Learning

After a couple of false starts, I started digging into learning ASP.NET MVC a couple of months or so ago.

First, I decided that I also wanted to learn webforms, just in case.

Don’t look at me like that. I learned the error of my ways after my eyes started to bleed and hands began reaching out of the walls for me. Though I’m not sure that was caused exclusively by webforms. That may have been caused in part by my recitation out of a book of really odd Latin poetry that I ran across…

Either way, I stopped trying to learn webforms, so mission accomplished. Now if the really creepy looking guy would stop making faces at me in the mirror when I try to shave, that’d be great. Oh, wait, that’s me. Sorry.

Next, I tried just diving in by starting with Professional ASP.NET MVC by Galloway, Haack, Wilson, and Allen.

This, for me at least, was kind of a mistake. The first couple of chapters were okay, but the first chapter on the topic of Views was full of hand waving and a sense of go screw yourself. It all kind of boiled down to “I’m not going to discuss the code. I’m just going to go off on tangents that you don’t need right now.” (This is a pet peeve of mine)

That’s not to say that the book is bad. It’s actually quite good as long as you have a rough idea of what’s going on (which I didn’t at the time). Otherwise, it got a bit frustrating. I'm going back over the book now, in fact.

I ended up going online to find the music store tutorial that was mentioned in the book and working through that first. That worked a lot better for me, but it could just be that I’m a bit slow. Who knows.

Going on the premise that I learn a lot better by playing with something once I’ve figured out the basics, I decided to rebuild my website with MVC. After all, it was just static pages, so I wouldn’t have to worry much about the M portion of things.

As a result, I got a decent grounding in the use of Controllers and spent a small mountain of time re-arranging the structure of the website to comply with the MVC principles.

Of course, I also got to do some much needed housekeeping, so that’s a plus. It just took loads of time because there were probably 40 or so pages.

In all honesty, most of my frustration was dealing with CSS3 (the site’s last incarnation used CSS2 and a lot of things have changed) and getting all of the settings right (both on my end and on my hosting provider) to get web publishing to work from Visual Studio.

The site isn’t “finished”. I’ll probably always have things that I want to do to it, but it is published. The visual changes are fairly minimal. Mostly, the menu has just moved to the top instead of running down the left side. However, things are a lot different on the back end.

Now I get to move on to more complex stuff.

Current mood: tired

Current music: David Gray – Babylon

I Have Email Again!

If you emailed me in the last two weeks and haven’t gotten a response, I apologize profusely, because I didn’t get it. I had to switch over to my gmail account because my domain email was down.

If you tried to reach me and haven’t gotten a response, please, email me again and I will do my level best to respond with all due haste.

My (now former) hosting company was great when I first signed on with them a number of years ago. For the last 6 months or so, however, service has been going downhill.

This culminated in my email going totally down about two weeks ago after sporadic periods of uptime for about a week before that as well as their servers getting hacked (again), causing my site to be defaced.

To make matters worse, they were basically ignoring any and all trouble reports, so I was stuck without my main email, which I had been using up to that point during my job search.

Not exactly the best time for your email to take a dive.

About a week ago, I changed hosting providers, and taking the advice of Jeff Blankenberg, went with Crystal Tech.

Over that week, I’ve made more phone calls and written more emails to the two companies in question than I care to think about. The transfer process was, to say the least, not exactly smooth, but it’s finally over (I hope). On the upside, I can say that Crystal Tech’s phone support is both polite and helpful, which is always nice.

Hopefully their service is just as good as their support and their data center doesn’t explode.

Current mood: tired
Current music: Jimmy Eat World – Bleed American

It’s ALIVE! Well, okay, it’s actually DEAD, but it’s HERE.

I’ve been tempted to do this for a while, but have resisted until now.

Once upon a time (2005-2006 to be more precise), I was the executive editor of an open source enterprise magazine called o3.

It was an interesting trip and I got to speak with a lot of cool people because of it. Unfortunately, it didn’t work out.

The readership was good (500,000+ people in over 140 countries not counting the numbers from the internal distribution at IBM, which I don’t believe we ever got), but the ad revenue just wasn’t there.

It was sort of a classic catch 22 – the advertisers didn’t want to pay until we’d been around for a not inconsiderable amount of time, but I couldn’t exactly keep going without getting paid since it took up so much of my time. Sadly, this sort of thing happens in life.

You learn from experience and try to come out better for it on the other side.

What does this have to do with anything, you ask? Well, I’ll tell you.

The magazine has finally been declared officially dead.

It’s been rather zombie-like for quite a while (the site even disappeared for a few months at one point), but every time I thought it was all over, there was some new stirring over there. Now, however, it has been stated that the company that bought the magazine isn’t going to continue funding.

On its twitter feed, it was stated that, while the site was not going to be updated, it was going to remain online. However, given its past disappearance and the fact that the site, in my personal opinion, looks *horrible* after the redesign, I’ve decided to host the issues of the magazine on my site.

This is, largely, I think, just to prove that it really existed and that I had a part in it instead of it simply being an entry on my resume and a couple of pdf printouts of the articles that I authored.

So, with all of that said, if anyone actually wants to see the magazine issues, you can look under the “Writing” section of my site for the link, or you could just click here =]

It was released under a Creative Commons license, so feel free to pass it around to your friends if you want.

Current mood: tired
Current music: Loreena McKennitt - Marrakesh Night Market

It's ALIVE!!!!!!

In case you haven’t noticed, the redesign of the site finally went live about a week ago.

I’d planned to have it rolled out about a month ago, but things kept coming up. Since it wasn’t a huge priority, the redesign kept getting pushed back. Now, however, it’s up and running.

I admit it. I was bad and rolled it out at around 3pm instead of waiting for the middle of the night, but I didn't think there would be much of an issue. Besides, I'd gotten sick of it not being up yet heh

The frames are gone (huzzah!), replaced with CSS and XHTML so it makes everyone’s lives easier. It’s easier to update, easier for search engines to index, easier to navigate, etc.

You should also notice that there are a number of new graphics on the site in order to provide visual cues and break up the flow of the formerly all-text content.

Everyone seems to agree that it looks quite a bit better than it did before.

The only page that wasn’t touched in the redesign was the html version of my resume. That will still be done in Front Page because laying it out otherwise is a pain in the rear, but I can live with that. It opens in a new tab anyway, so it doesn't interfere with the rest of the site's design.

I should mention the resources used in the redesign:

The basis for the site’s CSS came from Stylin With CSS, which has all of the files available here

Most of the icons came from here

And my South Park-like character (which I’ve been using forever) came from the South Park Character Creator.

If you run into any problems, please let me know and I’ll see what I can do to fix them. It’s been looked over by a few people, but there’s always a chance that something got overlooked.

Current mood: tired
Current music: Def Leppard - Hysteria

Email Issues.

I apologize if anyone tried to contact me from about 11:20am-12:40pm today. The mail server at my hosting provider took a dive and I didn't get any of your messages.

Please feel free to re-send anything that may not have gotten through and I will make an effort to ensure that I respond to all of you.

Thanks, and I'm sorry for any delays or problems this might have caused.

Hello and welcome to last week.

After more than a little pestering, I mean encouragement, from a few people, I've finally set up a twitter account.

I thought I should put it on the sidebar for my blog and on my site so people could, you know, actually find it. If you're wondering about the username, it's an old nickname that I use on a few different accounts (slashdot, among others).

Feel free to follow my feed, but be sure to check your sanity at the door. =]

Current mood: tired
Current music: They Might Be Giants - We Want A Rock

Back on-line.

Well, my site and email are now back up.

However, I have to apologize.

If you sent me anything in the approx 36 hours that the site was down, I didn't get it.

Please feel free to re-send any emails, and I will do my best to get back to you.

Current mood: tired
Current music: Three Dog Night - Mamma Told Me