Hiking, web development, best practices, and general awesomeness
Around this time last year I was playing around with fuzzy dates - that is, formatting a machine date (like the UNIX timestamp) as a human-friendly string (like, 'last week'). At the time I was working on my lifestream site and wanted to display elapsed time in a convenient manner. Now that I'm…
My Saturn Ion shot through the late-summer woods along a narrow two-track. The road to Echo Lake Nature Preserve, a walk that had taken my tired legs hours to walk last winter, was an easy drive for my little sedan. There were a few mud puddles, a few splashes to cake the sides of the car, and then…
Finding geographic proximity is nothing new for me. While I've played with the Google Distance Matrix API before I've also had some fun using alternative (Warning: Mathematical!) methods for measuring distance with flat planes, spherical approximations, and tunnels. When I looked at adding a simple…
Outside of fetching elevation information for each point on the upcoming waterfall refactor I decided to add a new feature. Listing the county and exact latitude/longitude is helpful for explaining where a waterfall is located (as well as showing it on a map, of course), but listing the 'closest…
The Huron Bay Quarry (better known as Arvon Quarry) and town of Arvon didn't have a very long lifespan. Around 300 people lived out here once, halfway between the entrance of Silver River into Huron Bay and Mount Arvon, and pulled slate from the pits for around thirty years. The entire operation was…
A related piece to the new waterfall site (that I'm still actively working on) is geodata - that is, the coordinates of each waterfall and nearby features, paths, etc. The existing waterfall site had each coordinate saved inline with the fall record, a very sloppy and elementary implementation.…
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…