Web Development and Technology Blog

If any of you read my wife, Stacy’s blog, you already are well aware of the big changes in our lives over the ast few months. We are now settled in Saint Augustine and I am finishing up my second week at my new job.

I was checking my blog so I could make sure and excise any pro or anti- candidate blogs, since my new job is political. Surprisingly more of my rants were not candidate and/or campaign related, so not much changed on the site. Also, I will be blogging less (if that is possible), because I don’t know what I will be doing to blog about and I won’t be freelancing to keep me much there.

I did do some cool stuff at Bluegrass before I left, so hopefully this next week I can blog about it. Make sure and check out their new web site!

I’ll be honest the reason I wanted to blog on this site was to get traffic to it, so I could do some freelance web development. My full-time job is great, and I get to engage in lots of different technology and business areas, but I wanted to do more web development. I have spent quite a bit of time learning CSS and PHP and MySQL…and now putting that all together to do some cool dynamic sites with advanced content management back-ends; so I want to do more!

I have been spending a lot of time looking at a blogging company whose whole emphasis is that you can should use blogging for SEO, on the commercial side of life at least. I have always thought this (seems common sense), but they have married the technology to the concept. Compendium Blogware was started just this last summer by Chris Baggot, late of ExactTarget. You can read all about it on their site and as much as I like the product, not a shill for them (unless it gets me a discount…then I will gladly shill).

I bring it up because one of the big things about the concept of the product is that the title of the blog plays into your SEO results, so use your keyword in your title of your blog page. I started out, like most bloggers, trying to be pithy and funny or intelligent…or something…with my blog title. Mine was “Tech Errata,” which accurately described my thinking of what it would be…but who ever Googles that phrase. In actuality, Stacy didn’t even know what the word was.

So I am changing in the hopes (and it is pretty remote, let’s face it, if people Google “Nicholasville Web Design” once a year I will be shocked)…but hey it is good advice.

Anyway, haven’t blogged in a LONGGG time, so needed to do it. Meant to blog after I got back from spending time in Indianapolis at the ExactTarget users conference, where I met the guys from Compendium. Have lots to talk about and will force myself to write this week…for the thousands of you Viagra peddlers (please if anyone real reads this, please comment) that frequent my site and have been dying for new content. So, sign up for the e-mail notifications and I will talk more later.

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.

It has, once again, been a while since I have blogged. Either been working or doing band stuff.

Anyway, saw this blog and thought it was pretty funny and pretty much summed up most bloggers. Haven’t decided which one I am (probably the validate my existence one, which no one has yet); although sadly, Bri has an ex-friend that totally fits the “Like Totally, I’m A Teenage Girl Blogger” category – if Bri cut all her hair she might fit that category some days too.

BTW, currently eating a Zatarains “ready to serve” sides, one of those rice packs that is ready in 60-seconds. Good, but not sure if I should be afraid of food this easy to cook and eat. Are we that lazy or that technologically advanced, makes me think of Back to the Future 2 and the Pizza Hut instant pizzas

Senate Minority Leader, Kentucky’s Mitch McConnell, is running for re-election next year and has launched a web site with a blog that so far has been pretty well updated. It is good to see a GOP Senator so pro-emerging tech and hopefully will continue to use this to communicate directly. Maybe some other Kentucky politicans will start doing this (hint, hint Ernie Fletcher).

On a personal note, I went to Sunday school with the Senator’s daughter, I even have photos from 1978 to prove it, LOL.

I saw this absurd article in today’s Herald-Leader. Stacy mentioned the other day how much quicker she can get around Cincy or Atlanta than around Lexington (probably because of our vast number of Interstates running through the backwater (uh, metropolis)). So the idea that what we need to do with an earmark is spend $100,000 on is pedestrian traffic. This is laughable and absurd, but moreover, this “in-fill” trend that city leaders like to talk about is a FAD, nothing more. In Jessamine county we are building a ton more Square Footage to serve Lexington workers than downtown Lex is, but hey let’s spend our tax dollars on pedestrians!!! (BTW, up until this I had really been supportive of the Newberry administration, but what bad priorities.)

Article: Earmark for Lexington

In a similar vein is this blog post on Fred Thompson’s site about how “temporary” taxes are anything but. I love this quote:

As we all know, there are few things more permanent than a temporary tax. Just ask the folks who footed the cost of the Spanish-American War for the past 108 years via a federal excise tax on our phone bills.

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.

My wife and kids are out back-to-school shopping. School starts back on Wednesday. I am glad their boredom will be over, but every year I lament the state of our American educational system more, but that is a rant for another blog.

Anyway, currently I am playing with tools in the Yahoo User Interface, some little JavaScript widgets that help give your sites a little more Web 2.0 interactive flair.  I am not doing anything complicated, but wish I knew JavaScript better, but with learning C#/ASP and the MS-SQL, MySQL and PHP work, I don’t know that my brain could take in anymore.

Of course, if the wonderful people at WordPress would put out a Rich Text Editor like the one embedded in this blog editor my life would be simpler. One of the reasons I am working with the YUI is that version 2.3 has a rich text editor. I have tested out quite a few and can’t seem to, at least easily, get the right set of options configured in any of them. So far, YUI’s Editor has been the easiest to configure, but still missing an image upload option (at least that I have found yet).

Lastly, while I took a break from coding, I was looking at the Iowa Straw Poll results. I find these to be great money makers for the party that holds it, but of limited real value. However, because the media places value on them, so do the candidates, or is that the other way around? Anyhow, after watching a video the other day from Mike Huckabee, I was very impressed to see his  second place win.

I went over to his site and thought it looked pretty cool and they already had a YouTube video up of post-Straw Poll spin, in about an hour, that is pretty good. What surprised me was that it was running ColdFusion. I have never done any Coldfusion, but what I have seen of Scorpio, ColdFusion 8 (which maybe out of beta now), Adobe hasn’t abandoned it, and with the help of BlueDragon, it might actually hold some developer mindshare.

On a personal note, I thought Huckabee to be a very articulate speaker and well-reasoned thinker. Plus, he has a good personal story with the weight loss and the Baptist preacher background. I will say the most ironic thing about him is that his sons, one of whom got arrested last year, are all still relatively large, and here the Governor lost all this weight and wrote a book on it. I am not really surprised about one son, as I met him back in my College Republican days and I think we all knew the only way he was involved with the CR’s was because of his dad, kinda reminded me of Tommy Boy.

So guess there are my random thoughts for Saturday…have a good rest of your weekend.

Well, not to sound obsessed with the whole “I’m with Fred” Thompson flirtation/campaign, but got an e-mail today and they have a 2.0 version of the site. The site that has been up all of 5 weeks. Guess this explains that whole $21,000 he dropped in the first month that I mentioned in a previous post.

Anyway, I should say don’t use me as a judge of the presidential campaign web sites, frankly I have only spent like 10 minutes on the other GOP ones, and not much longer on the Dem ones. (Although, doing a quick tour just now, I love the fact that McCain’s is begging for money and not much else on the front page…I’ll leave it at that.)

Today, would have been my grandfather’s 97th birthday. When I was a kid I always thought it was so cool that his birthday was exactly a week before mine, I thought that gave us some special connection.

Reflecting back now, I realize how little of a relationship I had with either of my grandfathers. My mother’s father because he died in 1986, and my dad’s father because he just was hard to get close to it. When “grandaddy” would talk and tell stories, it was wonderful. But those moments couldn’t be prompted. Guess he was very laconic, and if you asked tell me a story about X, you got the short version, but when he was ready to talk, he was quite the raconteur (kind of like my son, Jacob, when he wants to talk he never shuts up, but ask him a question and you get one word answers, LOL).

Grandaddy was a real example to do better in your life, both personally and professionally. I know my grandmother misses him, as do the rest of my family. I love you, Grandaddy.

BTW, quite the dapper photo. Found it when Courtney and I were looking through old Funeral Home photos. Doesn’t he look cool!

(Sorry, bad week both personally and professionally, so maybe got a little overwrought earlier when I wrote this)