the wooded hills. I cruised along, keeping a modest speed, trying to be mindful of the posted limit while being anxious to get started. This was my first hike of the day and the drive from Appleton had been long and dark. I neared…
Familiar green woods pressed around me. I was on my way out to Black Rock Point, a place north of Big Bay that I had visited several times before. A few discussions with a fellow hiker, Joel, had sparked my interest in the cliff base here. It was late in the evening and the sun had less than an hour…
Last week I wrote a little post and script to archive a directory. This can be really helpful if you're looking to backup some legacy code, especially a deeply nested old website, but what if the files only live online? How do you reach out to the internets and archive (scrape) a front-end?
There…
A few short miles south of Big Bay is an exposed overlook with a great view of Lake Independence and Superior beyond. Once an off-road destination for ATVs and people willing to walk in from County Road 510, Gobbler's Knob was purchased by the Thomas Family a few years ago and underwent a major…
Recursively tracing out a full directory and saving the files in an archive seemed like a fairly easy thing to do. After all, I knew how to glob() and was reasonably sure that the environment I was working in had the ZIP extension built into the PHP. But wait... Recursion? glob() does not handle…
Water dripped off my soaked jeans onto the bare rock. Jim sat next to me, relatively dry, and we chatted about programming. We had just crossed the Yellow Dog River below the last waterfall, at Brushy Creek Falls, through two very deep feet of water. Jim had a decent pair of quick-drying pants that…