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December 28, 2005
vBulletin Is Kickin' My Butt
After the big push on the site redesign before the holidays, I took it a bit easy for a week or so. A little R&R if you will. Well, now I'm back in the saddle and I thought I'd take on an easy task to help get me back into the swing of things, so I decided to take on the forum post bug that has reared it's ugly head. Unfortunately it's been anything BUT simple and it's kickin' my butt.
If you vist any of the posts in the forums, you'll see that there's an issue with each post. Instead of extending the entire width of the available screen, it's only the width of the user information. Needless to say, it looks funny and not the way I intended the site to look. So I've been digging into the code trying to find out what's causing this issue, but for the life of me I can't find it.
There's so much that I could be working on, but this little "bug" is really getting the better of me and I have yet to be able to find a solution. VERY frustrating. I guess I'll go sleep on it and see if a fresh pair of eyes can spot the error. :|
Posted by mashby at 12:25 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
December 15, 2005
Cooking With Gas Baby!
There has been just an absolute juggernaut of activity on the NPUG site these past few weeks. I'm just amazed at how much we've been able to get done in such a short amount of time. I have to attribute much of my progress to Getting Things Done
We have all the sections we had in the old design, PLUS new sections as well. I still have a good deal of tweaking to get everything 100% complete, but I have to say that I'm very happy with where we are right now.
As if that wasn't enough, the Leadership Council has been going pedal to the metal as well. There are new members to the Council and a lot of new projects in the works and we haven't even had our Annual Brainstorming Summit yet. :O
I'm just hoping this new energy keeps up, because it can only mean bigger and better things for NPUG in the future. I think this old dog still has some hunt left in her. :P
Posted by mashby at 02:35 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
December 07, 2005
Beat To My Knees, But Grinning Like A Fool
Got some GOOD time in today on the site. I guessing that I got in at least eight hours, which is very, very rare. I mostly worked on the site, which allowed me to apply the "new" design over everything but the forums. Never thought I'd get so far so fast.
Thinking about why it's taken me so long to get to this point, I've come to two conclusions. 1. My head is in the right place and 2. I'm more experienced at XHTML and CSS than when I started. My chops are much more honed than when I started and it's allowed me to fix things faster and strip out non-essential code pretty quickly.
What I'm most excited about with the work I was able to do today is the home page. I think it looks 100 times better and I've been dying to get the new design applied. I just couldn't have done it any sooner, because it relies on some big changes with the format of the meetings, news, calendar and forum include. Just a pile of things that I had to get through before I could change the front page.
Speaking of things I had to get through, I had a hell of a time with the navigation. As you may recall my good buddy Dan Westman created an application for me to build the navigation. It's a combination of XML and PHP and it does an amazing job at handling all the various states of the navigational elements. Unfortunately, it's a 0.1 release, so it has some issues.
For example, it doesn't remember past work and it doesn't allow you to fiddle with the order of things once they're entered. Since it's been so long since I worked with the navigation, I had to completely re-enter the information and that was t e d i o u s as hell. Mind you, I'm not complaining. Dan was an absolute angel and I wouldn't have been able to do the navigation with out him. My point is simply that it ate up a good chunk of time. At least 2 hours straight, non-stop.
I'm exhausted and now that it's after 1am, I'm definitely ready for bed, but I know that I'll go to sleep with a smile on my face because I was able to get so much work done. Man does that feel good!
Posted by mashby at 01:07 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
December 06, 2005
Long Time No Type
Isn't it funny how things can just slip away from you, without you even realizing it? Take this weblog for example. It seems like it wasn't all that long ago, I had high hopes of doing a travelogue for the PalmSource DevCon and posting it online here in this weblog. Unfortunately there was hardly a minute to spare and with my AlphaSmart not being able to connect to the hotel wi-fi, it meant I had to post when I got back to my room and all I wanted to do once I got there was crash. Once back home, it was back to the grindstone with deadlines and holidays and family commitments and what not. Next thing you know, you look up and 2005 is almost gone and it's been almost 6 months since my last post and all I can do is wonder where the time went.
Well, I'm sorry I didn't do a better job during the conference and I'm sorry I've stayed away from this blog far too long. Alas, there's no sense crying over split milk. I've got enough woulda, shoulda, coulda's too last a lifetime and there's too much to do to dwell on the past.
So What's Been Going On?
Well, the group celebrated it's 6th anniversary back in October. November was our last meeting at FirstData Systems. My Treo 600 bricked on me. My Zodiac almost died on me after leaving it out in the cold overnight, but it survived. We're working on finding a new home, but in the meantime I think we finally lined up a place to meet this Saturday (I'll know more tomorrow) and there's a new Leadership Council on board for 2006. *Whew*
I want to hold a Leadership Council Summit Meeting in January, so I'm finally getting around to getting my list of tasks done. The list is as long as my arm and some items are close to two years old, but I'm finally getting them done. For example, I just finished revising the CSS file for the site and I've cleaned up all the past web work that was converted to the "new" design. I'm at the same place I was 6 months ago, but now everything is tidy and 100% complete, so that gives me motivation to get the rest done. If you'd like to see my list thus far, you can view it at this link. Please bear it mind that this is a "living document", so it will change as items are added, completed, etc. As of this post, I'm not done making my list just yet, but you can get a small taste anyway. :)
My focus tomorrow will be on the meeting section and the main page. They go hand-in-hand and it'd be nice to finally get those sections converted. Once those two sections are done, the only thing left will be the forums. Who would have thought it would take me THIS LONG to get it all done? Well, at least I'm making some progress and I plan on forging ahead!
Posted by mashby at 12:55 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack