Hiking, web development, best practices, and general awesomeness
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…
Damp sand gave easily under my insistent footsteps. The logging track was smooth from a recent grading, a soft and even surface that hid years of ruts and potholes underneath. I envied the tires that got to enjoy such a road. Only loggers and the guards of the Huron Mountain Club were allowed to…
Over a year ago I started running. For a while I kept the routes short, only about a mile or so, not trying to pace or push myself too much. Then, in November, the plateau shattered and I was going for three, four, even six mile runs, averaging a ten minute/mile pace. In December I ran my first 5k…
Site analytics is an important tool for web developers and stakeholders alike. Knowing where visitors are coming from, how they're interacting with your content, and why they're leaving can provide valuable information on how to better serve your audience both on- and off-line. There are several…
I've had some fond trips along Blind 35. The first visit was over four years ago, a quick walk along some of the logging roads to a single outcropping. Then, a few years later, I did a fairly thorough exploration on both sides of Clear Creek, finding numerous vistas and even a bear and her cub. Yet…