Web Development and Technology Blog

This is a techy blog, not a personal one, but just what I have been thinking as I consume all the tech around me.

My Dad, Lynn Pearson, died in 1999. Oddly, however, I find many of the times (which seems to be a lot lately) I spend on social networking sites reminds me of him.  He would never have used Facebook, and definitely not Twitter; it took 3 years for me to get him on the Internet to start with…so I tried to think about why when I am on Facebook do I think about him.

The answer to me, is that Facebook, and to some extent Twitter and the rest of the networks I am on (see previous post about social overload), shows a curious cross-section of your life to this point. I have friends on my Facebook from all stages of my life: including friends from elementary school that I haven’t talked to in years, high school, college, old jobs etc. Most of them don’t know each other and don’t have anything in common except me. In some ways it really does feel like Six Degrees of Separation.

So the random quizzes and conversations that come up with this varied group, leads me to think about those different places in my life. I definitely hadn’t thought about Wesley and his “Why yes” taunting in years, or for that matter his Mustang he had in high school that he put on “5 Cars I’ve Owned,” or all the kids I knew at St. John’s Elementary School.  Maybe I am getting old, but I think it is awesome that new technology is allowing me to reminsence and interact with those people, and do it before I am 80.

In the end, maybe this blog isn’t about my technology or my dad, but rather the curious socialogical experiment that we are undertaking. The one in which an increasingly dispered populace with seeming less interconnectedness, is actually overcoming that distance virtually. Another reason an amazing time to be alive!

Senator Jack Johnson, Tennessee State Senate District 23, is a client of Majority Strategies, aka “my day job”, and we have launched a new version of his campaign web site.

Jack Johnson Web Site Header

Currently, the Tennessee legislature is in session, and Senator Johnson is using the site to keep his constituents informed on the news from the session, his schedule and committee meetings, as well as, solicite feedback from them.  Senator Johnson has also started to Twitter and you can reach his account from the site.

Senator Johnson is up for election in November , 2010 and will continue to use the site as a valuable communications venue to speak directly to the voters in his district.

We have some amazingly talented designers and the site looks incredible. On the back-end it has a custom content management system to easily allow the Senator and his staff to add events, news release and any other information; manage volunteers and send email to his email list.

I look forward to working with candidates around the nation to help them improve their web presence so they can communicate directly with voters.

Feel free to use my contact form if you are interested in getting more info on me or Majority Strategies.

After several bumps along the road, the web site for the Pearson Funeral Home, the oldest family-owned funeral home in Louisville, Kentucky has been launched.

The look of the site has been over-hauled and updated.  Additionally the major changes are:

• Virtual guestbook – People can easily add condolences to a virtual guestbook, that the staff moderates
• The obituaries are easier for the non-technical staff to input and update and post pictures
• Custom content management system – staff can add new pages and edit all existing content
• Easier navigation, including dynamic menus

No site is ever finished, but it is nice to get this site launched and for visitors to get to use it.  Not maybe the most exciting site, but a great marriage of function to purpose.

It always seems that maintaining and updating your own personal site is the hardest and most neglected. Ironic, considereing you contastantly tell clients that fresh, relevant content is the most important thing to keep visitors returning and improving search results. However, since I don’t pay myself, paying customers always come first.

So as I was looking at my site to get it up-to-date, adding my new job and such, I realized that I needed to add links to all my social networks. Previously, I only had a link to MySpace, which my wife and kids use. At the time I created that, I never thought I would have so many accounts littered all over the place.

I tried at one point to keep them separate, so that Facebook only had personal friends and LinkedIn had colleagues, but that didn’t work as planned, as some personal friends only had LinkedIn and some colleagues only had Facebook, so I ended up with duplicates. In addition, I now Twitter a fair amount so I am following a cross-section of people there. And finally I am using FriendFeed to aggregate some of the data (you know, because Scoble says everyone will leave Twitter and go to FriendFeed, so hate to be left behind :-p). This is only the tip of the iceberg when you think about all the private social networks going up, I know I belong to one for Red Jumpsuit Apparatus powered by Ning among others.

I think it is a big mess.

I know from each company’s perspective they need the traffic and users to get advertising to keep the platform free, but from the users perspective it is a nightmare to keep up with it all. I hope that Facebook Connect and the Google Friend Connect and the like are a step in the right direction. I think we need interoperability and we need to be able to control our own data. If I want my friends to follow me to Plaxo and FriendFeed and back to Facebook, they are my friends, I should have the options for what info gets shared and by whom and to where. Of course, it will take it a while to iron it all out, but till then feel free to add me/contact me, wherever you find me.

Normally, Stacy does all the personal family blogging (and picture posting), but she is still in Kentucky on the second week of our holiday trip, while I opted to drive home on Saturday, so I thought I would post about the trip to Gatlinburg for Christmas. I am sure when she gets back she will have much more to say, and more eloquently too.

We got to the Smokies on Saturday, Dec. 20, where we stayed at the Westgate resort. The weather had definitely cooled off since leaving Jacksonville. Everyone was excited about cooler holiday weather and the prospect of a white Christmas. We got in too late on Saturday to do much, so just went to eat at Johnny Carino’s (they no longer have any in Jax, so we missed it). We enjoyed the drive, our friend Garmin had taken us up 95 through Asheville, which did seem better than going up 75, and we had stopped at rest stop and eat these wraps Stacy made.

We only had a few plans, lots of places to eat from our past trips, but not a lot we HAD to do on this visit. So on Sunday we went out to see the national park and maybe some snow. It was cool, but not as cold as expected, but obviously the higher we got the more it cooled off. The road to Clingman’s Dome was closed, but you could stop at the base of it, where you straddle the North Carolina-Tennessee border. The view was amazing, but the wind sure was blowing, I had hoped we could do some walking, but no one was for that, and Stacy had started to get a cold (I think from the change in weather). From there we went over into Cherokee, NC. Stacy and I had been, but Jacob wanted to see Santaland and Ghost Mountain in the Sky. We will have to go back in warmer weather so he can add to his coaster count.

Once we got back to Gatlinburg, we went to Calhoun’s. I had some very good ribs! Looking back now I am thinking our main activity was eating out, LOL. The next night we ate at Bubba Gump’s. Stacy and I had really liked it previously, but it was very disappointing and over-priced this trip. After we left Bubba Gump’s on Monday we walked the strip to see the Christmas lights. I couldn’t believe how sparse the crowds were, I assume the recession really impacted discretionary travel, but it was still very pretty. I hadn’t dressed warm enough, so we bought jackets in a store, which I probably won’t get to wear again till we go back next year.

All week long we played lots of board games, which went well. Usually someone yells death threats after only a few minutes, so that was wonderful change. Maybe us 3 kids are maturing, LOL. We even had gotten a new game from Santa, a new version of Clue and it was a lot of fun. We also played a newer version of Monopoly where you get $2 million each time you pass GO.

Brianna and I went to the indoor water park on Tuesday, and it was a BIG disappointment. It was one of the reasons we had picked Westgate, but the whole experience was a let down. But the worst for us was the 60 degree lazy river (the water heater had been broken for a week), I thought would be relaxing, not a Polar Bear Dive! While we were at the water park, though, Jacob made his famous peanut butter balls. We had tons of chocolate for the week, will probably pay for it in diet in the new year. That night we went to eat at a new place called Blue Moose, that Stacy’s friend Beth recommended. The burgers were great, and next time I want to try their wings.

Anyway, Stacy still wasn’t feeling good and since Dollywood was closed on Christmas Eve, we postponed that to Friday. Amazingly, considering it was a tourist town, lots of places closed early on Wednesday and were closed on Thursday. But we did go to a great Mexican place called El Paso in Sevierville (apparently it used to be Monterrey, leading to us having GPS issues). I honestly think I could eat Mexican daily, but it was Feliz Navidad for us, LOL.

As is our tradition, we opened gifts Christmas Eve night. The kids are getting SO old, so they get less but bigger gifts, but they seemed really excited about their gifts. Glad Bri liked her record (yes, like LP’s) player after spending hours looking for Beatles albums around town. Christmas day we ate lots of food and chocolate and played games and watched holiday movies. It was so much fun, weird when I think how old the kids are and I figure not too far away from having our family of four maybe include significant others on the trip (of course with Bri’s texting, it is almost like having them along now, :-p ).

So on Friday, we went to Dollywood. The weather was very warm so all but the water rides were open. The mystery mine ride was a ton of fun, but being the old geezer I am, I pinched something on the second ride and hurt the rest of the day. Stacy still had the cold, so we went to a lot of the Christmas shows, while the kids rode. When we left there, we ate at Ruby Tuesday, so Jacob and I could get the unlimited fries, because that is a BIG deal in our house.

On Saturday, I rented my Chevy HHR, which Jacob was jealous of, and drove home. I hit every accident and construction delay possible in Georgia, south of Atlanta, so it seemed to take forever, but I was glad to get home. On Monday, I picked up my “boys”, Tucker and Graedy, and we are having a bachelor-week, except for the time I spending at office working on web site and installing some network-storage.

We have a wonderful Christmas, and hope you all did. Definitely check back in a week for Stacy’s version.

A long time ago (ok, 1998), I wanted a name for when I did consulting. Mainly it consisted of simple networking and computer repair, and was almost all cash (hope the IRS doesn’t read this), and was rarely invoiced. So to be interesting I decided that the name of my one-man company would be ECP5 Networks.

The name I bill on actual invoices these days for my networking/web development/database work is still ECP5 Networks, but that is about the only place you see it. When I launched my first personal web site in 2000 it was name edpearson.net, but had the ECP5 on it and a logo (a logo I designed, so not much to look at). However, when I launched this current personal site, I opted for a different domain as I now have a family and thought that each member would use it, currently, that is only Stacy. In face, the ECP5 doesn’t even appear on the site currently, except under my Curriculum Vitae.

Anyhow, as I am doing more consulting, I wanted to come up with a new look to the site and therefore a new logo and branding. So I am back to thinking about how to use the ECP5 name and it got me to thinking that I use the name as my Twitter id and on many forums around the Net, but only in my head did it mean anything, so thought I would explain…for all of you dying to know. LOL

Growing up, my family heritage was a pretty important thing to me, as I had important lineage, at least if you asked my two grandmothers. Anyways, I was named in honor of my grandfather on my dad’s side (the Edward) and for my mom’s maiden name, Clay. My dad’s name had taken after his granfather, but wasn’t just alike, so it wasn’t like we were ever Jr.’s or Sr.’s etc. However, we shared the initials of our progenitors. For my dad LDP followed from Lorenzo Pearson, who started our family funeral home (the history is here) and for me the ECP came from my grandfather, Edward Clarence. My cousin, Edward Courtney had been similarly named, but he always went by Courtney.

So anyway, being the history person and thinking my heritage was cool, I counted and realized I was the fifth member of my family to be named something with the initials ECP. So decided my “corporate” identity would be ECP5 Networks.

I am hoping I have a new logo soon and can re-design my site and actual use this as the beginning of a real brand, even if just for web, database and network consulting. But at least now if someone were curious, they would know, maybe this will even be a blog Stacy will read.

As I recently Twittered, I am excitedly back into doing some web development. Currently, it is a final re-launch of the Pearson Funeral Home web site, that basically was designed 2 years ago, but never got launched, so now I am re-writing the code for it to be more secure and have more functionality, as I have learned a lot in the past 2 years.

Anyway, since Adobe Dreamweaver CS4 is out, I thought I would try the trial and see if I thought it was worth the upgrade. The last version I bought was Studio 8 when it was still Macromedia. I hadn’t seen anything big in CS2 and/or CS3 to push me to upgrade the studio, other than the post-merger integration of Fireworks and PhotoShop…but that is another topic.

However, being a Dreamweaver user since version 2, in like 1997?, I wanted to give CS4 a try and see what they had added to make the case to upgrade.

The biggest improvements I wanted to see were better performance, better PHP code completion, CSS suggestion and I wanted to see how the Live View feature would work.

My basis of comparision, besides Dreamweaver 8, was Aptana, that I have been using inside Eclipse. It is NOT WYSIWIG, but has functioned well for code generation, and has a great price point..FREE!

Like anyone else who lives on their computer like I do, I am a constant user of Google, but I have mixed feelings about the intertwining of my needs and their services. As a (now-former) Windows admin, I spent a LOT of time with Microsoft products, including developing and managing them. I understand the angst about MS and their monopoly, but for all the MS-haters out there, is a “GOOG-opoly” really better?

I am for free enterprise and if someone provides a superior product, then the market should reward them. Google certainly has responded to a market need, in a variety of niches, however, the more areas they go and the more data they suck into the huge data centers, the more they can abuse that power.

This has become of particular concern for me lately.

At my current position, I was running out of mail server space (we outsource it) and I am on two machines, and so IMAP made more sense for me than POP on each. But I couldn’t keep the messages on our server, so I looked around. GMail became my choice, simply because they allow FREE IMAP access and will store (currently) at least 6 GB of data. I have long used Yahoo for webmail, but they charge for IMAP. So I am now using GMail, happily, and didn’t even notice the outage the other day, because I don’t use the web interface AT ALL. Also, it does a Blackberry app, which is nice. My only question is, what does Google get out of this arrangement? I don’t use the web app, so never see the ads, so how are they going to monetize me?

The other area we are using Google now is for their spreadsheet app, because it was so much easier to share documents with others, than me building a new web app for some internal use (although it has given me a great chance to prototype different PHP/AJAX grid frameworks). They already had built some cool little AJAX toys into it, so let them deal with the hassle. But again, how will they monetize this in the future?

I can’t imagine they are just giving me all this bandwidth and disk space (regardless how cheap it is now), just out of some techy-altruism, there is a profit motive in there somewhere! My only conclusion I can reach is that the more I am dependent on them in any one arena, the more likely I am to use them in others and they have already figured out how to monetize many of those areas. So again, I ask, is really a “GOOG-opoly” any better than any other monopoly. We become so dependent on one company, that the opportunity for abuse, may just be too much to resist, regardless of the oft-professed “DO NO EVIL” mantra.

Stacy read that we needed to upgrade Wordpress, so while we were doing that, we both changed our theme. She was tired of her sunset theme, so she got a Fog theme and I gotone that looks kinda tech to me (call CleanJS..I think cause it has some Ajax-capabilities).

Anyway, it is pretty amazing how customizable the themes are and the amount of option in the themes and in Wordpress. I don’t blog much (obvioulsy), but see the potential. Of course, Stacy doesn’t see the point in spending all the time customizing the CSS and even the layout, but I think it is great that it is so flexible.

Well, hopefully, everyone will like the new looks for our blogs.

I am getting settled into my new job. I am working for a mail firm that does mostly design work, meaning a lot of Apple’s. In fact, I am writing this on a MacBook Pro (with Fusion and Vista running virtually), that actually isn’t too bad.

It has been a learning experience spending all my time on Mac’s, but all in all not that different. They have some great features for me, you can install and run Apache, MySQL and PHP all with a click, try doing that on a Windows to make a development machine!!!!

Anyway, because of the work I will probably spend blog less here, but did finally make the jump to Twitter, which I had heard about from Scobleizer for a year, but didn’t think I would like it. Actually in some ways it is better, because I don’t have time to do long-form blogging, not to mention I wasn’t sure that many people read mine. Anyway, if you are on Twitter, follow me and I will try to do more updates. I am also on Facebook if you are on there. (It is a big argument in the house as I am not a MySpace fan, but everyone else doesn’t like Facebook as much.)

If you want to follow more on teh family, Stacy is doing a great job blogging (apparently it helps to not have to work full-time, LOL). So check her out.

I am loving Jacksonville, went to a meeting of the Jacksonville SQLServer UsersGroup the other day, and they had a full house to talk about the new features of the 2008. In fact the guy giving the presentation has even published on SQL, wow that is cool.

I am currently working on doing some more MySQL/PHP work and learning Ajax, maybe even Ruby if I have time, so will try to update everyone on that!

TTYL..Ed