health care, road trips, tech talk, occasional rant

nerd notes

these pages are “how-to”s, “what I did”s and “what I think”s in the techie world.

they are all under construction so far, when a page makes minimal sense and is not deemed embarrassing I publish it and keep working on it.

These are the pages I am working on so far:

  1. WHUFU – my mega-project – an interlinked presentation of all my content.  In my grand vision, this will become a generalizeable content presentation system that will actually make me some money, which would be awesome.
  2. This led me to install and become minimally proficient in Subversion, after I lost a substantial chunk of code while working distractedly at the bar … I started a new page by dragging and dropping about 140 lines of PHP — that is I cut it rather than copied, then happily modified the new copy for a couple of hours.  The next day I noticed those 140 lines were gone from the original.  sigh… I can take a hint; the Universe is telling me to bring Source Control back into my life, and you should always listen to the Universe :)
  3. Doing my own development on my own timeline meant I can use the whole thing as a research project.  Something I’ve had in the middle reaches of my technical brain since the 90′s was the centrality of properties in technical development.   Not a new insight I know, but I have my own Freeman-ized version of property management that is working out quite well for me.
  4. After a threshold amount of development of both content and techniques for WHUFU, I decided it was time time to start working on presentation rather than purely back-end development.  This lead me to  discover Free CSS Templates.  Taking a couple of templates and hacking them for my own uses (resume and new home page) lead me to a higher plateau of understanding how to really use CSS and thus really elevate my page design game.
  5. Part of WHUFU is organizing and interlinking photos in a database-driven way.  While thinking about this, I went back to some earlier work on file-driven (no database) photo presentation.  The idea was to integrate my nasty-looking operation photos into my shockingly popular health blog.  This lead me to the discovery of JQuery, my new bff and the current obsession of my technical life.