Archive for the 'Site Updates' Category

Where have I been?

Published
by
Abyss
on January 22, 2009
in .NET, Site Updates and Web Development
. 0 Comments

An excellent question. Where have I been?

In the past 12 months I have gotten married, switched jobs, adopted a kitten and moved back to the big city. You could say I’ve been in quite a few places doing any number of things. To explain though, I left WeatherFlow to return to Orlando to be closer to friends and family. Working there was perhaps the best decision I had made as I was able to learn quite a few technologies in a short amount of time, meet some very bright and driven people, as well as work on some amazing projects. If it wasn’t for WeatherFlow I wouldn’t be where I am today.

Where is that, you ask?

Well, I’m currently working for one of the largest defense contractors in the world. I work for the division which creates internal HR Applications for the company. Definitely a change from my usual 6-12 developers in a room and rapid application development. I picked up some legacy ColdFusion code and helped the team hit a couple releases before I was reassigned. From there I joined a small VB.NET/ASP.NET development team working on some internal applications which were eventually shelved, or made it into Phase II.

During the colder months I took on a stretch assignment to help another team which had been working with a 3rd party software vendor. Essentially, I have been testing and deploying the application for our internal team and managing the correspondence with the vendor. I’ve been learning our software engineering process, IIS configuration, account provisioning, writing SOI’s, hosting meetings and trying my hand at application deployment and environment configuration. Really, it has been a great learning experience thus far and I am looking forward to this new fiscal year.

Where do I go from here?

I am hoping to post more code on this blog, as well as start a few new projects on the side. I have a small Pandora/iTunes mashup written in VB.NET/ASP.NET 3.5 which needs a home. Hopefully I can find some hosting shortly and get that one up and running.

This year my goals are lofty:

  • Learn ASP.NET MVC with C# & jQuery
  • Learn Python & Django
  • Learn Ruby on Rails
  • Get Certified, whether its an MCPD or MCTS just do it.
  • Write something useful.
  • Become a better technologist and developer.

As always, I want to keep current and stay on top of the industry changes, and filter out the hype from the reality. Agile this, rails that are great things to investigate but what is the business case? What is the need? Hopefully this year I can find the time to publish some articles recounting those very things from my own point of view.

I hope that brings everyone up to date. I am still here, and hopefully I’ll be posting more in the weeks to come.

Updated: MyBlogLog Plugin v0.5.1

Published
by
Abyss
on February 20, 2008
in Site Updates, Tech and Web 2.0
. 0 Comments

The MyBlogLog WordPress plugin is receiving a very belated face lift and a few bug fixes (thanks to those who reported them). Now, as a disclaimer, this code is relatively untested and was dug out of a very old archive from my days at cloudspace (the company who initially partnered to create MyBlogLog), so use it at your own risk. If you find any bugs, just drop me an email using the contact form and I will try to help in any way I can. This release has been activated on at least 2 WordPress 2.3.3 installs, so yes, it works with 2.3.3!

Check the project page to download the latest plugin file.

Oh, and still no readme.txt. ;)

MyBlogLog Plugin Update – In demand?

Published
by
Abyss
on July 25, 2007
in Site Updates, Web 2.0 and Web Development
. 1 Comment

Well, it’s been over a year since I released my WordPress MyBlogLog plugin, and I’m still getting emails about it. Honestly, I’m very surprised that this thing still works. If you’re using the plugin now, or want to, let me know! I think it is time for a big code overhaul, and perhaps some new features but there is no sense in developing this plugin if there’s no demand. If you’ve got an idea, post it up and I’ll do my best to get it out there in the wild with the next release. I did notice the guys over at MyBlogLog have been hard at work improving the JavaScript and their own feature set as well which means I should probably update the plugin pretty soon. Also, I am aware of the missing readme file! Please, I know about it, and I’ve posted about it. I promise, next release, you all will get an extensive readme!

Anyways, it amazes me how far MyBlogLog has come since the day I registered and alpha tested it. Really, you have no idea how simple the idea was at the time. Todd, Eric, Steve, John and the rest of the crew over there at Cloudspace and Yahoo, my hats off to you guys.

Updated!

Published
by
Abyss
on March 19, 2007
in Server Alerts and Site Updates
. 0 Comments

The site has been upgraded to WordPress 2.1.2 and I’m working on a new template. ;) Enjoy.

Update: Site is now XHTML standardized! (If it isn’t, drop me a line and I will fix it…)

Update Again: Added in the new contact form plugin and my resume page.

The Month in Review

Published
by
Abyss
on December 1, 2006
in Gadgets, Site Updates, Tech, Web 2.0, Web Design and Web Development
. 0 Comments

Well, its been awhile since I’ve had a chance to post. A lot has been happening with my work and college. All leading up to the probably graduation in May 2007, so I’ve been unable to post as often as I would have liked.

So what’s been going on? Well let’s see…

  • The web speculates that MyBlogLog is in acquisition talks…
  • Apple updated, well, everything in their line yet again
  • I have left my position with FuJ Tech, and will continue to work on freelance projects
  • I recently learned that MediaTemple’s Grid service is actually not a grid. So much for that idea. ;)
  • Sony’s PS3 has about as many issues as the Xbox360 had at launch, but with almost double the initial pricetag
  • The Nintendo Wii is selling like crazy, as predicted, and I for one will be buying one once I raise some funds.
  • Windows Vista is practically out, and Acer is saying not to bother with the ‘Basic’ version.

Did I miss anything? Oh well, check the Digg section or my ma.gnolia for daily link updates and news stories.

We’re back, again!

Published
by
Abyss
on November 10, 2006
in Server Alerts and Site Updates
. 1 Comment

Edit: Just realized this site does not validate. Seems that K2 and the MyBlogLog plugin (which I wrote, ironically) are the culprits as well as some posts where I’ve used h4′s. I’ll be picking these things apart over the next month or two. I am hoping to roll my own theme instead, but at the moment I just don’t have the time.

The site is again live, which is a relief. I basically took a couple weeks off for school and work, etc. Please update your links, we are back to the very nice mod_rewrite way of life which means you can now access everything with user friendly URLs once again. The site has been moved back onto the Linux hosting on Lunarpages, and will stay here until next August. At that time, I will probably be hunting for new hosts, or making deals with the current hosting overlords.

I also updated the site to the newest version of WordPress and K2. What does that mean to you? Oh probably not much, but I did fix the icons to render without that unsightly grey background in IE.

The MyBlogLog plugin will be posted as soon as I can find the newest source. I did leave Cloudspace, and most recently FuJ Tech which leaves me with quite a bit of new found free time, minus the freelance projects I need to get done. That means I have a ton of source code laying around, and I need to get it all published.

In the coming weeks I am hoping to release the PHP Calendar script I wrote based on an old Zend tutorial, as well as the newest MBL Plugin for WordPress.

Any questions?

Hubert? 1passwd

Email and hosting issues…

Published
by
Abyss
on October 16, 2006
in Server Alerts and Site Updates
. 2 Comments

Just an update on the hosting issues I’ve been having lately. My email is currently in limbo between the backup servers, as far as I can tell. I may or may not recieve emails placed between yesterday through today. The techs assure me this is being taken care of, but they always say that. Most likely the site will be moving this week to another hosting plan within Lunarpages, but hopefully away from them entirely. The windows hosting at Lunarpages has been nothing short of subpar, and I would not recommend their windows plan to anyone.

For more information on the trials and tribulations of my support tickets, check out my feedback article on the Lunarforums.

Thank you all for your patience. If you have any immediate needs, or concerns contact me via my cellphone or my gmail address (abyss12).

And we’re back!

Published
by
Abyss
on July 3, 2006
in Site Updates
. 2 Comments

Took awhile, but the site is back.

Please note that all email notifications and contact forms are offline due to the lack of sendmail. I am working on it, if you really need to contact me you can email me. Thanks!

Soon to come:

  • WordPress Update
  • Ali’s Website
  • More updates.
  • Fix sendmail
  • Recode Site in ASP.NET

MyBlogLog WordPress 2.0 Plugin

Published
by
Abyss
on March 15, 2006
in AJAX, Site Updates, Tech, Web 2.0 and Web Development
. 37 Comments

Updated – February 20th, 2008

There is no readme file for my plugin, and for that I apologize. If you need further instructions, just drop me an email and I’ll do my best to lend a hand. Though, this plugin is quite out of date and I would heartily recommend using the sidebar widgets HTML plugin instead, as it does much of the same thing and is included with the new WordPress distribution.

A few months ago the company I work for (cloudspace) built an awesome link tracking system called MyBlogLog. Ever since, I’ve been trying to use it with WordPress. After upgrading to WordPress 2.0, I decided it was time to integrate MyBlogLog into WordPress without opening the template code. I spent about an hour or two learning the WordPress plugin API and came up with the MyBlogLog WordPress plugin. At the moment, it only integrates the actual link tracking code and the Top 5 Links script. The plugin allows you to enable or disable the Top 5 Links script and set its colors. The plugin hooks the main tracking script in just before the content of the site and the Top 5 Links code is inserted just after the Meta section of your template. As far as I know, there are no template specific issues thus far and everything should be working. I wrote this plugin for myself, but I figured others might find it useful as well so I am going ahead and releasing the plugin here.

Continue reading ‘MyBlogLog WordPress 2.0 Plugin’

Site Updates, digg, projects

Published
by
Abyss
on February 13, 2006
in Site Updates
. 0 Comments

Just updated the site to use the add-digg api instead of my plugin for the digg page, and added a projects section for my code. I will be adding content to the projects section whenever I can. Expect more updates soon!

Update: Added ma.gnolia syndication as well. Not sure if I will keep them both, but I’ll give it a shot.