Colleen got a Guitar and I got a Game

So, it’s summertime, and it’s ultra-hot outside and we needed some new activity to do inside.

Some of the people at my work play this computer game called Eve Online. It’s one of those games where you fly around in a ship and do different things. Much like a Star Wars game, but the graphics are pretty good. So I decided to download it and play it. I’m liking it so far.

Colleen got a guitar so she can start taking lessons and learn how to play it. She can already read music due to her excellent violin skills, so she’s halfway there already. As for me? All I can jam out is Louie-Louie.

Sooners B-Day

While it wasn’t too big of a day for Sooner, she turned one year old today. She’s no longer a puppy!

To Do for 3.0.0

1. Fix marathon training picture and look at upper case for file extensions.
2. Write CSS Class for non-thickbox images.
3. Xhtml validation fixes
4. Write CSS class for non-list bullets
5. Import marathon report, bolder boulder, elephant rock, walker ranch, 14er TR’s (huge), sugarloaf, ptarmigan pk, bear pk, sand dunes, hanging lake, brainard lake, climbing stats, me, friends, home p2, webcam, winter 02 in misc, winter park, rubik’s cube, sunlight ski and any other misc page on old website.
6. Circle animation while image is loading.
7. Fix thickbox window caption issue.
8. Fix Stats and Useronline page layout issue.
9. Ratings and Polls AJAX not working in IE6.
10. Test all with FF, IE6, IE7 b3, Safari.

Code Update

Hopefully in another two weeks I will have finished the importing from my old static site to this one. I’m hoping it won’t take that long because now Colleen is starting to miss me hanging out with her. So if it doesn’t get done by then, that’s what I went to go do instead of working on this site.

I’ve imported over 50 posts already and have another 100 to go. For instance, for those of you that always emailed me saying you couldn’t find the “Proposal Story” on my website anywhere, all you have to do is go over to the Search bar and type in “proposal” (without the quotes) and it should come up. Click on the title to display the full article. And boy is it long!

In other news, we are trying to train Sooner on how to go on walks properly and not act like she is the lead dog pulling a dog sled. It’s not going so well. Oh well, we will give it another week or two.

So Where Did Toid.net Go?

Ok, so you visit my site once every week or so and you just now came back and the entire design is now just showing a blog.

“Where are the links to the 14er trip reports!?…Where are the links to the…”

Well, after spending a month creating this blog, I realized how sweet php is and how lame static html is. Now that I have a backend database that is actually working, I am basically going to pipe all my old html pages into blog entries, corresponding with the date they were created. This will create one master database of my whole website!

Trust me, things will actually get updated more now that it’s so easy for me edit things. Here is an example of the steps I had to take to do a simple 14er Trip Report for Toid.net version 2.0. (aka static html Toid.net)

Old Method:
1. Climb the friggin’ mountain.
2. Take pictures with digital camera.
3. Download pictures from camera to linux box.
4. Open pictures in Gimp and downsize images to “web-ready” size.
5. Create a html page for each picture and write caption for said picture.
6. Find similar trip report and copy html to a new file and start editing the code by hand using notepad. Very time consuming.
7. Upload everything to Toid.net.
8. Manually update links on all my pages throughout site to reflect change in status of mountain climbed and where the html page itself is located. Tedious.

Whole Process ~ 6hrs (on a good day)

New Method:
1. Climb the friggin’ mountain.
2. Take pictures with digital camera.
3. Download pictures directly to my website, as they upload, I’ve created a program in perl that automatically downsizes the resolution to make them “web-ready”.
4. As I write my trip report, there is no html I have to enter as that is all pre-defined by my CSS file. I just free-hand everything in quickly.
5. Pictures no longer need their own page, as I’ve written a function that automatically displays a picture to the appropriate size of your screen, regardless of my original picture size, and adds a caption that I type in, again, without needing their own page created.
6. The database properly files the report, and updates all links automatically. No need to edit any other pages or upload anything. Everything can be found by using the search tool bar.

Whole Process ~ 1-2hrs

Much better. So….now that I’ve bored you with techno-babble, what does this mean?

As I approach Toid.net 3.0.0 and the new design, I will be doing the “easy” part of now adding a little more graphical spice to the layout and importing all the old data into the database. It’s a little hard for me right now to want to change as Google has all these links to all my old sites and now I’m going to really confuse Google by changing it all around. Plus, right now without any real graphics, it looks rather weak. However, that will change whenever I get time to work on it.

Thanks for hanging in there during this time and I envision the whole process to be done in another month. At least it better be!