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.

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!

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!

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.

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.