Announcements,Friday, August 31, 2007
The good old discussions that we had in the discussion forums are gone. When I updated the forum software I made a few mistakes in the updating steps and it caused a number of problems. I was barely able to get them working at all. We had a number of old discussions in there that are gone now, but everyone’s avatar and profiles still exists. I greatly simplified the discussion forum to just three categories since there really isn’t a whole lot going on there anyway. Feel free to start any topic you like.
Announcements,Wednesday, July 18, 2007
I removed the flickr badge that showed the latest photos on the sidebar. It was slowing down the front page and I think it might have been causing the front page not to load in some cases. Now, to see our photos at flickr, see the “My Space and Flickr” section of the right sidebar and click on the “Flickr” menu item.
Announcements,Sunday, April 29, 2007
Over the past several months I’ve really started to use this website more and more to store all sorts of tidbits of information. If you’ve visited the Wiki area of this site, you’ll notice new notes in a variety of places.
Recently, Live Earth farm, the place we get our veggies, has started a Yahoo group and there are people emailing recipes on a regular basis. The problem is, once they email it, it just sites in my email box in a fairly unorganized fashion. I would always have to search through all my email for the recipe. Searching can sometimes take a long time. In addition, there are a bunch of other recipes we find at the food network, southern living, and so on. If I’m around, I usually converted them to PDF and it sits in a folder on my hard drive somewhere. That is also not easy to sort through. So to avoid that mess, I setup an online recipe database.
The thing I like about databases is that once you have the information stored in it, you can display and sort it in nearly any way you want; alphabetical, food type, author, rating, ingredients, date, etc. Just enter the information and the database does the rest of the work. And entering it is extremely easy too. Since most of the recipes we find are already online, it’s simply a matter of copy and paste to enter a new recipe. Now we have access to all our recipes, whether we are in Alabama or California, and we can share it with all our friends and family.
Check out the sidebar on the right and you’ll see a new “Recipes” link. Believe it or not, it was super simple to setup considering the hardest part of all this was getting to know all the features of the Expression Engine software and I still don’t know everything this online software does. Expression Engine software developers continue to add more stuff to it too! As of now, it’s a simple task to setup a new online database. It’s in an infancy stage at this time, but I plan to eventually have more viewing options on the main Recipes page and also provide a way for Jenn and other people to enter recipes. Perhaps later down the line I’ll add a rating system. For now, it simply shows the latest entered Recipes, but you can view them all and search through them using the search box.
I guess by now you’re probably thinking I’ve gone a little too far, or perhaps you are now convinced that I am really a geeky computer engineer! Or you’re asking yourself, does this guy really get excited about this kinda stuff? Hey, it’s okay, I wouldn’t be offended, that’s nothing Jenn hasn’t already told me. For some strange reason she actually loves me for being nerdy 
Announcements,Friday, March 23, 2007
I added a section to our website that shares our favorite links. These are websites that we like for one reason or another. Some of them we visit very often and others we visit only occasionally. In the navigation section on the right side panel, click “Links” to see the full list. In the full list, click one of the link titles to visit that website. Under each link title is a description of the link. And under each description are a few keywords related to that link. Click on one of the keywords and you’ll see a list of links related to that keyword. For example, click the keyword Church, and you’ll see a narrowed down list of links related to Church. To get back to the full list, click “Links” again on the side panel.
Announcements,Friday, December 15, 2006
After a short evaluation of Flickr.com, I decided to stick with putting photos on my own gallery. I think flickr.com is a lot slower than my own site.
Flickr is slower for several reasons.
- Huge number of visitors.
- It’s a cheap service, you get what you pay for.
- A complex interface.
My site has a very simple gallery interface that makes it much faster for viewing. I know not everyone has a superfast DSL connection, so I decided to stick with my own website. Also, I’ll have complete control over how the photos are displayed and the organization of them on my site. With flickr.com I am subject to whatever they decide to do with the site.
It’s so easy to uploade to flickr.com that I’ll continue to upload there. The high resolution versions will be uploaded, so if you want to have any printed at your local store, the flickr.com interface provides an order prints option that prints to a local store. In my area, they print to a variety of Target stores. I thought this might be a compelling reason for me to use flickr.com, however, I find that their prints are mediocre compared to the professional online service I use. I use http://www.whcc.com and 4x6’s are only .24 cents per print, including shipping. So I’ll continue to use http://www.whcc.com for prints.
