I will be attending the festivities of BarCamp Conway on August 20. Hosted at the University of Central Arkansas College of Business building, the un-conference will have lots of attendees (over 60 last time I checked) with plenty of topics for everyone. Lunch and swag will be provided. I’ll be making the three-hour trek there to meet and enjoy lots of new company.
I hate reading blog posts that are simply a bunch of lists, but I wanted to share a list of books/sites I’m currently reading from to help hone my skills.
These are the most recent books I’ve delved into. Actual, physical books are so much better than PDFs or online sources. I just picked up five PDFs from SitePoint for $25 (as part of their Christmas specials, wrapping up with this sale today), but they won’t be read “cover to cover” like the actual books will be. I dig the paper so much better.
I use Google Reader for my RSS feeds. (Yes, I know Twitter killed RSS, and I’m just dragging its corpse around.) In fact, I love it. Between the web interface and Byline for iPhone, I still depend on gReader for a lot of my information consumption.
That aside, Google sucks at designing intelligent and accessible user interfaces. I ran into one such example of suckage tonight.
Over Labor Day weekend, word was sent out regarding older versions of the WordPress blogging platform. A nasty worm was circulating around older WP installations by searching for them through Google. When an old (that is, anything older than 2.7.1, I believe) installation was found, this worm would create and then hide an admin account. From there, it could potentially corrupt MySQL databases and, filling blog posts with spam content. So, needless to say, it was a nasty problem that could be easily avoided.
I took over the technology side of Monticello Live a few months ago, and have been keeping things in order. The problem arose over the holiday weekend when this worm was announced—Monticello Live was running on a much older WordPress installation (try 2.4, if I remember right).
I backed everything up after checking for any worm problems, and updated to the latest WordPress build. I’ve been working on a new theme for ML for several weeks now, and figured this was as good a time as any to implement the changes. Over the past two weeks, I’ve been tinkering and making changes and building the site back to near-completion.
I hope the local community finds this refresh of the layout a welcome change, since the site has remained virtually unchanged since Jeff Nobles created it back in 2006.
I plan on adding a lot more to the site as far as web standards go, but for now, it’s running well and should be completely operational.
I decided I couldn’t let July pass me by with only one blog post, so I decided to show a mock-up of a site I am currently working on for Marquee Lanes in Monticello, Ark. Marquee Lanes, formerly the Timberlodge, is under new management and they are making a lot of changes to the business. One of these changes incudes a web presence.
I was hired for the job, and this is the result of brainstorming with Reggie Riley, co-operator of Marquee Lanes. In the coming weeks, I will be transitioning this Photoshop mock-up into valid HTML/CSS, and it will be live at Marquee Lanes.com in the coming weeks.
