Combined with the prevalence of micro-blogging such as Twitter and Facebook status updates, writing out full-length quality postings seems to be quite old-school now. While in the process of migrating my old blog articles back to WordPress, I’m reading through all of them again and finding some oldies but goodies, such as “Reasons to Date a Geek” and “I, Geek, take you, Mini-geek” among others. I also see lots of failed potential such as setting up thedouglasclan.com as a photo site for our family, and I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve switched from one blog engine to another or posted about new layouts on the site.

Like most full-time employees, I fear blogging about my workplace or what I’m working on, so as not to get dooced which really only leaves a few areas of my life to share that I feel could help others: running a freelance business, web development, marriage, finances, and being a new dad. And since I’m not particularly an expert in any of those areas, I imagine iandouglas.com will be a culmination of all of those topics. I’ll do my best to categorize and tag my ramblings so you can filter out only what you really want to read.

Since mid-March, I’ve been working like crazy at the new job to get our latest software out the door (it was very successful, thank you very much!), move to a new apartment, get the old apartment cleaned up (and still owed almost $200 on top of our initial deposit), get into a new routine at the new place, and getting out of my old day-to-day “I’m a freelancer” routine.

Let me tell you I really missed being a full-time employee, having a regular “culture” to be at, peers to bounce ideas off of and interact with on a daily basis, and the job here has been awesome. By the way, we’re hiring — if you’re a senior LAMP developer or a math genius and want to work in Santa Monica with a bunch of BRILLIANT mid-20′s to mid-30′s peers, contact me with a resume ASAP.

At the same time, I do miss some of the flexibility of being a freelance developer, though the guys here at work are awesome about flex time schedules as long as our work’s getting done. And since I only live two blocks from the office, it’s tough to ask to work from home any more.

The pros WAY outweigh the cons though, and I love it here. Wouldn’t trade it for anything.

Anyhow, I’ve got a whole Email folder of questions from people that have been to the site asking questions about the Blackjack 2, offering suggestions for software reviews or tweaks, the news about Windows Mobile 6.1 being released and being made available for the BJ2 (though I can’t get anyone at Samsung to talk to me about an ETA for a download), and reviewing various freeware apps and exploring other registry hacks. Whew, quite a list.

May is going to be my “catch up” month, now that our software launch at work is taken care of and Elizabeth and I are settled into the new apartment, etc. So stay tuned, I’ll have new content up soon!

I’m almost there — I just need to figure out a few final things about injecting data into drupal’s database, and we’ll be all set. Plus I need to undo BBcode formatting from SilverStripe (changing [b] to real bold tags, etc).

So I’m loading up my old articles, but I don’t know if I’ll have the energy to port comments or not.

Very pleasantly, he asked whether the daily cartoon page I had here at iandouglas.com was something I’d paid to license. Upon asking for more clarification on both sides of the conversation, he basically informed me that even by my site linking to comics from other sites, it gives the appearance of "publication" of those cartoons, and some of those cartoons sign exclusive distribution rights.

Personally, it was just more convenient for me to have all of my most favorite cartoons in a single place to read than to click, and click, and click, and click, somewhat endlessly, to read my favorite cartoons. I don’t recall these other cartoon sites having a service where you can do such a thing.

However, since I don’t want to get into any legal trouble over the appearance of publication, I’ve removed my daily cartoon page, and do not apologize for any inconvenience it causes anyone else who visited my site just to read them. A

ll of you can go to comics.com and gocomics.com to read them just like me. A few extra mouse clicks per day versus legal hassle or paying money? Yeah, I think I’ll click my mouse a little more.

Thanks again, Eric, for being polite and cordial about it — please keep up the great work! If you can think of any good ideas about web development to work into a cartoon, I’d love to see them.

Lately I’m seeing a lot of spam user registrations here at iandouglas.com which of course raises the question of whether using a third-party application such as e107 is beneficial to my needs, or if there’s some inherent flaw/exploit/vulnerability that someone’s trying to take advantage of.

I see a lot of this kind of behavior on client sites who have third-party apps running that advertise the CMS/forum software along with version numbers, like phpBB where spammers have learned to read the default ‘captcha’ image and register accounts so that posting spam comments is easier. All they need to do is go to Google and search for “phpBB” with a version number with a known exploit, and Google will happily serve up a list of sites that proudly proclaim “powered by phpBB v1.0.0″ or whatever.

I’m currently using the latest release of e107, but I’m starting to think, again, that a home-grown solution might be more beneficial. There’s so much bloat in third-party apps as CMS engines try to be “all things to all people”. Like my struggle with buying a cell phone that’s JUST a cell phone, CMS application developers keep cramming in features I’ll never use, and offer no easy way to strip them out or disable them.

I’m seriously debating just going back to the ol’ drawing board, like Wile E. Coyote, and just design my own CMS software. I’ve started it in the past and usually gave up because it was a pretty daunting task. Now, with tools like Symfony, it’s a lot quicker and simpler to build scaled applications like that.

It’s not like I need anything terribly fancy either, just a place to write my blog articles, manage my file downloads, and let users register to leave comments. Barely anyone uses my forums any more for support help on the software I write, so I’ll likely take that completely offline in the near future.

Of course, with a new CMS comes the chore of writing a fistful of .htaccess rules to ensure search engines and bookmarks to my site still work by bouncing browsers and bots over to the new URLs. Overall, that’s the easy part of the job…

Give our blogs, for example. My geek blog here at w98.us has been rock-steady, thanks to great service by LunarPages, yet our blogs at PDQ Networks with thedouglasclan.com have been plagued with bad server after bad server. I finally got onto a reseller account with this group, PDQ, and they were wonderful for about a month, but now their service is starting to decline as well, with no end in sight. Our site has been offline, then MySQL was slow, and today it’s just s-l-o-w (!!!).

So I told Elizabeth that I was going to move our blogs to w98.us. Her blog will be http://www.w98.us/ekd/ and mine will hopefully move okay to http://www.w98.us/id/ without my geeklog setup totally crapping out on me. Then, the main w98.us page will just be a portal to our blogs, links of our friends, etc., since the w98.us page gets between 200 and 1000 hits a day now.
And for me, this is a big deal, I mean a BIG deal. I tired of fussing with web sites, I’m tired of moving stuff around, and for Elizabeth, I’m sure she read my IM, shrugged nonchalantly, and replied with “okie” like her life wouldn’t fall apart one way or the other.

Anyhow, she admited, rather humbly, that she’d never mopped a floor before, so I showed her how to put the detergent (Pine Sol, Mr Clean, etc) in the bucket and how much hot water to add, etc., and after a few scrubs with the mop, she hollers “Go get the camera – I’m blogging this!“

But then I get an IM from my lovely wife saying "you’re gonna get the marriage annulled when you see today’s blog" and that never ceases to raise my curiosity level to where I’m hitting F5 over and over and over on her site, racking up tons of alleged "hits" (combined with our photo site, we average about 1000 hits a day), just to see what she’s talking about. It wouldn’t be the first time either – she’s mentioned before the wedding such things as "you’re gonna call off the wedding" or "you’re going to be mad" or some such thing. Which never turn out to be true …

At the end of the day, we love and respect each other, and I trust that no matter what she has to say, she’ll be honest and respectful, ’cause she’s cool like that. I always know where I stand with Elizabeth, and that’s something I truly cherish about our relationship.

Update: March 26 2010: Obviously that plan didn’t follow through very well. Elizabeth moved her blog to http://bloggymommer.com/ though she doesn’t blog much any more, thedouglasclan.com isn’t used for anything at all, and obviously you’re here so you’re looking at my all-purpose blog at iandouglas.com.

Update: June 1, 2007
Funny enough, I had started blogging on WordPress back in the day but wanted to offer file downloads for eventual podcasting and open-source downloads. Since my personal blog hasn’t had need for anything of that nature, and since I seem to suffer from a dual-personality and hence needing two blog sites, I’m reverting this blog back to WordPress.

I’m looking at a few different CMS/blog/wiki applications to install on my site instead of what I’ve written by hand. Frankly, I’ve learned about as much as I could with it.

None of the packages I’m evaluating are “XHTML 1.1 Strict” compliant, so I’m sure I’ll have some work ahead of me.

I’ll be evaluating them offline and see what I can do about putting these old journal entries into the system so I don’t lose any of this info.

Main reason: traffic to the site is increasing and I’d enjoy having a new look and feel to the site if I’m attracting this many readers.