First Post

Hi all, thank you for coming to my blog to see what I have to say. It is my hope to write here (almost) every day this summer (2008) with my ideas and thoughts while I travel. The current plan is to be in LA from May 10th to June 10th, and then in Cuernavaca, Mexico from June 29th to July 29th. I am quite excited to experience these new places and look forward to sharing any interesting stuff with you all here.

Before starting with regular posting, I would like to give you guys a few notes concerning this site. It is currently in active development, and is subject to change often in the next few months. Until the design is finalized, things may shift, and features may be added to the blog. For this reason, I want to alert you to the following items:
1. Nothing on the site is permanent. It may last a long time, but the “Permanent Link” below each post may not truly be permanent. If you would like to link to a post I write from your website, feel free to do so, but keep in mind the link may change (although I will try to keep the links as permanent as possible.)
2. Please feel free to comment! However, there are a few things discussed below that should know about commenting.

You currently aren’t required to have an account to comment on a post I’ve written. I’d love to hear from you, and I want the process of commenting to be as easy as possible. That said, please remember every field of the comment form (found by clicking “Post A Comment” below) is required. If you forget to fill out one of the fields, your comment will not be added to the site, and you may lose what you’ve typed. For this reason, I highly recommend writing your comment in a text editor (notepad or wordpad or the like) and then copy/pasting it into the comment field on the site. That way, if you forget to type your name, post title, or you mistype the text found in the picture, you can simply go back and try again. I hope to later add a feature that will help you avoid losing comments in this manner.

Please note that one of the fields in the comment form is a name field. This name will appear by your comment so we know who posted it. I’d recommend using your first name, your initials, or any pseudonym I might know you by. Since this blog is so far just for my friends and family, feel free to e-mail or facebook me to let me know the name you will use to post comments. Otherwise, I might not know who I am replying too :-) Keep in mind that the blog is public though, so you may not wish to use your complete first and last names, and that’s cool.

You’ll also notice that you are required to type in some text found in a picture beneath your post. This is to keep automated scripts from posting spam on the blog. If spamming does occur, I may turn off commenting for a short or extended period of time. If spam becomes a big problem, I may have to resort to adding accounts for commenters on the site. This means that you would have to make a login and password to post, which is something I’d like to avoid.

If you’ve made it this far, you have a great attention span. Thanks a ton for stopping by. I hope you will enjoy reading and commenting!

The last part of this post will likely be most interesting to my Software Engineering friends. Feel free to read it, but be warned that it may be boring!

Here’s a little snippet about the technology powering this site. It is currently written in Coldfusion 8 and backed by a SQL Server 2005 Database. It was developed in about three days of work, most of which was spent on me getting up to speed on Coldfusion and Transact-SQL. All pages on the site (including posts and comment pages) are valid XHTML 1.0 Strict (unless I break the site with an update, which may happen frequently :-) The design is currently defined in a single valid CSS 2.1 stylesheet. It is my hope that future re-designs of the site will be quick and painless. The site is currently tested under IE 7, Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.14 (Windows and Linux), and Safari 3.1.1 (Windows). If you run into a bug on the site using these or any other platforms, contact me (by comment if you can, but e-mail is fine too) and I’ll try to address it as soon as possible.