Bad luck struck over the weekend. My Border Collie, Skyler, got hit by a truck. She survived, but she looks like she will permanently suffer from the accident.
Archive for the ‘MontArk’ Category
Life with a Gimp
Thursday, October 15th, 2009Monticello Live re-alignment
Tuesday, September 15th, 2009Over 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.
Mock-up of Marquee Lanes
Thursday, July 30th, 2009I 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.
Work begins on MonticelloLive.com
Saturday, June 13th, 2009A few weeks ago, a friend and fellow member of Twitter Geeks of Monticello, Jeff Noble, asked me what I thought about taking over the technical side of Monticello Live (ML), a WordPress blog reporting on local news around Monticello, Ark. and Drew County. After a few weeks of doubting and pondering and vacation, I decided to take him up on the offer. It seems like God had his hand in this endeavor, as Jeff and his family are moving to Virginia next month.
History of Monticello Live
Jeff started the blog in September 2006 as an online source of news and community information. Since then, the site has expanded to a center for the community to communicate online. Jeff became absorbed with Journey Church, and Joe Burgess took over operations of ML, with Jeff helping out with the technical aspects.
The site receives an average of nearly 1,000 daily visitors—an accomplishment, considering Monticello has a population of under 10,000—and has seen peaks of up to 16,000 visitors in a single day.
The Challenge Ahead
I don’t take the task at hand lightly. ML has grown tremendously over the years, and I only hope I can help it continue. Taking over Jeff’s responsibilities will be a challenge I look forward to. My first project at hand will be an overhaul of the layout of the site. ML’s content causes it to burst at the seams from time to time—the severe storms that rolled through the area on May 6, 2009 stressed ML’s server and the site was taken offline for several hours. That situation has been remedied and we now recede on our own dedicated server, allowing us stretching room for the growth spurts.
Over the next few weeks, I will be working on re-designing the layout to be more user-friendly and accessible. If anyone wants to be in-the-know, comment and I will let you see the progress from time to time. It won’t be a drastic overhaul—a new masthead, a different perspective on the three-column layout, more refined typography, integration with Facebook Connect (to allow you to tie your ML activity with Facebook), and a few other things.