Blogs

Went to Chicago last night to have Dinner with my 3 Day team even though I am not walking this weekend. It was great seeing everyone. We had a much smaller group this year but still had a nice time.

I finally got out and started training for the San Diego 3 Day. It was a short 3.5 Mile walk but at least it got me out and got things stretched out. The weather is finally decent and I needed to get out since we are just under 200 days now. I will probably do another couple short walks before kicking it up to 5 miles for a short time.

You might notice the blog page looks kind of plain right now. I decided to get rid of the Wordpress software that I had been using and convert to Drupal. Drupal is the content management system that I have been working with. I have converted my blog entries but have not themed the site yet but it should look better within a week or so.

For the last couple of years I have been doing all my Web development and testing using a Linux Virtual Machine that allowed me to setup a development image that was close to what my actual production environement was.  This worked pretty good but I probably wasted quite a bit of time building the system and installing all the write tools.  I found a new tool for my Mac called MAMP that is going to mean I won't have to waste that time in the future.  This MAMP program installs the Apache, MySQL, and PHP environements on my Mac and the Pro version includes some tools to allow me plenty of control over virtual hosts, mysql databases, and the apache modules that are loaded.  I wish had found this months ago.  I have been testing this for a couple days now and it works great.  The sites load and work locally just as they do on their hosts and I no longer have to keep Fusion running with a Linux VM all the time. The Pro Version is $58 and well worth the money in my opinion.

I have been working on my Church website for a number of years now and while it has gotten better with each itteration, I have come to realize that there really is so much that could be done yet.  When I took over our Church website from someone who moved out of state, it was developed entirely in Frontpage and I continued to use that for some time.  After I got tired of dealing with the bad code that Frontpage produced I moved the website to Dreamweaver and that made it a little better but I did not have the time to devote to the site that I had in the past.  The other issue with using Dreamweaver is that I was testing/developing at home and unless we purchased multiple copies of dreamweaver, I was the only person that could update the site and that did not lend itself to having a lot of fresh content. I spent the last year or so learning the basics of Drupal.  Drupal is a content managenment system which I have used to setup our church website so that once I put some basics in place, others can help update the website using only a browser if they have a login to the site.  We have started using this new site but as I teach others to use it I find there are many things I am not satisfied with on the site and I want to learn more about CSS, PHP, and MYSQL so I can really do the things that I want on the site.  I have found a great resource in a website called www.geeksandgod.com that is a great site that helps people interested in developing church and ministry related websites.  I am listening to the podcasts and really coming up with some good ideas. One of the first things I want to do to get to know this platform better is convert this wordpress blog of mine to Drupal 6 to get me more proficcient in the tools that I need.  Design is probably one of my biggest hurdles as I am more of a technical guy and not really the artsy creative type.  I may need to rely on the advice of others for help there.