Spring break....snow?

E had the week off for spring break. Jodie took the whole week off; I just took Thursday and Friday off.

Snow in this part of Oregon usually ends in early March. Washington, just across the mighty Columbia River, always has their spring break a week after Oregon. More often than not, we get rain for our spring break, and they get sun.

This year, we got snow! No accumulation here, but we have been getting showers of a mix of hail and snow.

On Thursday. we drove down to Volcanoes Stadium in Keizer to watch Portland Christian play in a 2A baseball tournament. Nephew Vance played catcher in the game we saw. They won 15-5 in the game we saw. The game was stopped three times due to hail and rain. Friday's games were canceled because of snow - it was really snowing down there Friday afternoon. We did not go town today.

We had a guy come over to give us an estimate on a sun porch. I was thinking it would cost $5,000. Hee hee hee. Naw, it's really not that funny. I don't think we'll be doing a sun porch...


I took Jet White, our monster van, to have the breaks checked. The break peddle has had a little give in it lately. I thought it was more in my head. It turns out a little fluid is leaking in the cylinder when I break -- something like that -- so it was not in my head. The parts are ordered and I go in on Tuesday.

I applied for a job with the web design team with the State. I have created a number of websites, and I manage a few. I don't have formal training, but I have learned a lot on my own. Evidently not enough. I got my "Dear John" letter on Friday.

Sigh.....

MYSQL bought by Sun

MySQL is an open source database. The Joomla websites I make each run off a Mysql database. Photo galleries, blogs, calendars, many different apps use MySQL databases.

Since it is open source, it is typically free.

I rent webspace from Bluehost. $95/year I believe. I have 50 MySQL databases I could use.

When I saw that Sun Microsystems bought MySQL, I was concerned. Am I going to pay more to use MySQL?

The answer appears to be "no". They do plan to market an improved enterprise version of it.


How did Sun beat Google to buy MySQL?

Dr. Randy liked the website

I made a new website for our chiropractor. More pictures to gather, but he likes it so far:

http://twittren.net/portlandchiropracticgroup/

Another website done...

Roger, a friend of mine at church, is a minister to the homeless. He went to seminary a few years back...he can now be called Pastor Roger.

Roger and Ronald Nitz, a pastor from Holy Trinity Church in Portland, are starting a new worship community, a "koine'" community, in Portland.

A week ago Friday I met with Roger for lunch. He wanted a website. He has reserved the domain names koinecommunity.org and koinecommunity.com. He knows that I do the website for our church, Resurrection Lutheran Church at rlcpdx.org. He wanted to see what I could do for them. I told Roger I could set a Joomla site for them.

Roger emailed me content and pictures...makes setting up a website much easier. All went smooth except for a couple days ago when I logged out of the admin area...and the site was blank. I spent a day sorting through this problem. I googled and found there was a bug in the latest version of Joomla that was causing this to happen. I read through a huge thread on a joomla discussion board, and I replaced three of the php files...bug "hotfixes". Still, this site would not come up.

I started a new joomla site, very reluctantly. I was afraid the same error I was having in the first site would happen in the second site. I proceeded to copy files from the new site to the first site - the hot fixes were not working anyway.

I noticed something different between the two directories where the joomla sites are stored. The permissions on the first directory were tighter than the permissions on the second site. I must have changed then permissions, but I don't know how. A changed the permissions back...and the website came up again. I was so happy!

The website is here. The last challenge was to change the color of the template to match Roger's blog. I had to dig through the template files to find the graphic that made up the top of the website template. It was a small rectangle divided into three differently colored sections. The rectangle is repeated across the top to form the template. I used the rectangle and paint fill tools to change the colors. To find out the colors from Roger's blog, I viewed the source code to find out the color codes.

A lout of work...I know...but it worked!

The last step is to forward the domains to where the website is stored on my host. The domains are currently registered through Network Solutions. I was going to do the forwarding for Roger, but they charge $12 per domain per year to do this. I was surprised, because Godaddy does not charge for this. I researched the two companies. Network Solutions has been around since 1979...the beginning of web time. Godaddy started in 1997. The two are the biggest companies in the biz. It would be cheaper to transfer the domains from Network Solutions to Godaddy and then do the forwarding. I sent all this in an email to Roger. He's probably scratching his head.

Nothing in webdesign is ever simple!

Some Success...

For the last week, in my time at home, I have been working hard to update my church's website - rlcpdx.org.

I changed the template, I added the poll, and I got "e-vo" to work. e-vo is a devotion that our new associate pastor, Karl Hester, writes and posts online. People can subscribe to it so that when he writes a new one, subscribers have it e-mailed to them.

I use Joomla cms for the church site. I tried to get various Joomla components to this. I was googling error messages and editing php files. Nothing was working.

I had Karl open a blogger page. I thought I could pull in a RSS feed from that onto the website. Blogger does not produce RSS feeds, but rather ATOM feeds. I tried everything to pull those into joomla, to no avail.

I finally found a free third party program to do the trick, a widgit from Springwidgits. And I found a subscription program with FeedBlitz.

Tomorrow I am having lunch with Roger, a friend from church who ministers to the homeless. He wants a website. He has a good blog going. I am hoping I can help him. I just don't feel real confident in my web design abilities.

Back to webdesign...

It is flustrating! Now I know why I slowed down my web design efforts a wilee back.

I am updating my church's website, rlcpdx.org. Our new associate pastor, Pastor Karl Hester, has taken interest in the site.

He has a weekly devotion that he sends out by e-mail. Currently he is using a myspace account for this, but he wondered if I could add this functionality to the website. I have spent last night and today trying to do that.

I use joomla for the church website. It a great open source cms (content management system). I found three newsletter componants that would do what Pastor Karl wants. One was too simple and not functional enough, one was way to complicated.....I settled on YANC. When I wrote a sample newsletter, and went to save it, it wouldn't save.

Yes, I am pulling my hair out.

I found a nifty widgit from Feedblitz to allow people to subscribe to my blog.

I am testing it out to see if it might be a good solution for Pastor Karl. The main advantage to this widgit it that people can subscribe without being a member, as it is with myspace.

The other night I was trying to create a new website for the church. I had to log in to my hosting account through cpanel to change a file name. I don't know how, but I ended up deleting all this files...the whole website! I don't know how I did that...