Micah's Musings

Let's see, I'm currently...

• Writing a blog post (duh!)
• Making phone calls to arrange a dance on Saturday
• Organizing a soccer team
• Researching political campaigns
• Cleaning the kitchen
• Browning 12.5 lb. of hamburger meat
• Listening to a critique of dating methods for rocks

Obviously not all at the same time, but pretty close. Comment with your busiest multi-tasking moments.

I took the designs section offline and made it private for registered users only. Part of this is because I'm not really a designer and people who don't know me won't appreciate them as much, and also since I'm posting information about work-in-progress stuff that is only known to a select few.

For registered users:

You can still see my designs by logging in and clicking on the "Designs" button in the Quick Nav.

I discovered two days ago that one of my websites is getting nearly 200 visitors (that's people, not hits) every month so I figured I better put out a better design on it than the last one I did.

A while back I'd toyed with a potential redesign with a nifty slide effect for screenshots.

You can check it out on the live site now.

The other design I implemented yesterday was of course for this site. I was... very satisfied at getting the shadow effects down the first time. I'd seen it used hundreds of times (yes, literally) but hadn't ever tried to implement it. It turned out to be pretty simple once I looked into it. I also found another beautiful image for the header (I like misty looks). I also created a page listing some of the software tools I frequently use and a set of site designs (most of which are old or simple).

Yes commenting is possible, but you need an account. Email me if you're interested. No anonymous commenting for now.

I'm sure everybody (meaning the few that read my blog... or lack thereof) is wondering why in the world I haven't put out a detailed post since April, or any post at all since October. So here are the two biggest work highlights of mine in the past six months.

The Confederate Shoppe

Probably my biggest project this past year has been a Confederate ecommerce website for a store called The Confederate Shoppe. A gentleman in our church told me about a friend of his (the store owner) who needed her online store redone (the original was done in '95 or so). We exchanged emails in May, and I started work on it immediately. The new site went live in September and has handled orders successfully. Many of my client's customers are a little wary of shopping online but she really wants to leverage the potential of the site since it means she doesn't have to answer the phone or wait at her house for someone to buy things from her.

Plethora

One of the reasons I offered my services on the shoppe was that I had just completed a revision of my web framework. To abbreviate into English for all of my non-geeky readers, a web framework is essentially tools for building a website that get reused over and over for multiple projects like displaying a web page, authorization, storing data, and so forth. These frameworks are usually common pieces from websites grouped into one coherent package and sometimes published for others to use, like Django, Ruby on Rails, Turbogears, and Pylons. I've tried a few times to write my own framework, but usually fell into lower quality from time constraints on websites. Right before I did The Confederate Shoppe, I made another attempt to build something useful, and called it "Plethora" (more on the name later). Since then It's grown both in actual size (nearly 5,000 lines of code), functionality, and quality. I got the name "plethora" from the fact that it shares first letters with the language it's written in (python) and a principle I'm attempting to reflect in my work known as loose coupling which allows for interchanging parts within the original product, hence the framework is "one, yet many" or a Plethora ("a" denoting singular, "plethora" denoting many).