Hello again! This is my first time to blog since July and that is a little bit long I know. So what has been going on? Well quite a bit actually.
First, Addison and Brandon are getting quite a bit older and are more active. I truly enjoy spending time with them in the evenings and that takes a lot of time out of blogging.
Second, my role as youth leader at my church has been taking a larger priority in my life than when we first started our youth ministry. We are now up to 40 students at our Saturday night events so I have needed to place more effort into the planning and preparation of that.
Third, we have moved…a lot. In October I moved my house and our John and my office in a three week span. That remains to be fun as we start to unpack boxes.
Fourth, I needed a break from blogging. My blog has grown more and more non-technical and more about what is going on with Geekswithblogs instead of the cool stuff I am working with. I hope to bring back some energy into the work I am doing in ASP.NET and the cool stuff coming out.
Well off to work for now, hope no one comes down with a case of the Mundays… (yeah I said it)
Seriously why do new bloggers insist on placing a test post with the word “test” as the entire body? This is just a weird concept to me. Please stop. No one wants to see you introduced to a community as “test”. Rather we would like to see you say, “Hi, this is my first post. My name is [Insert Name] and I am [Insert Interests and Bio]”. This is a blog community so why not try out a blog post for a test?
Anyway, I am very sorry for the number of test posts we have been receiving lately. I will add to the list of site updates some verbiage about what to post and what not to post to the registration email.
I think everyone says this, but wow did that year fly by. No longer do we have a baby that needs to be carried everywhere or drinks formula. Instead, we are a speedy kiddo that walks all over the place and can’t be stopped.
We had a great turn out for her birthday and it was a lot of fun to see all the kiddos and families who are now in our life thanks for Brandon and Addison. Here are some shots from her birthday party and time at the park.
Check out Michelle’s cake as well, she is getting really really good!
Technorati Tags:
Birthday,
Addison
Over the past few days you may or may not have noticed that Geekswithblogs.net was down for a few minutes here or there. I decided it was time to get rid of some of those annoying, Log filling bugs that were generated in most cases by comment spam attempts. Now you should notice the log (via admin) is much smaller and should not grow on a 5 second interval now.
I also published some small changes to the comment controls used by most of the skins. If you witness commenting issues, please ping me and let me know. I am not done by any means with the comment upgrades, but I wanted to get something out the door before we got deep into coding.
Photo: Nelson Art Musuem in Kansas City taken by me on 7/7/2009
Well that title may be a little misleading, but I fixed several issues with the community twitter tools we have on Geekswithblogs including integrating the Follower counts for each member into a new twitter cloud.
The link to the community twitter portal is: http://wblo.gs/?q=twitter
I also fixed a few linking errors:
- Underscores are supported for those who link to … ummmm… D’Arcy is the only one I know who uses underscores so him. @darcy_lussier
- #Hashtags will not turn into links for search
- Thanks to the twitter admins, we now have unlimited rights to request using the API so we have updated the processing to every 2 minutes.
- I fixed some issues we had with our scheduled twitter tool for loading status updates
If you see some more issues with the twitter integration or really want the ability to turn it off on the side of your blog, please post on this entry. Thanks
With the popularity of twitter growing, we wanted to enable users to have the possibility to have a shorter URL for posting. To complete the idea, we purchased http://wblo.gs and http://geekswithblo.gs, and you can selected which ever you prefer. Once the request is made it will be redirected to the page under that http://geekswithblogs.net domain, but it will shortcut the amount of characters needed. Here are some examples:
I hope you enjoy these additions. Photo was taken by me on 6/25/2009 at 5:00am while I was waiting on @clinted to wake up. He forgot to set his alarm.
I first need to start this post with a thank you to Lance Robinson for submit all the required work and the idea of a Geekswithblogs.net search provider. Now when you visit the Geekswithblogs.net Homepage, if you drop down your search providers list you will see a “Geekswithblogs” listing as well as a highlighted link to add the Geekswithblogs search provider to your browser. With this, you then can use the Geekswithblogs search for finding answers to the questions you have.
Our search is powered by Bing, but it is pretty much the same result set Live Search would give for our entire site. We still need to review what the changes in the Bing API would do for our integration with the search engine and how we would display that information.
Please remember at any point you have an idea on how we can change Geekswithblogs.net, please email us and let us know what is on your mind.
It looks like someone (probably search engine bots) were a little more excited with these servers than they were with the last and made over 10,000 requests in a minute, causing IIS to shut down. I up-ed the limit and am going to keep an eye on concurrent connections for awhile. If you see any issues with GWB, please
@jjulian message me on Twitter or email me at jjulian AT geekswithblogs.com. Thanks!!!!
We are now live on the new servers!
Some of the other sites are down for migration like the support site, but I hope to have them up soon. If you see any problems, please let me know ASAP by email jjulian AT geekswithblogs.com or DM me on Twitter @jjulian.
Maine was great! This passed weekend and beginning of the week, my wife and I took our first vacation without the kiddos since our honeymoon in celebration of our 5 year anniversary. At first we were looking for places like New York or Chicago to go, but I wanted to get away from hectic life and visiting large cities is just a hectic as real life in KC. So we decided to go to Maine on a whim. Since it was so unlike us (mainly me) to not do trips like this, we went one step further and only planned the airfare and rental car. The rest of the trip was in God’s hand and it was amazing. Most of the time we went Lighthouse to Lighthouse, took photos (my new hobby), and just relaxed and checked out the area. We were able to get a convertible from the rental car place which made the drives even better.
I totally would suggest anyone get away in this style. Now I am sitting back in the hot office (for some reason GWB HQ AC is not working right), but I feel relaxed and ready to kick 2009/2010 in the rear.
Here are some photos from our trip:
So What’s Next:
Now that I am back, I have started transferring the database and web servers to their new homes. This includes a lot of third-party applications for ticket tracking, statistics, email, advertising, ftp, documents, and newsletters. I am doing each application one at a time leaving the main site for the last since it is the biggest. I will post in the new few days to let you know everything has moved.