Blog entries tagged Web

In July of 2005 i wanted to make my site nicer, more organized, and more fun. To do this I added Tagging. Tagging is this really nice feature used by popular sites like Flickr, YouTube, Google, etc. Tags rule. They invoke a lot of coordination in a web site and are just fun.

I decided to use this to tag all my photos of people I have photos of. It was a huge task and took me a really long time, but in the end it turned out to be awesome. Everyone likes pictures of themselves, no matter how non-vain they claim to be. Also, everyone googles their name from time to time (no matter how non-vain you claim to be). So if I tag things nicely, my friends will probably find photos of themselves on my site.

Besides the advantages I've …

I haven't really done much framework stuff outside of my full-time job, so I decided to play around. (mainly so Harper would stop yelling at me).

Nearly all of my personal development is in PHP and JS, so I tried out some PHP and JS frameworks on a simple app.

After a few hours, my "funny quotes" site is all smartied and prototyped, which was a nice little learning experience.

The big thing I learned is that prototype RULES. Seriously, it makes life so easy - just ask JD (but refer to it as LAF instead of Prototype).

Smarty is also pretty decent. I can't really think of a huge advantage of using it, aside from the obvious fact that it separates logic from display. However, it was nice to play around with. There are …

Man, I am really beginning to love Amazon wish lists. Not only are they super nice for gifting, they're nice for finding new items and keeping track of things you need to buy. I often find myself looking through Amazon just to mark things that I already own. Why? Because then they recommend things similar, and their recommendations are usually pretty relevant.

However... Amazon sucks at a few things. The first being publishing their phone number. The second thing that has really annoyed me about their site is gift list printing. Nowhere on the site is there a "Print this list" button. You can "Create a new list," "Delete a list," "Tell people about a list," "Make a list private." But you cannot "Print this list." Give me a …

Oh Yeah. So, we had a Halloween Party last weekend, which marked the biggest party held in my house to date - 40 people. I didn't realize how much fun that costume parties can be. It sort of makes an automatic ice breaker and then everyone ends up hanging out with everyone. I loved it. Check out my pics, Nicole's Pics, Zach's Pics.

And to continue the radness, Des Moines Alive got invited to the Friends and Family pre-opening party for Cabaret Night Club. We're also getting invites for the VIP party. I'm pretty excited. We have some good plans to make the site much better... Not to mention the new Mobile site that we just launched. We're totally going to rock it.

This weekend will be pretty ridiculous as well. Ninja turned …

So, minnis is one of the biggest hotkey fanatics ever, which is starting to rub off on me. He's gotten me all excited about them in web apps... You know, Google uses them, flickr uses them poorly, etc.

That said, I added some super rad new hotkeys to my site. They use eventlisteners and all that so you don't have to use the accesskey and alt keys. Just use your left/right arrow keys to browse through photos, albums, and even pages. Weeeeeee.

I think I got everything updated on the site, but let me know if I missed anything. Also let me know if you find any errors... It seems to work for me in firefox and IE.

So I had just left the house this morning and got an IM from Zach:

zachsatwork: hey something is wrong with your website
zachsatwork: Network Error (dns_unresolved_hostname)
zachsatwork: Your requested host "derek.broox.com" could not be resolved by DNS. Please verify that you entered the URL correctly and try again.

At this point I freaked out a bit because I vaguely remembered a "1 month expiration reminder" from Joker.

zachsatwork: thats it though, all the other sites are up
brooxmobile: Is kari.broox?
zachsatwork: down

So I freaked out more, pulled off at this gas station and logged into Joker from my phone while pumping gas. That's when I found out that broox.com expired 9/24 - 2 days ago. I about died. I tried …

Man. This house is in so much need of tech upgrades, it's ridiculous.

My PC runs decently but it's now over 4 years old (9/2/2002). I started noticing the suckiness a lot lately because I am constantly running out of room on my secondary HD, which is primarily used for media (photos, videos, music, etc). I mean, I have an 80gig primary and a 120 gig secondary. When you take photos, collect music, and shoot video as much as myself, after a few years, that is not sufficient. Really what I need is like 3-4-500gb. Plus new apps are seeming to run crappier than they are probably designed for *cough*itunes 7*

I was browsing around in Best Buy the other day to find that most standard configs now come with more than what my PC is …

I'm really confused about Google's index. I used to think I understood it really well, but now that I've gotten into this sitemaps business, it's much more confusing.

I mean, Google had www.cedarrapidsalive.com indexed fairly well shortly after I released it. Then I added the link to Google Sitemaps (without submitting an actual sitemap) in an attempt to get the pages picked up faster. It made things worse... So I eventually made an actual sitemap and submitted it. However, now if you check out the index, they only have 2 results indexed, wtf.

QC Alive seems a bit underindexed as well, but it's doing a little better with 514 results. However, I'd really like them to be fully indexed like Des Moines Alive, which currently has …

...seen the Grand Canyon 66 times, spittin wicked sh*t rhymes.

So yeah. If you didn't know, I had this Map that kept track of everywhere I've traveled to. It made use of the Google Maps API (v1) and was fairly ghetto. So I upgraded to v2, used xml, and integrated it into derek.broox.com.

Peep /travel

Hmm. I sort of said, "yeah right" when I first heard about this this morning. Because netrality and freeness is really what the internet is all about. And I rarely like to stand behind causes - but since internet is what I do... this one seemed scary enough for my attention.

The bottom line is this: Internet freedom is under attack as Congress pushes a law that would give companies like AT&T the power to control what you do and see online.

Apparently, some bigger companies like AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon are wanting to control the internet. They basically want people to pay for their sites be seen. For example, if I don't pay AT&T, x amount of money, my site will load slower and be further down the chain than Harper's site, …

This error has been forwarded to MySpace's technical group.

Why does MySpace suck so bad? Seriously. It's horrible. I think I see that message more than whatever it is I'm actually trying to look at.

Oh yeah, I redid the home/splash/main/whatever page for www.broox.com.

I figured that after over 3 years of that blue design, it was time for something new. Plus I don't wear suits, I have facial hair, I'm cooler, etc. However, I'm not quite ready to admit that I don't skateboard.

P.S. One of my cameras (Canon SD550) is broken and sent in for repairs. Luckily I had a month left in the warranty, w00t. I sometimes wonder about the reliability Canon - or maybe it's just the way I treat cameras.

And it all begins - again. I have this love/hate relationship with summer. I love the weather, all the hanging out, skating, traveling, driving, partying, etc. But I hate hate hate how poor I get. And even more so, I hate complaining about how poor I get. It is straight depressing. I owe people money. I come home every day and look at all my projects that I can't afford to finish and just get sad. I spend the few extra dimes I have on hotel rooms and gas. It's retarded.

Today I found the car I've been describing for years. My perfect car. Perfect. A white 98 Automatic Eclipse GSX with less than 50,000 miles. Not owned by a kid, garaged, stock, and taken very well care of. Man. It is seriously soooo rad. It's the first …

This weekend was pretty nice. I got a lot done.

Friday night, we met nick and Nicole at A Dong then went up to Mars Cafe for some hip hop and breakdancing. It was nice. The bboys definitely stole the show. Later we stopped by MH's surprise party. Fun Fun.

Saturday night I had a little last minute get together. Some buddies came over, we shot blowguns, shot blowgun darts out of paintball guns, played pool, sampled new homebrews, etc. Then we all went out to Stix.

The homebrew setup is becoming pretty nice. I've started modding a chest freezer to be a mini kegerator. I'm building a wooden collar for it so that I can take my co2 tank out of the freezer, mount a couple tappers, etc. Eventually the plan is to have tappers …

Oh man, the past couple weeks have been insane. Work has been pretty stressful - a lot of weird things are happening, but they're panning out to be not so bad. Regardless though, it's prompted me to start updating my portfolio. Here's what I've got so far... yeah there's still a lot to do. I think it's probably important to always keep your portfolio and resume up to date, I'm gonna try to stay on top of that more.

Besides that, Soul Position and Kill Hannah were awesome last week. It was nice to hang out with Greg a bit. Jeff and I also got the homebrew kegged, w00t! I'm pretty excited for that. I got co2 yesterday... and we're still trying to figure out good refrigeration. Our current cooler sucks - it's either freezing or …

Welp, last week my site broke... so instead of fixing it, I decided to write a complete new design, ha. Actually, when I say "design" I really don't mean "design" at all. As you can see it's not much different than before. Lots of grays, same header, etc. However, I reprogrammed the entire site. That's right - I rewrote every bit of code, haha. I also changed the DB around a bit.

That may seem a bit dumb, but over the last 6 years, I've just been adding on and enhancing certain parts of the site. After a while the code started to get pretty sloppy. Plus, I've learned how to rule at programming since then so I decided to rewrite - completely. I'm super glad I did too because everything is much much lighter and the DB stuff is …

So desmoinesalive.com is almost 1 year old and is doing really well. Some pretty cool things are happening. First of all, we got myspace! haha. So now we can be friends with bars, restaurants, ballers, party people, etc. Hopefully it'll help everyone involved. I really like providing a good useable service - sorta like Google does. I bet Google must love life. I need to make more sites like this. I should make Google.

On another note, joker.com has been killing me lately. I'm getting so annoyed. Apparently there have been a bunch of DDOS attacks on their nameservers which has taken ALL my sites down for hours at a time this week. I have been so annoyed. So at one of the not-broken times I went to change my secondary DNS to …

Man, Man. I'm having some fun lately. Awesomeness is awesome.

So last week I was sick... which I suppose was not awesome at all. In fact it was really lame. However, I got better in time for the weekend and went to visit some friends in Mount Vernon. We ran around, partied, ran around, etc. At one point we met up with some peeps at Cedar River Brewing in CR. While there I talked everyone into going to club Element, haha. It's a dance club in this old gym in CEDAR RAPIDS. It was sort of funny, but definitely fun. The best (worst) part was when I was dancing with drea and she straight up kicked me off the dance floor. wtf? am I that bad? that white? I bet it's this freakin beard. Once I shave I'm trying again. Don't get …

So I haven't really been writing much or posting pictures much in the past month. Nothing has really happened cause Kari and I have been too poor to do anything. Mostly I've been doing a ton of web dev, and figuring things out. Some of that has been super painful, some has been really nice. I'm excited to start a couple more projects and hopefully start generating more cashflow. I've got 4 pretty good invention ideas - I need to figure out how to afford patents on those. I hope soon I'm going to figure something awesome out. I feel close. Soooooon.

Last weekend we went to Cedar Rapids to hang out with Kari's family and to Mt Vernon to celebrate Lindsey's Birthday. It was fun - sushi, running around Mt Vernon, etc. Too bad …

Haha, I'm on the Vox Vodka Website for the podcast at Buzz with Harper. It is so funny, and rules so much, haha. This is from their site:

"A Weekend Out in Chi-Town@ Buzz and Soundbar (Podcast Coming Soon)
8/17/2005

This past Saturday, Vox Vodka made a second appearance at Buzz nightclub in Rivernorth. The last time Vox dropped into Buzz, we celebrated the best of Chicago bartenders and entertainers at "Industry Night".

Saturdays bring a different crowd full of both Chicago residents & weekend warriors who come to experience the Chicago nightlife scene. CAUTION – weekenders tend to drive the cost of admission up and create very long lines (apparent by the long lines snaking around the buildings and alleys at Buzz to get …