Hiking, web development, best practices, and general awesomeness
Winter had been rough on the old Smith Fisheries Road. Well, to be honest, I don't think I have ever seen this road in great shape. Since my first visit to Montreal River in the summer of '08 every drive has been a treacherous one, lurching over huge ruts and praying at that ridiculous slope around…
As some frequent visitors may have noticed over the last week I've been dealing with a pretty bad spam problem on this blog. Since I don't use Wordpress or any other blogging framework there wasn't a quick fix for this issue, no plug-in to download and plop on or anything. I had to come up with…
The Keweenaw Ridge has plenty of interesting rises of conglomerate and basalt. The spine stretches from the Porcupine Mountains all the way past Copper Harbor with dozens of prominent mountains and bluffs, some remote and forested over, others easily accessible and well-known by locals and tourists.…
As I discussed in a recent post about my 2013 plans, I've started working on my waterfall site again. This was my first large-scale side project, outdating my blog by a few months and including over a hundred waterfalls and 50-odd journal entries. The website included driving directions, photos, and…
Angry no trespassing signs shouted down on me from high in the trees. They were scattered through the woods, not in a solid line, and it was confusing to know where the actual property line was. The only thing that was obvious was that the wide, easy road leading from Keystone Bay was private while…
The noon sun hung high in the sky. I looked west, along the south shore of the Keweenaw, and mentally reviewed my status. All morning had been spent walking alongside Lake Superior, starting up near Horseshoe Harbor and curving around the eastern tip. I was near Keweenaw Point now, the farthest…
Cool air issued out of the hole of the woods like the gentle yawn of a waiting giant. It was surprisingly tough to leave the open air of the shoreline, with Lake Superior's vastness sitting always to one side, and enter the closeness of the forest. I stepped away from the Keweenaw Rocket Range and…
Moonlight trickled down through bare branches and spilled out onto an overgrown track in the woods. It was a full moon that morning, or pretty close to one, and the sun had yet to rise in the eastern sky and brighten my passage. I wasn't too worried. Aside from a few deep mud puddles the road over…
Over the last month or so I've been spending a lot of time working with image manipulation. First I played with resizing with PHP GD, a basic library included in most builds. Then I jumped into the real meat, reading and overwriting the raw EXIF headers, to both clean up some pieces from GD and…
With the advent of responsive design and later discussions adaptive content has come a split in the world of content strategy. In one corner is NPR's COPE, the idea that content should be flexible and flow through many different formats with the standard web page being just one possible outlet. Over…