Website Info - ChuckMathews.com

New Theme

2008-10-07T09:45:00.001-07:00

I'm trying out this new theme..... I still have a lot of work to do to be happy with it, but for now I think it's better than what was there before.... and it will just have to wait.... I have a lot of other things to do that are more important.

email migration

2007-11-09T00:30:00.001-08:00

By the end of the day Friday, my email migration to Google Apps should be complete. Currently the only outstanding issue is that I can't send mail from gmail. So, now instead of having a gmail account in addition to my chuckmathews.com email address, my chuckmathews.com email address will be my gmail account. This will simplify things. Also, if you happen to be using one of my other old email addresses, they've all been decommissioned.

corrected centering

2007-11-06T00:28:00.000-08:00

The formatting is now a little prettier, thanks to my friend, Stirling. I will be attempting to learn CSS and HTML tables over the next few weeks so that I can clean up the code and make it easier to modify. Anyway..... gotta finish up on another project here.

Updates coming soon

2007-08-03T04:57:00.001-07:00

All right. The updates came to a hault a while back. My trip to Venezuela, and then my purchase of a condo, among other things kept me too busy to work on things. However, you will see some updates very soon. The two major changes will be the graphics and the front page. The graphics will be redone for a better looking page. Then the front page will be redone, moving the updates (such as the one you're reading now) to their own pages. This will make for a cleaner front page and a more logical layout.

PHP Feed Implementation

2007-04-30T20:26:00.000-07:00

I'd like to give special thanks to Duncan Crombie from http://www.chirp.com.au. Not only was I able to get a wonderful chunk of PHP code for my next modification to the website (for putting my RSS feeds on the homepage, but he even provided me with a wonderful modification that allows you to limit the number of entries that are shown! I was excited to have gotten this bit of help... especially since my knowledge of PHP coding started such a short time ago.

Here's the location of the original code: http://www.the-art-of-web.com/php/atom/

Here's what he sent me for a modification:

The key line is:
# display feed entry(s)
foreach($ENTRY as $item) $this->display_entry($item, "FEED");

You want to replace this with something like:
# display first 3 feed entries
$MAX = 3;
foreach($ENTRY as $item) {
$this->display_entry($item, "FEED");
if(--$MAX <= 0) break;
}

(this code is untested)

Well, I just tested it and it works great! Thanks for the help, Duncan!

Feedburner Formatting Issue Fixed

2007-04-29T12:21:00.000-07:00

Apparently, since Blogger uses RSS v1.0 instead of RSS v2.0, Feedburner cannot correctly handle the EMBEDDED objects. Therefore, I told Feedburner to stop showing them. So, until I find a way to make Blogger post an RSS v2.0 feed, you will have to visit the blog to see the pictures.

EDIT (04/29/07 - 6:30 PM):

I got the pictures posting properly, now. I found out that if I used the "<td>" tag I could change the default width setting that was being inherited from the embedded object. Enjoy.

If anyone knows how to implement Feedburner with PHP, I would love to hear about it. Otherwise I will work with another tool that is PHP based. I just need to figure out how to limit the number of items that post on the page. I got it posting properly on the page (and can be seen on my test.php page) but an infinately long page doesn't make sense. Later.

Dang! More Problems

2007-04-29T03:29:00.000-07:00

OK, just when I was ready to go to bed a new problem cropped up. You can see the problem here until I get it fixed. For some reason the feedburner feed is messing up the CSS stylesheet settings and going beyond the margins. It didn't do this until I got feedburner to correctly include all of the HTML links and the photos from slide.com/flickr.com. Well, I guess I will figure it out later.

The Switch to PHP

2007-04-29T01:18:00.000-07:00

Well, I "discovered" PHP today. I was looking for a way to make changes to all of my pages at once when I changed the menu items and found that PHP would be the easiest way to this. In the future I may find more uses for this so that I can make complete template changes like this, but for now I'm just using it on the menu bars. Since I really didn't know much of anything about designing a web page a month or so ago, I feel pretty good about getting as far as I have as quickly as I have. I think that the last few pages will be up later today and then I will have met my April 30th deadline (self imposed) for getting the full site up and running. Later.

Edit: (4:46 AM)

Ok, so no sooner than I wrote this did I get an idea for how to very quickly change the pages so that they used a template, so that each page that I wrote only contained the data that was relevent to that specific page and not all of the headers and menu information. It was amazingly simple. Well... time to get some sleep. I've got work to do tomorrow. Later.

Website 1.0 up and running!

2007-04-28T23:15:00.001-07:00

If you're reading this then the website is obviously running in it's new location. Thanks to Feedburner.com, I've got a dynamic home page that is easy to maintain. I'm using their "BuzzBoost" feature to post the content that you're reading right now. Later.

Preview site link

2007-04-28T23:15:00.000-07:00

From time to time, I may post a preview of new versions of the site here.