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Web site changes
I’ve made a couple of changes to my site. As you can probably see, I have added my twitter feed to my front page. I’ve done this because I don’t post to my main blog as much as I used to – I post my thoughts to Twitter (which then automatically get copied to my main web site and Facebook). I will probably reserve my traditional posts for longer posts. It was not a simple tasks to intermingle Twitter posts within the WordPress loop, but I eventually got it to work with some sloppy code. 
 The posts are cached and updated every 30 minutes.
I also am trialing my web site back on a Windows server (previously it was on Linux). I’m doing this to consolidate web hosts, and hosting on Windows gives me most stuff on Linux as well as ASP.NET. I generally prefer Linux hosting when .NET isn’t needed, however, this will save me time and money.
There will be bugs with the new setup, but I’ll take care of them as I see them. I see my Flickr feed isn’t updating, which is probably a permission issue (curse Windows permissions!). I’ll work on that.
April 9th, 2009 
Tags: New Site Design
I decided to go with the new web site design that you currently see. There are still some visual bugs to work out, but it’s mostly functional. I think this design looks more modern than my old one, and I think/hope the navigation is more intuitive. I also added widget support to my web site, which means nothing to you unless you’ve worked with Wordpress (previously, I manually added content to the side bar in the template).
Hendricks Photos Moves
We’ve decided to move our online photos to Flickr. Not all of the photos from the old site are transferred yet, but we’ve been making some good progress. By using Flickr, we save money by using their discounted, unlimited storage place. And while the service isn’t perfect, it does offer a number of features and interfaces that I do not have time nor ambition to implement on my own.
In short, here is our new photo album page on Flickr:
Web Site Outage
Some of you have noticed that my web site has been down for that last couple weeks. The problem arose when I had my ISP enable ASP.NET 2.0 on my domain. As a result of Microsoft only allowing SQL Server connections by default while running in medium trust mode, MySQL and ODBC connections did not work. Although it took a couple of weeks, my ISP finally enabled ODBC connections from ASP.NET. Although I’d prefer to use the .NET provider, I’m pleased that they now support a working method to connect to MySQL from ASP.NET.
Currently, I restored my web site to it’s previous working order. Eventually, I plan to implement some of the new ASP.NET 2.0 features. For now, I’m glad to have my site back.
New Photos Section
I revamped the Photos section. It now supports subcategories, although none are set up yet. The best part is automatic thumbnail generation, so I no longer have to create them by hand. All I have to do is copy the original to the appropriate folder and it shows up. It creates thumbnails dynamically and caches those that have already been created. I also added Next/Previous links so you can click through each photo more easily, and a “slideshow” feature that will automatically scroll through them for you.
Web Hosting Blues
If you hadn’t noticed, my web site has been down for the last several days. My previous web hosting provider decided to take down the server I was on without notice, losing much of my data (as you can see, I lost my blog entries since February). I have since found a new web host. I have made a dramatic change from past hosts – I’m now hosting on Windows 2003. Even thought I’m a Linux geek, most Windows hosts give you everying the Linux hosts do (minus IMAP), plus you get ASP, ASP.NET, and Microsoft SQL Server. My new host even supports ColdFusion and Java Servlets. It’s going to be a long road ahead…
New Site Design
Has it been a week already? Yeah, I wasn’t as pleased with my last design as I thought I would be, so I changed it. It’s not perfectly XHTML-compliant because I was having troubles with the menu script, but it works in most major browsers. The breadcrumb trail on the old design didn’t work as I expected, it made it more difficult to maintain and update, and I didn’t care for the menu system much. I like the drop-down menus I implemented on this one much better.
New Design
Some of you may notice I’ve implemented a new site design. I wanted to create a design with a little more color. Some of the pages haven’t been updated yet, so some colors may be goofy, but the content is all there.
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