Web Development and Technology Blog

My cousin, Glen, had the idea to create a Wiki. We recently suffered a loss in our family and one of the ways people dealt with it was by using the blog of the person who had died, so this seemed like a natural extension.

Now, outside of Wikipedia, I have yet to see how exactly this would be useful, and definitely have yet to see how people are using it in the enterprise; but in this case I think it could be a very good idea.

The site isn’t the best and the rich text editor needs work, but if it gets my not-all-tech-savvy family to post info, it must be doing something right.

If you are interested here is the Pearson family wiki.

(BTW, I am putting this in my Web 2.0 category – I am still somewhat undecided about what that is, is it the technology (RSS, Ajax, RIA) or is the community-stuff (Blogs, MySpace, Wikis)..feel free to give me your thoughts.)

My wife has started putting up pictures on my site (you can see here), so that everyone can see them. But I noticed that some were big and she had so many it was a pain for her to edit each one individually. I had recently found this site Picnik.com and so I went back there to look at it. Not only does it work great, but they have now added the ability to get a Firefox extension or IE add-in (which I haven’t tried).

The extension makes it so easy to right click, send the picture and edit it. Now if only we didn’t have to save and re-upload, but hey, much easier to use than launching Photoshop for every picture.

When I started blogging, I thought I could put all personal stuff on MySpace, and tech/work stuff, here. But guess this blurs the line, although it is mostly personal.
My fourth wedding anniversary is coming up on June 14 and I was looking back at some photos from the wedding and the honeymoon. My wife, Stacy, and I went to Hilton Head Island (a wonderful place if you have never been). Along the way we got off Interstate 26 onto US 74 outside Hendersonville, NC, headed toward Chimney Rock Park. We stopped in this little town that had a little creek running along the main street, behind all the shops and you could go down and walk along the river. The scenery was beautiful, and while there, I walked across the rocks into the river to take some pictures. Stacy kept the camera, and as luck had it one of the rocks was slippery and I fell in (only a little bit). All caught on camera.

Stacy has lost 90 lbs. since this photo was taken (wish I had lost that much!)

This is one of my wife’s favorite honeymoon memories, and a funny story (which I don’t tell well), but at the time we didn’t realize what a strong memory it would be, so we never made note of the where we were, or the town’s name.

Since I was looking at the photos, and we are again planning a trip to HHI, I thought I would try to find where this was. Luckily, Stacy remembered that we were headed to Chimney Rock, so thanks to the miracle of Google Maps, I mapped Chimney Rock, and put it on “hybrid” and followed the creek all up and down US 74. Finally I looked really closely at where it seemed to come together and the road went over, and we googled the location and found out there is a town of Chimney Rock Village. We found this site, and it matched our pics, so we knew we found it.

So I guess in the end this is a tech-y story, cause in the olden days before Google, we might have had to just drive around Western North Carolina wondering where we had stumbled upon this pretty little village.

Wow, it is so much harder doing a site, either professional or personal in nature, for yourself. Like many things in life, it gets placed behind higher priorities. So it is that I am blogging at 2 AM while trying to finish the content on my site.

I wanted to answer the number one question I would have if I came to this site. PearsonSpace.com, huh? How derivative is that.

Well, not really, or not as much as it would seem. I never realized, having not had my own domain in years, how many Pearsons there are. Of course, I manage one of those site, Pearson’s Funeral Home, but I never realized I had such an extended web family. So after trying to get my 13-year-old daughter to come up with something cool and creative, and not Pearson-related, this is what we ended up with.

Seems to fit though, because we can have family stuff, hopefully, soon my wife and kids can blog and put pics up there, although they do a lot of that at MySpace; plus it can be a repository for my freelance web work, as well as my tech musings.

My blog- My intention is to keep this more focused on what I do for a living, namely web development, software and IT. More personal stuff I have stuck at MySpace, time permitting.

So take a look around and contact me with questions.