Not like it’s anything weird or embarrasing. Family photos, vacations. A large collection of vintage Hedges family photos. A disturbing amount of cat pics. When I roam around on other people’s sites, I always enjoy clicking through their pictures. It tells me a lot about them as people beyond the code or article I’m reading. And I know if my other family members had their pictures online, I would just love it.

I think the thing for me is, that living as a ‘public woman’ invites a fair amount more attention than a man, and in no small ways, this canbe very dangerous and scary It’s a bit creepy looking at how my stats jump anytime I post a photo. Combined with how easy it is to cyberstalk someone. I’m not hiding from anyone. I’m just … private. Which is why I probably wouldn’t want to use Flikr or some other service much. And I’m safety conscious about being a single woman.

That said… I’ve been promising to do this for a long time, so here is the start to my online photo collection.

This is a set of photos I took of the big sky of Amherst, West Texas, at my grandmother’s home a few summers ago. I spent the summer cleaning up the house after she and my aunt passed, leaving a 16 room house filled to the brim with ephemera of a life of teaching and shopping for Christmas. It was a very temperate summer; I saw wildflowers in late June - the latest I’ve ever seen them (in fact I don’t ever remember seeing them) in this part of the panhandle. We had several amazing storms roll across the plains that turned the sky brilliant shades of red, purple, black, green, and blue, and these are the photos I took.

It’s summer. It’s 100+ degrees. I work at home. The kid is out of school……it’s down time. Being the daughter, granddaughter, niece, and cousin of teachers, summer has always been a time for refreshing, renewal. Taking stock, cleaning out, freshening up, and resting. Still is.

Out with the Old, in with the New

So, for business renewal, this month I switched from shared hosting to a managed server with WiredTree. After eight years with websites online it was a little past time. I chose WiredTree based on industry reviews and a comparison of their offerings with other VPS providers; and I know already that I made a wise choice. And I want to say how helpful they have been in helping me get up to speed. Adam, Zack, Joe and Jake have been exceedingly patient with my questions and are lightning quick with response time; and WiredTree’s managed services offer me and my clients great peace of mind. I’m not a sysadmin and don’t want to be, but I still want to have the ability to manage things myself if I wish; and so far all signs are that I can rest easy at night, or leave my cell phone in the car accidentally, knowing the server is just fine.

Learn and Re-Learn

I’m undertaking learning Ruby/Rails basics. And a few (hundred) other things, as the skill sets required these days seem to grow exponentially almost by the hour. I’m playing around a lot lately with the YUI, particularly the grids module; and some other CSS frameworks. Like everyone, I’ve had my own little snippets and big blocks of code I use all the time building up over the years, but not coming from a programming background it’s not been nearly as much of a framework as a set of templates. It is exciting to have an easy entry into deeper development with the modular aspects of both Ruby and the many developer frameworks cropping up everywhere; but I always feel uncomfortable incorporating technology I don’t quite understand into a project. So for the moment I’m mainly using them for active learning, reverse engineering, and self-teaching by mostly-mistake.

One VERY cool thing I did just implement is Ryan McDonnell’s method for running multiple (virtual host) blogs with one wordpress install and zero code changes. WordPress 2.6 came out a month ahead of time and the tickets in the trac went from around 700 to none in just a few hours, just as I was getting my clients all settled from the big 2.5 upgrade, and then the server move. The thought of upgrading all of my installs again, and again, and again….made my hair hurt, so I set out looking for a solution that wasn’t MU. Ryan, I think I love you. So, soooo much time saved by this, and cache and a bit of memory too. Woohoo! Made my day, like three days in a row.His writeup on the method was drafted a year and a few big WordPress changes ago, and I have not yet gotten individual theme folders for each user to work, but that is so not a big deal, for the most part. It is why I chose his over other methods, along with being able to have each blog running as a virtual host; but it is by far the easiest thing to live with. Clients should expect to see a few changes in the plugins and themes folders. I’m so excited by it I think I’m going to write a little bash script for making all the symlinks and such. Mmm…weekend fun.

Review and Renew

Of course, with each new mistake I realize there’s another language I don’t know, interface I need to get up to speed on, discussion forum I need to keep up with. It begs the question, just what is it I am doing again? Web design? Application UI design? Graphic design? App development? Server administration? Software support? Database management? Of course, like most freelancers, the answer is a little of all of that and then some. And, l think also like most freelancer web whatevers, I find myself following an ever branching path, on which it’s not always clear which fork to take next. So I’m taking a purposed look at where I want to go next and re-evaluating my business goals. No. I don’t have any idea where that will lead just yet. And no, I’m not going anywhere. Just trying to pin down an idea of what I can logically keep up with in the future as technology speeds ever onward.

So, that’s it … my summer renewal, at least the business portion. After so much renewal, I just can’t understand why I’m so tired!

OMG I am SOOOOO fangirling. I have been a diehard fan since high school. I don’t really buy music, but I buy EVERY IG release. And I have always been down-to-pennies broke when they come to town. Today, close, but not so close that I didn’t jump at the chance to go. I will even gladly bear traffic and parking to get there early and eat ramen and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for the rest of the month. I can’t tell you what a thrill this is…if I had ONE concert to see for the rest of my life, Indigo Girls would be my choice. Now I can say I’ve finally seen that concert. Holy crap I am giddy like a teenager.

YAAAAAAY!

My home inspector,Bob of  Precision Inspection recently contacted me to have ‘title tags’ put in his website, an understated informational site with a design featuring his logo, about 5 years old. He was looking for a quick fix to increase his search engine rankings, had been doing some reading, and learned that his site didn’t have them and they might help.

Before rushing in to do the work I gave the site an inspection of my own; knowing that simply adding title tags might not be enough, and in fact might hurt more than help. A quick once over and a look at the  internet archives and google cache for the site told me I was right.  I knew Bob wasn’t looking for a total re-design, jut better search engine rankings; but the reasons for his poor rank required in essence, a total overhaul, at least.

Why? Bob’s information for the site hadn’t changed since it’s design over five years ago. His logo is the same, and he likes the look of his site. The reason is, it was designed over five years ago; and design standards have changed. It used frames, which are essentially separate browser windows- one for each menu, header, and content area….plus an extra for the active state of the menu; totaling four separate files making up one page. Pulled together using frames, this caused search engines to read each frame as a separate page on the site, whether it was a menu repeated on every page, or the content of a page. The site had been designed without much META information in the header, including title tags, description and keyword tags. And it had no robots.txt file or .htaccess rules keeping the spiders from crawling the many duplicate files in the site.

I offered Precision the option of keeping the look and feel of the site identical, and simply upgrading the code from a table and frame based design to current valid XHTML, adding META information and search engine specific rules. This acheived the goal of better search engine results; but left the long standing branding of the company in place and offered a much less expensive and intensive process than a complete re-design. I call it an overhaul or a tune up….and we were done in a week.

While adding more, fresher content regularly would certainly help any static and informational site, keeping the site error free and meeting current validation standards is a basic must to get good search engine listings.  Doing this alone took Bob’s site from well past page ten in local search results for “Austin home inspector” to page three of the results. Not stellar ranking, but much better than page seventeen! And over time, I hope to help Precision Inspection improve their results even more by adding easy ways for them to publish new information to their site as often as they wish.

SO, as promised, here are my pictures from the FIRST Robotics Nationals Competition! I know it’s taken forever, but I swear it’s just because I love to keep everyone in anticipation.

This was NATIONALS [thats right, Nation-wide] for the FIRST Robotics Competition, at the Georgia Dome in Atlanta Georgia. If you’re not sure what FIRST or robotics actually IS, I’ll explain. The Robotics team operates like a club here at LASA High school, and we compete in two main events. The first is BEST [or Boosting Engineering, Science, and Technology]. BEST is a Texas based, state competition. Did I mention LASA Robotics took first as BEST? *brushes dust off shoulder* But BEST is a warm-up compared to FIRST [or For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology]. The FIRST Robots are huge in size compared to BEST Bots [and the cost carries that same trend.] FIRST was created by Dean Kamen, the inventor who made the Segway, and believe me, he was like a ROCKSTAR at Nationals. Here’s a link if you want to know more, and please, if you’re at all interested, get involved! http://www.usfirst.org/

Here we are! Still at the school, waiting to take off. Note the happy faces-soon to change, after the 20 hour bus ride to Georgia.

Awww…Krista fell asleep while studying. If you want a picture of the typical LASA kid, this is it. STUDYING while on a trip…

This is me being…me.

We finally made it to Atlanta! This is some of the damage downtown Atlanta suffered, due to some tornadoes that hit about a week before nationals. Our hotel and the Georgia Dome, where the competition took place, all suffered damage.

We arrived in Atlanta the day before the ‘practice’ day, so we could settle into our hotels and unwind. Before we got to the hotel, our beloved mentor, Danny, gave us a tour of Georgia Tech, where he went to school.

This was a wall of all of the patents made at Georgia Tech. You could just SEE all of the kids wheels turning. It was really inspiring.

And FINALLY, the next day, we made it to the Georgia Dome. Today was the practice day, which means no real competition, but a chance for everyone to check everyone else out. We were all EXTREMELY tired…

There we a lot of other teams waiting with us. The doors weren’t quite open yet.

Yeah, we’re SUPER happy to be here, in the cold, at 6:00, waiting….

A few of the other teams.

Me and my best friend, Erin. No comment on the face I was keen on making that day….[This is my favorite picture of the bunch...]

Erin was VERY tired. AND happy, obviously.

Erin and Mitchel. Mitchel is our Project Manager, and he’s the next Dean Kamen and Bill Gates COMBINED.

Me and Danny, our amazing mentor. He works for National Instruments. [ignore the crazy boy in the background. his name is Abraham, and he's 'boyfriend. He doesn't matter.] [Also, ignore my face. I was in a weird mood that morning.

YAY! We got to the stands, right up front.

There were four fields to compete on, and all were named after famous engineers and scientists. We were on Curie field.

I’ll post the rest of the pictures tomorrow morning. For some reason, the other twenty I uploaded aren’t showing up. More to come soon!

-Chelsea

1. Do not walk behind me, for I may not lead. Do not walk ahead of me, for I may not follow. Do not walk beside me either. Just pretty much leave me the hell alone.
2. The journey of a thousand miles begins with a broken fan belt and leaky tire.
3. Its always darkest before dawn. So if you’re going to steal your neighbor’s newspaper, that’s the  time to do it.
4. Don’t be irreplaceable. If you can’t be replaced, you can’t be promoted.
5. Always remember that you’re unique. Just like everyone else.
6. Never test the depth of the water with both feet.
7. If you think nobody cares if you’re alive, try missing a couple of car payments.
8. Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way, when you criticize them, you’re a mile away and you have their shoes.
9. If at first you don’t succeed, skydiving is probably not for you.
10. Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach him how to fish, and he will sit in a boat and  drink beer all day.
11. If you lend someone $20 and never see that person again, it was probably a wise investment.
12. If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember anything.
13. Some days you’re the bug; some days you’re the windshield.
14. Everyone seems normal until you get to know them.
15. The quickest way to double your money is to fold it in half and put it back in your pocket.
16. A closed mouth gathers no foot.
17. Duct tape is like ‘The Force.’ It has a light side and a dark side, and it holds the universe together.
18. There are two theories to arguing with women.  Neither one works.
19. Generally speaking, you aren’t learning much when your lips are moving.
20. Experience is something you don’t get until just after you need it.
21. Never miss a good chance to shut up.
22. Never, under any circumstances, take a sleeping  pill and a laxative on the same night.

Thanks Samantha for sending me this. I had to post it. If I’m overstepping any copyrights, just let me know and I’m happy to credit the author or take it down.  But this pretty much nails my ‘Zen’ on the head…

We settled upon using WordPress; the new 2.5 release was in candidate stages when we set up…this caused no small amount of nail biting and teeth gnashing on my end, but I wanted the Hills to have the best experience possible and not to have to learn to work with the old’ WordPress, then turn around and re-learn ‘new’ Wordpress. And I wanted to avoid installing plugins for image galleries and other functionality now included in the core WordPress files…we wanted to reduce maintenance overhead and keep things as simple as possible.

A custom logo was created that establishes an excellent brand image, and we went through several iterations of theme mockups before landing at this one, inspired by the new brand. It is actually not that far from June’s original idea of a simple and traditional layout; but the use of the stunning background image and page opacity makes it seem much more complex. Adding ‘road safety’ related styling such as custom pilot car flag bullets and safety border boxes for emphasis further fleshed out the branding and style to create a truly unique theme.

Training for WordPress as well as ongoing customizations are being provided to allow the site owners to maintain and operate the website internally, cutting overall costs. Hosting and DNS management services were also included in this project.

The Hills have been truly wonderful to work with; it is rare to have a client so explicitly trust a designer’s judgment. They maintain several resources for beginning pilot car operators, including a yahoo group, Pilot Car 101; and are active in their web communities. I look forward to seeing how they use this new platform to present their ideas and company.

My daughter has been looking forward to this trip for months and it’s all she’s talked about for weeks now. Seeing her so motivated is … well… it just makes me so proud! She promises to log in here and upload pictures and video as the trip progresses. I suspect that might not happen quite that way, and I’ll be spending next week posting galleries and videos for her…but I think I can let it slide.

Anyway, if you want to send some kudos and well-wishes the LASA Robotics Team way, just comment and I’ll pass it along.