Filed under: Blog Changes, News, Poetry, Random, Technology, blogging, washington nationals, websites | Tags: analytics, cambridge, dc, drupal, Google, iphone, massachusetts, mccain, mysql, nationals, News, obama, palin, php, Poetry, update, washington, wordpress
I know I’ve said it before, but this time I swear I intend to actually come back to this blog. And by ‘come back’ I only mean actually paying some attention to it, whether that attention is apparent to you or not is irrelevant (to me, obviously). Here are some thoughts on what I’ve been doing and what is to come:
- I’ve become really interested and fully invested in upping my technical skills, particularly w/ php, mysql, Drupal, etc. More to come on that subject.
- Despite my recent struggles with WordPress I’ve decided to keep this blog on WordPress for the time being. I don’t love WordPress for many reasons, but I don’t hate it either. It makes blogging pretty easy, and as long as that’s all you want to do it definitely works. Redesign forthcoming. I have a ‘real’ website in development elsewhere. I started development on it in WordPress and am slowly moving over to Drupal.
- I also have a pretty fun php project in the works. Launches in early September. Stay tuned.
- Check out centerfieldgate.com, a Washington Nationals blog customized and maintained by yours truly. You may remember a post from last year in which I mentioned my work on river-dogz. I’m happy to say that my skillz are a bit better than back then. Granted I’m using a stock theme but all of it just generally looks better. It’s also a recent addition to the NL East Chatter community. Hawt.
- I helped out a bunch on masspoetry.org and attended the festival last October. I’m not helping as much with it this year given other commitments but it’s still a really awesome event so you should probably go to masspoetry.org. Masspoetry.org. Oh also, you’re only cool if you actually attend the festival!
- I developed and was tech support for vetsforobama.org during most of his campaign until the campaign actually took the site over. That’s probably the site I am most proud of on my resume, given tons of custom design work and functionality, trying to manage a massive petition, and pretty much always being on call for any site issues despite my objections (”I have a job!”). They had to take the site down for legal reasons after the campaign ended, but maybe I’ll find a screenshot and post it later. He won, too, so that doesn’t hurt.
- I also did The Truth About Palin and The Truth About McCain. Tumblr is fun.
- I moved to Boston from DC successfully, with my 2 cats. I’m in the same crappy apartment but moving to a better one soon (September 1).
- Oh, I signed up for Twitter. If you came here from me posting a link to Twitter, that’s awesome. If not, email me if you want my twitter name or just want to stalk me.
- that reminds me, I need to set up a penfall.com email address
- I’m getting a new iPhone, suckas.
- I may start to write those Musings again soon. Maybe musings from Cambridge? Ideas are welcome.
I think that’s it. I’m on the Acela to DC at the moment, it’s 7am, I’ve been awake for 3 hours and only got 3.5hrs of sleep. I have a long day ahead, a long week ahead, and I’ve officially exhausted my want or ability to write (or say?) anything creative at least for the next 24 hours. Time to go check Google Analytics and see if Tweeting about this made any difference in site traffic.
Filed under: Chicago Cubs, News, Random, Technology, blogging, washington nationals, websites | Tags: News, river dogz, river-dogz.com, washington nationals, websites
You may have noticed (or not, if you’ve just stopped checking all-together) that I haven’t written here in a while. Well I’ve been busy! I, with my limited technical knowledge, helped build a blog focused on the Washington Nationals. Granted I’m a die hard Cubbies fan, as are a few of the writers on river-dogz, but there’s always room for another witty, sarcastic and highly analytical baseball blog.
You’ll notice that my website-building skills are pretty minimal (the header could use some work), but all in all I’m quite proud of myself! I even figured out how to get an image to show up in a text widget – for me, that’s a huge accomplishment. Also, changing the fonts or text size was initially a challenge but now I find myself talking about font families and scrolling through stylesheets. It’s crazy! (for me it’s crazy.)
As for changing colors, well, I’m just not there yet. I mean, can someone please tell me what this means? As I began working with code and trying to figure it all out, the colors seemed pretty self explanatory. Find the ‘333′ in the stylesheet for the header color, change it to ‘033′ and you’ll get a new color (dark blue), right? Wrong.
Now I find myself working even harder on my own site (I’d link to it, but it’s currently password protected), trying new things, working with code and challenging myself more and more to try to make a website not only look good, but go past the original theme and make it my own. Once I take the password protection off it’s going to be great – not just visually, but it is and will be a full collection of my writing, research, and some photos.
A final note about river-dogz - I think it would be pretty awesome to have an embedded calendar (or something similar) to show the Nats season schedule. Any suggestions for how to go about that?
Michael beat me to it! Just tonight, I was reading some of my older posts and noticed that the archives jump from December of last year to March of this year. How could I possibly call myself a writer if I’m not writing anything here? I have certainly been writing offline, but I really need to bring it back online.
Since being at South by Southwest and doing my best to blog about all of the amazing panels I have attended (or at least take detailed notes for future posts), I’ve come to the realization that I have deprived my loyal readers (all four of you) of my daily rantings, ravings, thoughts, insights, poems, and everything else.
Well, that’s going to change, starting now. I’m committing myself to at least 5 posts per week, if not more. Welcome back Penfall lovers – I have returned!
