Hiking, web development, best practices, and general awesomeness
Personal sites can serve a variety of purposes. They can brand, connect, or define the person or their interests. While those are important to me another reason I spend so much time on my sites is to experiment. Whether the focus is on site optimization or coding practices, I enjoy both trying new things and sharing my findings for others.
A month ago my blog hit a big milestone: 500 posts. It's taken nine years to accumulate this many words, words about PHP and Arizona and work and more boring personal matters. There have been dry spells that have lasted months and some months that the posts flowed out much more frequently. Overall I…
Over a year ago I made the decision to publish the custom framework behind my personal website. There were a few reasons why I wanted to share the code, though the main driver was that I wanted to actively modernize my code base. And it worked. Since pushing my custom framework I've updated huge…
Five years ago I played around with a PHP class to contain my resume content and abstract out optional pieces. This work ended up being unwieldy and largely unused - I had to create custom exporters to get the data out and rarely needed alternate versions of my resume. Shortly after building a few…
This week I finally made the leap and pushed my personal MVC to a public GitHub repo. I didn't do this because I'm particular proud of the code - a good chunk of it is six years old and isn't representative of current (or past) best practices. Nor did I do it because I think other programmers will…
Finally. After years of neglect and false starts the Waterfalls of the Keweenaw site has a new look. It was my first website, predating this blog by several weeks, though I haven't touched it in close to five years. It was about darn time that it got a fresh coat of paint.
So what is this site?…
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…
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…
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…
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…
The most recent redesign of my website(s), which I started by rolling out a new home page late last year, is focused on some responsive ideals. There are some other changes as well, like removing unnecessary Javascript and sprucing up my framework, but the main goal is to implement responsive…