Life on Snow Hill

Lately, there have been a few things I’ve wanted to post, but didn’t. There have been a few things like that which I went ahead and posted because I wanted them ‘out there’ for people to see. However, they didn’t pertain much to the content that the name of this site would lead people to believe is here.

So, from now on, this blog will focus on content that has more to do with every-day life stuff around home, things I like to do, etc. My ‘thoughts and rants’ will go on a new blog, www.jdsnow.com. That one will have more to do with my religious views, or random thoughts I feel like talking about.

I haven’t installed the blog software just yet, but I expect it will be functional by the end of the day. Come on over!

So, I’ve had this idea for a while now about a website something like Facebook, but for Christians. I quit Facebook a while back because, among other reasons, there were trashy ads, I would see friends of friends’ photos and status updates that I’d rather not see, and just general stuff that a Christian doesn’t exactly find appealing.

I’m about to go geeky on you, so just bear with me.

I love WordPress. There’s a social plugin called BuddyPress that I really, really wanted to use. It’s lightweight, fast and pretty configurable. It looks somewhat like Facebook, so it would be familiar to those who moved over (or at least used both).

A couple weeks into it, I found it wasn’t going to cut it. I’d been trying to get a real-time chat script to work on it, but ran into a wall. Several times. then I found JomSocial. This is a social layer built on top of a powerful CMS called Joomla. I’ve actually tried Joomla before, but it was a long time ago and it was way over my head. I’ve learned a little bit about web stuff since then, and it actually makes sense (mostly) to me now.

JomSocial had a lot of the stuff I already wanted – photos, videos, walls, activity feeds, friends, groups…you get the picture. It didn’t have chat built in though. I tried the same script on this software, and voila! It just worked! So far, everything I’ve tried to do with this software has worked, and worked well.

Now that you’ve gotten through the geeky stuff, you may be wondering what this Christian website is? It’s called Friends of Faith. Feel free to go take a visit and sign up. It’s still growing, and things are changing, but that’s half the fun!

Seems like everyone is jumping on the Twitter bandwagon lately. I’ve been on it for a while, but haven’t done a lot with it. I’m a little more into it now that I’ve quit Facebook, but I’m not sure how long it will last.

I did have a twitter feed on this site back in the day when it was known as jdsnow.net, but had removed it until recent days.

One of the reasons I’ve gotten interested in it again is because there are a ton of iPhone Twitter apps. I’ve found one, Schmap GeoTweeter (iTunes Link), that will post a short URL which maps your location on a Google map. It gathers the information from the GPS locater in the phone.

If you look to the right of my page, you’ll see 4 posts from my recent tweets. Starting now, if I update from my iPhone, you’ll see a link (like this one: http://schmap.me/xkq3yy/) that if you click on, you’ll see my location at the time of the update.

Pretty cool, eh?

Hey, everybody! A little while back, I bought myself a Macintosh. I’ve been wanting one for a long, long time, and I was finally able to get one. One of the things included on every Mac is iLife.

I’ve been playing around with iPhoto for the last few days, and it is actually fun to use rather than tedious like other photo management apps I’ve used. You can geotag photos and display a map with all of the places you’ve taken your photos. You can also use iPhoto’s built-in facial recognition and tag people’s faces in photos, sort of like Facebook’s photo tagging, but better. It recognizes the same faces in other photos and tags them appropriately.

The feature I want to talk about here, though, is iPhoto’s Flickr integration. As I understand it, it’s been an included feature in iPhoto for a while. But since this is the first Mac I’ve ever owned, it’s new to me.

I’ve played around with Flickr before, but never really gotten into it for different reasons at different times. I used to host my own gallery using Coppermine Photo Gallery, but didn’t keep up with it very well. It has great features, but it was another place I had to keep up with photos.

With iPhoto’s flickr integration, you can publish an album or set right from iPhoto. All in one place. Nice.

And others have said I needed more photos on my blog. Well, I’ve killed two birds with, well, 1 1/2 stones anyway. I added a Flickr widget to my sidebar over there on the right. So as I take more photos and import them into iPhoto for organization, I’ll publish them to Flickr as well for your viewing pleasure – they’ll show right up in my sidebar. Spring’s arrival has inspired me to get the camera out a little more than I have in the past, so I’ve added a few photos in the past few days.

Clicking on one of the thumbnails in my sidebar will open it up on my Flickr page. There you’ll be able to browse all of my uploaded photos.

As an update to my site change post, I introduce to you TechJolt.  I’ve had it running for a few days now, but wanted to iron out the quirks before I posted anything about it.

So, for those of you who like my geeky posts, head on over and check it out!  I don’t have much content yet, but that will be added as time allows.  I have a few topics in mind, I just need to take the time to test what I’m planning to write about before I write anything on it.

Everyone, you should have noticed by now that my blog is on a new domain – www.lifeonsnowhill.com.  It only makes sense, since that’s what I’ve titled the site.  That is one of the reasons for the change.

Another reason for the change is two-fold:

1. I want to keep using this site as more of a personal blog.  Here I will talk about politics, religion, trips I may take, and that sort of thing.  I’ll pick something out of the news and give my opinion on it, then put up the shields as people yell at me in the comments.
2. I noticed that I have somewhat of a split audience.  One that looks at my blog for the posts I talked about in #1 above, and then another audience for computer/technical posts I do.  I want to use the old domain (jdsnow.net) for sort of a tech-blog.  Actually, I’m not sure if I’ll keep using that one, or if I’ll set up a new one, more cleverly named of course.

So please update any bookmarks you may have, or any links you may have to my site.  As most of you have probably already noticed, I have a redirect set up at www.jdsnow.net that points straight to here.  I’ll leave that up for a few weeks probably before I make any changes to it.  But once I do, there will be nothing left there to point to this new site.  I’ll try to give at least a few days warning before I remove that so as not to leave you in the dark about where to find me.

Thank you all for keeping up with me on my blog, and under this new name I’ll try my best to post more often about what’s going on in this complicated head of mine.

“What on earth is a CMS??” you may ask…  CMS stands for Content Management System.  In other words, it’s a fancy, easy way to update, add and edit content on a web site.

First, let me start by explaining why I’m looking at CMS’ in the first place.  (Well, besides the fact that I’m a geek and I like that kinda stuff anyway.)  The church that Becky and I recently joined has asked me to try to do some work on the church’s web site.  The existing one isn’t bad, but some of it is a little outdated and could do with a little bit of a facelift.

So, I set out on the easy (yeah, right!) task of selecting the best CMS for the job.  My first idea was to use WordPress to do the job.  Done deal, right?  Not quite…  It wouldn’t quite handle some of the pieces of the site the way I’d have liked for it to.  So I said goodbye to WordPress for this particular job.

I tried Drupal, Joomla, Mambo, dotCMS, PHP-Nuke, MODx, Plone, and probably 2 or 3 others that I can’t remember.  Now, don’t get me wrong, all of these systems are great systems.  Some of them were just simply too complicated for me to figure out and to be able to administer efficiently.  Others either didn’t have the modules I needed to be able to do certain things, or the modules I did find didn’t work as promised.

Enter Exponent CMS.  I skipped over this one on my first run through possible choices, although I’m not entirely sure why.  Probably mostly because I’d never heard of it.  Anyway, this one has all of the trinkets I needed to be able to include everything the old system has, and more:

• Standard HTML pages are supported (You don’t know how hard that is to come by in some systems)
• An Events Calendar is included
• Blogging ability is included (Great for, say, new prayer requests, etc.  It posts the new ones at the top automatically rather than having to edit an entire page by hand.)
• A News mechanism for site-wide news feeds.
• Forum software is included for an interactive area of the site – great for a Bible Question area on the old site.

So I’m excited about finally finding the software that is a perfect fit for this site.  I was asked about a week ago if I was working on the site.  I replied that I was, but not a word about how much difficulty I was having with choosing some good software.  Now that I’ve found it, migrating content has been a fairly easy task.  We’ll see how the rest of it goes.

Although I only got one response yesterday, I went ahead and set up a brand spankin’ new photoblog called jsnowphotos.com.  Yesterday it forced me to get outside after a big rain shower and snap a few photos of the sunflowers out in the garden.  I forgot how much fun it is just to take pictures just for the fun of it.  Hopefully this new site will keep me going with it, and at the same time help me to get better.

I’ve put a link over on the right side of my page to make it easy to find.  This new site also allows for comments on the photos, so please let me know what you think of them – good or bad!

Thanks for visiting!

I’ve decided that lately I’ve been severely lacking in furthering my photography skills.  In other words, I have been really lazy and don’t take my camera out of its bag nearly as much as I used to.  So I’ve come up with an idea, and hopefully you, my loyal readers, will help me out with it.

I think that buying a new domain (Only $9.99/year at GoDaddy.com) and setting up a dedicated photoblog will force me to take more photos.

I’m doing some research today on the best way to set up the site itself, and I may even get it installed and running today.  But I wanted to try to get some feedback from you guys to see if it might be a good idea.  (I might go ahead with it even if you don’t respond..but some encouragement would be nice. )

The latest and greatest version of WordPress is out and available for download.  Here’s a video explaining some of the newest features:

The biggest features I’d like to point out are:

• Post revisions – WordPress now keeps multiple versions of your posts, so if you make a change to a post, you can always go back to the original (Or any other version you may have saved).
• Gears - a browser extension that basically creates a ‘local server’.  Or, in other words, it caches commonly used javascript and CSS files locally to speed up page loads.  There is a lot of potential for Gears, so keep an eye on this one.
• Theme Previews – Pretty self-explanatory.  Without ‘applying’ the theme to your entire site, you can see what it will look like before you make it a real change.

There are many more smaller features listed in the official announcement.