Web Development and Technology Blog

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.

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

I work at a place where I believe we have about every product made by Iomega since they started in 1984?. We still have a huge 10 MB Bernoulli drive and disks around here. However, I must say thanks to the people at Iomega. I had all my stuff from working at the Republican Party on a Zip disk and couldn’t find any archives of my web work there until I was able to find a Zip drive and sure enough it was still usable. I will have them up in my portfolio section hopefully soon.  Even funnier I had a Zip recovery disk for Windows 98, didn’t even take the full 100 MB, but I couldn’t even fit a days worth of pictures now on that same size disk.

Also, have a friend who got an iPhone, but he was cool about the credit, said that it was his “early adopters tax,” which I totally agree with.  I did see this hilarious spoof on the web right after that (this isn’t the most timely blog), but I enjoyed it nevertheless.

Since my wife never seems to come here, and her using RSS is unlikely, I have added an e-mail notification option to the sidebar at the right.  Feel free to sign up to get an e-mail when I post.

If you have looked at my wife’s gallery, you can tell she takes a LOT of photos. In fact, on our trip to Hilton Head, SC a few weeks ago, we took about 600 pictures on her Kodak Z612. I am mostly happy to have them on disk, and now the web, but Stacy likes to have them printed and be able to show people. That meant, either we invest tons of money into ink for our Epson R200 (which does great, btw, but can be very expensive) or we search for a good, cheap on-line printer.

The big names, Kodak, Shutterfly etc are all about the same price. The stores that sell on-line (Wal-mart, CVS, Target et al) are only cheap if you send away, not if you get them in store, so we kept searching.

Stacy found this site, Winkflash, that was advertising 6 cent prints, so we tried it, figuring even if the prints were horrible, we weren’t out much. Well, alas, the prints looked just as good as any others, and they have continued to offer good deals. We would highly recommend them, they are cheap, quick shipping, and great results.

Also, Stacy has decided to move copy her blogging over to my site, much to my delight, so you can now read her blog at: Pearsonspace.com/Stacy.

7/23 Update
Stacy isn’t “moving” just posting both places so her non-MySpace peeps don’t have to go to Myspace to read, and vice versa.

I have started several posts and never finished. I never realized how much work a blog would be. Coming up with what I wanted to write, which I thought would be difficult part, has been easy. But fnishing my thoughts and finding links and pics, that is another story.

Not to mention, I went on family vacation (for info see my wife’s blog) and have been working a ton to get our new ERM (or what ever business management acronym you want to use – BPM, CRM whatever) to work (you buy off-the-shelf to work right out of the box, at least that is what you think) at my regular job.  But I will be back.

I have run into this numerous times, so I am hopeful this will help someone, and also be a good place for me to look if I forget what to do.

At my office computer, I have taken advantage of the ease with which you can use Folder Redirection in Vista. In XP it was a bit harder, but with Vista it is easy to have the “Documents” (no more “MY” in Vista) stored on a network share, in my case one that is RAID enabled so I won’t lose my stuff.

Anyhow, since that redirection changes the Registry location for user files, it has messed up many of the programs I install that use InstallShield to install. InstallShield doesn’t apparently like UNC or Mapped drives as locations for personal/temp files, so I get this Error 1327 Invalid Folder.  I found this doc on their site and it was for XP, but the same fix applies.  Basically, I change the Registry entry that points to the invalid mapped drive, and run the install, and then add back in the registry key (or you can also just set-up the redirection again).

These vendors need to realize in more corporate environments, esp. with the advent of Vista, this redirection is more likely, but at least I found a workaround. It is annoying, but no at least I know and it is pretty easy to do.

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.