The Apple developer sites for both “Web Apps” and “Safari” are not responding at all. Ken’s Paranoid Prediction: Apple’s pulling back on the stunningly cool and advanced CSS functionality (transforms and animations) now available in Safari Mobile and iPhone native WebView in favor of the same functionality in native iPhone programming. WWDC09 is coming up in June… I guess we’ll see.
UPDATE: They’re back up… kinda… I’ll take the paranoia down to threat level yellow.
In the midst of bringing the first public revision of flyGarmin to a close at work, a friend emailed me and asked if I could whip up an “instant web site” as his new startup company was about to get national attention. I had a week.
So I worked a normal busy day every day that week, and every night I came home and worked on the new site, kept company by my bride and my new John Adams DVDs. It went like this:
It was quite a week, but we got a pretty nice site out of the deal. And the great part was that I was able to make it client-maintainable right from the beginning. Open source is the coolest. I know that folks who love Drupal really love it, and I can tell it’s really powerful, but it just wasn’t “jump-in” intuitive like Joomla.
Oh, the site… weathernation.net. :)
The traffic was just burying my server. Heh heh.
No, I just realized that the podcasting plugin I was using was tagging everything on the site as though it was a podcast. But really, I didn’t even really record Intermediate Greek since it just wasn’t a lecture-style class. Most of what would have been recorded would probably have been me mistranslating something, thus discovering fresh new heresies.
So, TTFN to the exciting world of podcasting.
And a whole lot more. :)
[http://www.redeemerbaptist.org](http://www.redeemerbaptist.org)
I’ve finally switched on a group of changes I’ve been thinking about and working on for a long time. We had a site up, but it was basically straight WordPress, which just didn’t work well for what we were looking for.
Well, it’s still WordPress, but with a much more customized approach.
I decided to separate out what we did on our server and what we leveraged from somewhere else. Now, instead of trying to do our own calendars or use a pay service, I’m using Google Calendar and a nice plug-in for WordPress (which I’ve hacked slightly to serve my purposes). How wonderful to be able to add an event by typing “send Ken a check every second Thursday of the month at 10:30am” and have the system understand it and add it.
I’ve pulled together what I think is a novel use of static pages and categories into a pretty unified navigation system. The overall design is tableless, and (last I checked) valid XHTML and CSS. The CSS is virtually hack free with the exception of a conditional CSS inclusion for older IE due to their hideous treatment of overflow:visible. I can remove that later if I want to do a bit of a rework; we’ll see. I think I’d like to add a pre-IE6-era css file for simple display for folks with very old browsers; I’ll be keeping an eye on traffic stats to see if it’s worthwhile.
We’ll be podcasting Sunday messages shortly; just a plug-in and some set up. I have the audio already. The hardest part will be tracking down titles, references, and descriptions. (But it won’t be that hard.) Video is being served from and stored at Google Video (their server space, their professionally maintained cross platform player).
I’ll post a more detailed technical rundown on that site with links and comments. Time will tell, but I think we’ve landed on something we can really do some good stuff with.
If you have comments on the new site, I’d love to hear them. Use the email address on the site, or the comments here.
[cd]: http://www.librarything.com/work-info.php?book=15044595
Inspired by the very cool work at [memorizable.com](http://memorizable.com/), I’ve started to put together a vocabulary tool using their freely available, incredibly portable code. It’s just started, and I’m trying to find a source for the vocabulary words in order of frequency of occurrence, but at least you can give it a little run and see what you think.
[Ken’s Greek Vocabulary Tool](http://www.kpmartin.com/greek-tools/vocab.php)
Just choose a frequency range (I’ve purposely grouped it into tracks as they appears on Pennington’s [*New Testament Greek Vocabulary Guide*][cd] CDs), and then click “memorize” next to the word “definition”. There’s a flash card mode and a matching mode, both available from the bottom of the table. I only have about words down to about 100 occurrences right now.
Feedback appreciated in the comments here.
Imagine a fresh install of MySQL, (entropy.ch) PHP, and phpMyAdmin which didn’t work. MySQL is running in Terminal just fine. PHP is cranking along nicely. But phpMyAdmin steadfastly refused to run:
> Probably reason of this is that you did not create configuration file. You might want to use setup script to create one.
>
> Error
> MySQL said:
>
> 1045 – Access denied for user ‘root’@’localhost’ (using password: NO)
Run the setup script. Nothing. /config world-writable? Yes. Try manually editing the /config/config.inc.php with various recommended basics. Still no love.
The missing step? **Move the config.inc.php out of the /config directory to the root level of phpMyAdmin!**
…sigh… I didn’t see that written anywhere. Why doesn’t the successful “setup script” tell me to do that? Not too mention that the setup script will report “New server added” when in fact config/config.inc.php only got created, not written to.
I thought I killed it. Long ago. But as I was doing a [vanity search](http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&client=safari&rls=en&q=%22kpmartin.com%22), I found a [live copy of my old site](http://kpm.nwcomputer.com/Christian/M-Cheyne.lasso) running. Hmph. Dawn of the Website. thud… thud… thud… THUD… THUD… GRRRRRRRR!
[1]: http://oneredpaperclip.blogspot.com/
He started with one red paperclip, and [traded up to a house][1]. Great story.
[1]: http://www.business-opportunities.biz/projects/how-much-is-your-blog-worth/
According to [this][1] it’s worth $1,693.62. Isn’t that funny. I remember checking about three months ago and it was worth $0.00. So at this rate, I’ll be worth millions soon.
It must be the rapier wit, piercing political insights, deep philosophical challenges, and world-moving technology assessments. Or a broken algorithm.
[1]: http://www.flickr.com/
[2]: http://del.icio.us/
[3]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tags
[4]: http://books.aetherial.net/wordpress/
[5]: http://www.librarything.com/catalog.php?view=kpmartin&shelf=shelf&sort=ratingREV
[6]: http://www.librarything.com/
I know my readers include both those who will yawn at this as old news, and those who’ve never heard of such a thing, but in the spirit of [flickr.com][1], [del.icio.us][2] and similar “social” web offerings, I went ahead and started to set up a [LibraryThing][6] [account][5].
Pretty neat stuff. You’re able to have a very nice catalog of all your books, and you can cross-reference with the other members of LibraryThing, seeing who else has that obscure “Gospel Worship” by Jeremiah Burroughs, and then browsing their library for similar books you might find interesting.
Also, the site uses keywords (or [tags][3]) instead of as well as categories, which means where a book may fall under one major category, you may think of it in more than one context. For example, a book on Fort Sumter may be rigidly classified “history”, but I can keyword it “history, South Carolina, Places I’ve Visited”, “American Revolution” and find it more easily in the ways I think about it.
I can use a barcode scanner (which I got off eBay for less than $20) to enter books into it with one swipe. (The barcode scanner also works with nice, non-web-based software like [Books][4].)
Anyway, [visit and peruse the beginnings of my library][5]. It’s fun. Many of the books that I’ve entered are actually books that I’ve packed away (there were entered by Kenny before they went into the box) so they’re not necessarily my favorite books, but it’s still kinda fun.