SharonAndAdam.com

Lookin’ a Little Different

I recently updated our version of WordPress and in the process the current theme we were using did not properly list the pages within our site. Sharon and I searched through a few themes out there and haven’t found something yet that suits are tastes, but we’ll stick with Ocadia in the meantime.

Having the pages listed is important to us as it contains the stories of our children, including the latest and recently added Baby G IV.

Amazon Central

As some may have noticed, our “Amazon Central” sidebar got a little boost. The previous version was hosted as a separate blog in Moveable Type. Each book was it’s own entry with various blog fields mapped to different attributes about the book: i.e. entry body => ISBN, keyword => are we still reading this?, etc. Not very intuitive, yet a common practice used by bloggers wishing to enhance existing tools.

If you want something done right, do it yourself… and have fun doing it.

Amazon Central is a Flash-based internet application integrated with WordPress and Amazon’s E-Commerce Web service that I created. Our collection of books is store in a mySQL database by ASIN, who’s reading it, and is it being read right now (its reading status). The accordion menu separates the collection into views by reading status. Each view displays up to 10 books. Ten is the maximum number of items you can request from Amazon in a single call. If there are more than 10 items in a view, the next and previous buttons will be enabled. Since we’ll only be reading a few books at a time, I decided to include images for the “Reading” view.

Now for the real magic.

What you don’t see is the admin form unless you are logged in to WordPress as an author. The image here shows that authors can add books to either view by simply entering it’s ASIN in the appropriate accordion menu. If the author wishes to change a book’s reading status from “Reading” to “Read”, or visa-versa, she would simply need to (un)check its checkbox. It’s that simple.

As before, clicking a book will take you to its entry on Amazon.com tied with our Associates tag. So remember – visit our site first before shopping at Amazon!

Hello WordPress

As my version of Movable Type was becoming dated and I’m too cheap to pay for the upgrade, I decided to make the switch to open source, hence WordPress. I know a few people who have been using it and enjoy the experience. I’m looking forward to implementing all the neat tools the community has been developing to support the tool; and perhaps creating a few of my own.

A note on the look and feel: no, it is not my own design. As if I have the time to do that sort of thing. I utilized one of WordPress’s features called Themes. I liked this theme (Blix) since it builds a list of Pages (also a cool feature) as your navigation at the top. I only had to tweak it a bit to exclude sub-pages and display them instead on their parent’s respective page.

Hope you enjoy our modified home!

Baby G Mini Site Extended

The Baby G Mini Site has been modified to suit each of our child’s pregnancy/birth stories as they happen. We hope you enjoy the years to come as we look forward to our growing family!

New Category: Automotive Care

It’s without a doubt that vehicles are the biggest money suckers a family can own. Insurance, gas, regular maintenance, and the inevitable repairs (those of you with American-made cars know what I’m talking about) will sink your budget faster than a submarine with screen doors. All this and the hunk of metal/plastic on wheels continually depreciates.

With our continuous efforts to cut expenses, we have learned that a great deal of money can be saved by personally handling your own automotive maintenance and repairs. I have made it a habit that before driving (or towing) one of our cars off to the mechanic down the street, I will first research what really needs to be done to get the thing going on the road again. Surprisingly I have learned that I can save a bundle by doing half – if not all – the work myself.

Sharon has noticed that I have been through this grind a number of times already and suggested that I should begin sharing my experiences. I really don’t have a lot to offer since I am without a degree in Auto Mechanics, but I can throw out a few tips on how to keep a few bucks in your pocket. Perhaps it’ll also give you a little encouragment to take the leap and get under the hood of your own vehicle.

Hence the new category to our site: Automotive Care. I hope you’ll enjoy some of the forthcoming posts on my sometimes terrifying, yet never dull adventures in car care.

AmG tweaks

I doubt if anyone has noticed at this point, but I’ve been making quite a few modifications to my work/portfolio related site. Most of it has been “under the hood improvements” so you won’t notice a lot of visual change other than cleaner templates across the site.

The primary goal is to begin participating more with the Flash developer community; writing more frequently on design and development issues around Flash-based applications and games. A secondary goal is to *possibly* pursue more work, as if I don’t have enough to do. Christmas is around the corner and Thérèse is showing no signs of growing any slower, so a few bucks could come in handy. Not to mention beefing up the ol’ portfolio in this area wouldn’t hurt.

Portfolio Redesign

Adam has completed a redesign of his Web portfolio. The primary reason for the new site is to better faciliate updates through Movable Type. I have to admit, through a little trickery and a bit -o- php scripting, it worked out quite well. The new design also complements the look and feel of this site. Feel free to take a look.

New Photo Gallery

A new photo gallery has been added to better improve the process of getting pictures out to our family and friends. I decided to go with Coppermine for its ease of installation, clean code, decent support community and abundant features. Two things it is lacking, which I will later find means to implement, is video support and and hook up to a third party photo printer such as Shutterfly.com for those of you would like to order your own prints.