Spring Cleaning

Google recently announced that it was discontinuing blogs published via FTP which is how this blog used to be published.  So, today I scrapped my custom built template I put together several years back and took the plunge to storing all of my content on Google's servers.  The following are the changes:

• Since the posts are stored on Google's cloud instead of my home machine, and I want the same URL to work, I had to change kevin.servebeer.com from a DNS host to a DNS alias that points to Google's servers.
• Since my picture gallery is still stored on my host machine, I had to register another hostname so that my picture gallery is still accessible.  My picture gallery can now be accessed at http://kevingallery.servebeer.com/gallery2.
• Set up a broken link host to point to kevingallery.servebeer.com so that pictures from old posts continue to work.
• Completely new fresh template design courtesy of the new online template designer
• Besides the new obvious colors and look and feel, a few cool new things:
• Date based hierarchical listing of old posts
• "Cloud" labels where the label names are larger for those that are more frequent
• Subscribe widget with several options to subscribe to the blog
• Cooler "What I'm Reading" section taken directly from my Google Reader account.  The items are sorted by most recently updated and include icons and thumbnails related to the item

Since I'm completely on Google's system now instead of using a hand built template on my home server, I hope to continue to add new and cool features that only the non-FTP deployment can provide.

Hopefully this fresh look will also give me more motivation to post more often.  Nowadays, most of my motivation is spread thin between school, work, and our bathroom remodel (details to come later).  I should be done with school this summer though and hope to pick up on a bunch of neglected projects like this website.

Website Enhancements

I had some time to work on some improvements to the site:

• Blockbuster queue widget. I subscribe to Blockbuster Total Access to receive movies through the mail. The Blockbuster thing in the right side bar will show, in real time, the contents of my movie queue.
• Condensed the archive list. Now, instead of listing out all of the post archives in the right side bar, I've condensed this down to a drop down box to save space.
• Updated map. I've updated the map piece in the right side bar to now center on the location of my house instead of my old apartment address.
• List of Google Reader subscriptions. This is the "What I'm Tracking" piece on the right side bar. This is usually referred to as a blogroll. I recently started using Google Reader to keep track of what I'm interested in via RSS. I used to use a plugin for Outlook called RSS Popper that downloaded updates on the machine where I was running this plugin with Outlook. Now that I've switched over to Google Reader, no matter where I am, I can read "updates" to the Internet that I am interested in like I'm reading unread email. There are other subtle improvements to using Google Reader like being able to watch embedded videos without have to actually go to the site address for the post, organizing your subscriptions by "tags", and starring your favorite items.
• My recent starred items. This is right below "What I'm Tracking" and shows the most recent articles that I have "starred" in Google Reader. This is basically a way of saving the Google Reader items that you are most interested in or want to save for whatever reason.

Stay tuned for a complete redesign one of these days...

Excuses

So, the website has been down and not updated for quite some time now. I can explain, I promise. So much stuff has been going on:

• Started school which includes one evening of class and one lab. The profesor expects us to spend the rest of the time outside of class studying for his class.
• Megan and I remodeled one of the living rooms. This consisted of stripping off two layers of wallpaper and two layers of trim, repainting the entire room with four coats, and removing the curtains. We spent a good two weeks on this working on it every evening.
• Getting ready and preparting for house party on September 23rd.
• Planted new grass in the backyard.
• My Internet was down for two weeks. This made the site not only out-of-date but completely inaccessible. The cable company took forever to get out here and fix it.

Hopefully I'll be posting more frequently in the coming weeks. I'm planning on putting together some "before and after" pics from the all house projects. Stay tuned...

It's Alive

I got my PC setup this evening in the office of my new house. Just had to register the free DNS service I use with the new IP address here and the site is back up and running. I can't sit at my desk for another week and a half though cause I cannot put large rugs down on the newly finished hardwood floors yet. I need the rug so I can roll around on my office chair without damaging the floor.

Getting things in the house and unpacked has been a little slower than I was hoping because I screwed my back up pretty good. I've been self medicating with some old pain medicine for relief. I was able to mow the lawn this evening though. It was getting pretty tall and really needed to be done.

My parents came up this weekend and I was able to get a ton of things done. We got everything from my old apartment moved, redid the electric box (see spreadsheet for more details), got the cable and Internet turned on with cable wired to all of the rooms, a couple trips to Home Depot for supplies, and a lot of much needed yard work done. I'm sure I'm missing something.

This week I'm having my new living room and patio furniture delivered, the outside and inside sprayed for bugs, some roof and guttering work done, and of course more moving stuff inside and unpacking.

Site Down for Awhile

Today, I'll be packing up the computer that hosts this website and moving it to my new house. I'll be pulling the plug this evening and things probably won't be up until Sunday or Monday (assuming I don't run into problems).

Maintenance Complete

All of the upgrades went fairly smoothly. The only trick is to get Apache to load PHP (my picture gallery uses PHP to render its contents). The following are the upgrades:

• MySQL - version 5.0.11 to version 5.0.41
• PHP - version 5.0.4 to version 5.2.3
• Apache - version 2.0.54 to version 2.2.4

So far, everything appears to be working and Apache hasn't crashed at all since upgrading.

Maintenance This Weekend

I've been having problems with my HTTP server crashing regularly so I'll be upgrading Apache, PHP, and MySQL this weekend to the latest versions. Depending on how many problems I have, my site could be down for a significant time this weekend. I've ghosted my current disk so I can resort back to that if I screw it up too bad :)

Upgraded Gallery to 2.2.1

I upgrade my picture gallery from Gallery 2.0 to 2.2.1 the day before yesterday. You can see the new stuff they added with this version. I haven't had a chance to play with anything yet though.

New KU Motorcycle Club Web Design is Up

I finally got the new design done and live for the KU Motorcycle Club at http://groups.ku.edu/~motoclub. Changes:

• Fixed F.A.Q. to look good through Firefox.
• New image on entry page.
• Condensed a few of the pages into one page.
• Updated the left-side navigation bar (new image, pages, font, size, etc.).
• Added images to the different news sites on the front page.
• New Club Officers page that shows images for each officer.

Finally Outta Beta!

I'm finally at the point with this website where it's stable enough for others to look at it. The site evolved from a bunch of random stuff I've been doing over the years. I've compiled everything together into what I like to call a "hybrid blog". It is also a really good arena for me to work on my memory skills which are definitely nothing to brag about.

A few highlights about the site:

• Run a real time report about my movies.
• Look at my picture gallery.
• View my blog entries in the center column.
• Click links within the blog entries to have the Google Map in the right sidebar update to reflect the clicked location.
• Search for your own locations on the search bar below the map and take advantage of the results (switch between map, hybrid, and satellite, get directions from that location, etc.)
• Use the search box in the right side column to search my blog, the web, videos, news, and all blogs. The results will be dynamically displayed in the middle column without page reload via AJAX. Change between the tabs to get your search results in the different domains.
• A list of different RSS feeds that I am tracking.
• Add comments about each individual blog entry.

What I have yet to do:

• Fix the style of the search results to better match the rest of the site.
• Integrate my Google Calendar as a page on the site.
• Add links to the RSS feeds for the blog and picture gallery piece.
• Add links in the right side bar for the different labels (you can currently see the labels at the bottom of the blog entries).
• Add a subtitle for the site.
• Finally finish uploading and sorting all of the pictures from European trip.

I've been posting for a couple of months, but the main page will only show the latest 10 posts. You can look at the older ones by accessing the archives in the right sidebar.

BIRT Updates

I finished a new BIRT report that displays information about my DVD collection. I basically cleaned up the formatting to make it look nicer and added some new graphs. There are three pie charts accompanied with data that show how I have ranked my DVDs, what decades they're from, and the different MPAA ratings in my collection. The second page is a list of all of the my DVDs including the year it was released, the MPAA rating, the runtime (in minutes), the date I added the movie to my database, and my personal ranking of the movie.

All of the data is dynamically populated whenever the URL is ran. So, what you see, especially the graphs and total runtime, is calculated on the fly when you run the report. I need to add about 10 DVDs to my database so the data in the report will change when I get around to this.

You can export the data into a CSV file by clicking the following button in the toolbar and choosing the desired columns to export:

You can also convert the report to PDF by clicking the following button in the toolbar:

Also, I upgraded the BIRT Report Viewer to version 2.1.1 on my Tomcat 5.5 application server.

New Google Toy

Being that I still have this in Beta, not yet ready to be unleashed, I just added a Google search bar in the right column (I also made the Google map longer, because bigger is better, right?). This new search leverages the Google AJAX Search API. I'm still tweaking the CSS stuff so that it looks right in the site, but so far I'm really impressed.

After you commit the search, I have programmed it so there are five tabs displayed in the main column: This Blog, The Web, The News, Videos, and All Blogs. These correspond to the different domains that can apply to the search you made and can toggle between them. The neatest thing about this is the AJAX technology allows the results to just be "pushed" on top of the existing content in the main column seamlessly and without refreshing the page. The same goes for toggling between the different search domain tabs (This Blog, Videos, etc.).

Here's my current list for the main things I need to tweak/add before I'm taking this thing out of Beta:

• Fix the new search so that the results colors, styles, etc. look good with the site.
• Add feed links for both the blog piece and my photo gallery.
• Create a subtitle.
• Integrate my calendar into the site.
• Finish new BIRT report design for my movies.

Welcome to My Brain!

http://www.brain-dump.com/ explains that a brain dump is "The act of telling someone everything one knows about a particular topic or project." While I definitely don't claim to know everything about a topic, I will do my damnest to dump all I have. Welcome to my brain, don't stay too long :)

My first post

Not much so far...