A New Look for JaredHatfield.com

I wrote a custom PHP script for the first version of my personal home page on the Internet. It collected several RSS feeds from social media sites and displayed them in one location. The page simply collected all of my posts from my blog, Twitter, Digg, and YouTube. While this page served its function, technically, it was riddled with problems.

First off, it was very slow. It requested multiple remote feeds which was at the mercy of the remote server. The feeds were cached, but when they needed to be fetched, which happened to be synchronized, the page would take almost 10 seconds to render.

The other major problem is my lack of ability to make a good looking website or write a single line of CSS that improves the visual appeal of a website. While the page didn't look terrible, it did not stand up to the quality that I wanted.

My solution was to simply abandon my custom page. My main page now points directly to my personal wiki which hosts information about various projects that I have worked on along with other code samples that I have published. To make up for it I added support to embed RSS feeds.

Overall this should help encourage me to post more on my blog and publish some of the old projects that I have worked on.

My New Commitment to Blogging

I realize that I have not been the most consistent blogger on the internet. However, I often have things that I would like to publish. There are interesting items in the news, various projects I am working on, or simply ideas that I would like to share.

My new goal is to post at least one blog post every week. I'm going to try and be consistent, schedule some time to sit down and publish something no matter what. While it may be short and simply mention a few things, if I fall into a habit the probability that I start producing better and better posts goes up and up.

I have several other goals that all revolve around my web presence. I started on my personal home page a while ago https://jaredhatfield.com/ but never really finished. It doesn't look very good, is very slow to load because it is not optimized correctly to load in the remote feeds it uses, and needs to completely changed. This is definitely on my to-do-list, but finding the time is always difficult.

My other big project is posting things on JCode (https://www.jaredhatfield.com/code/wiki/Main_Page), my personal Wiki where I planned on posting things about projects that I have worked on. This is something of a companion site to my blog. More specific details and actual code will be posted on the Wiki while time specific progress will be posted on my blog.

The main project I have been working on lately is a method for tracking members, attendance, committees, and achievements for Speed School Student Council. I wrote a custom PHP application and designed a normalized table structure to store all of the information. The bulk of the work went into writing a management console that myself or future DOAs will use. The front end is at http://speedcouncil.org and is purely informational. This will likely be my first major post to JCode describing how I designed everything including table structure and some clever security features that I designed.

That is it for now. I haven't decided which day I'll try to post on yet, but at the very least I will be attempting to post every week, it is on my calendar.

Thunder Over Louisville 2009

The weather was a beautiful for Thunder this year, a stark contrast from last year. Overall, it was an amazing day!



I ended up taking a total of 731 pictures which totaled around 2.3 GB of data. Needless to say, I spent a better part of today uploading all of those pictures.


Thunder Over Louisville 2009 (Flickr)

Thunder Over Louisville 2009 - Album 1 of 13
Thunder Over Louisville 2009 - Album 2 of 13
Thunder Over Louisville 2009 - Album 3 of 13
Thunder Over Louisville 2009 - Album 4 of 13
Thunder Over Louisville 2009 - Album 5 of 13
Thunder Over Louisville 2009 - Album 6 of 13
Thunder Over Louisville 2009 - Album 7 of 13
Thunder Over Louisville 2009 - Album 8 of 13
Thunder Over Louisville 2009 - Album 9 of 13
Thunder Over Louisville 2009 - Album 10 of 13
Thunder Over Louisville 2009 - Album 11 of 13
Thunder Over Louisville 2009 - Album 12 of 13
Thunder Over Louisville 2009 - Album 13 of 13








No, this picture doesn't need to be rotated, the helicopter was upside down!












Velociraptors!

JaredHatfield.com Version 1.0

This is only my first draft of my new home page (https://www.jaredhatfield.com). First off, I will admit it is still really ugly. I'm still working on collecting all of the content that I want to display and haven't put the time into the formatting / CSS that I need to.

My basic goal is to collect a wide variety of RSS feeds based off of all of the services that I commonly use. This includes services such as Digg, Twitter, YouTube and some other web services. Obviously this also includes my blog.

The page is a custom PHP page that relies on MagpieRSS to pull in all of my RSS feeds and then I can simply use the content as arrays and do whatever I want with it. Right now I'm simply displaying the few most recent entries. Overall I feel I'm heading in the correct direction to accomplish what I want.

My other goal is to publish some of my code that I have written for various projects. There are some projects that I have done for my classes that I want to publish some of the source code and others where I will only publish the binaries. The main thing standing in my way now is deciding if I want to make the pages from scratch or use some type of CMS.

I am hoping I'll have enough free time in the next few weeks to make some progress on the projects.

My New Home on the Web

Just purchased the domain http://www.jaredhatfield.com Yay for vanity domains. ;)

My blog will be still hosted on Blogger, but the URL for my blog has moved to http://blog.jaredhatfield.com

Not sure what I'm going to do with my other web space I've acquired. Looking to do something creative, but not sure if I'll have the time to do anything worth while.