Hiking, web development, best practices, and general awesomeness
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…
The trees grew thick and undergrowth tangled along my confused route. I had come a long way from Wolf Lake Road - along clear and exposed rock bluffs, several two-tracks, and through managed hardwoods - and this last stretch on the ridge was the worst so far. There was supposed to be some open views…
Stretching west from the tiny town of Diorite is a jagged line of bluffs, swamps, and sandy flatlands. The bluffs are not terribly tall, rising less than two hundred feet up above the plains below, and promise few clear south-facing outcroppings. Pines cover the sandy sections of the plains near…
Comments are an important part of a blog. Too often blogs are used as a soapbox for one person to state their ideas and opinions out into the open air of the internet without any sort of inline interaction. Comments allow an audience to give feedback, debate the points, or provide their own views…
Tilden Mine, for all its positive contributions to the Upper Peninsula's economy and history, looks like an oozing orange-and-grey wound gouged deep in the green hills of Ishpeming and Negaunee. Summit Mountain, Tilden Lake, and Palmer Lake are remembered only on old topographic maps, completely…
Reading and writing EXIF headers into JPEGs is not something that PHP offers a lot of help with. Outside of one helper function for reading, exif_read_data, which returns a wide variety of meta data about the image (including non-EXIF basic properties of the file), there is no easy way to read or…
Of all the memory-intensive processes that you can do with PHP image resizing is one of the most abused. It may be tempting to have the power of requesting any image in any size, passing the parameters in to a script and boom, having a custom fitted image, but it's not a great idea. There are…