Pocket Revolutionary

Anybody who has seen this site before (and isn’t using an RSS reader) has already noticed the redesign, but I thought I’d mention it anyway. To the right, you can see the old design, and you can of course see the new design by just looking at the page in front of you. If you’re using an RSS reader (I always use NetNewsWire), please take this moment to actually load my page.

I’ll wait.

Okay, I’ll assume you’ve seen the new design at this point. I’m not actually pointing this out to toot my own horn… even though letting other people toot my horn sounds so very creepy. I actually just wanted to acknowledge that I had in fact re-designed the site after spending a lot of time looking at more muted, clean sites like rands in repose, shawnblanc.net, and Wil Shipley’s blog. Technically, I look at probably hundreds of blogs that are more skillfully designed than mine every week, but those are the ones that were most similar already in architecture so they were the ones that I really stared at while getting “into the zone.” Anyway, I just wanted to give an acknowledgement for my inspiration from them and let you know that, yes, the last time you saw this site it might have been tri-color and I might not have discovered the joy of Pixelmator effects just yet. If you like the new look, you can leave me a comment; if you don’t, then you can just use NetNewsWire or Google Reader and never look at the actual site again.

The other major change that happened the past week was that we switched over to mediatemple for our hosting needs. I don’t really feel like ranting about the last host we had, suffice to say we’re all “a little bit happier now.” Now that I’ve switched hosts and brought over my friends and my wife with me, we will be starting a new group blog soon. I don’t want to give away the domain yet, because I’d hate for you to go there just to see the default WordPress Kubrick theme and “hello world” post right now. We do have the domain, though, and it’s going to at least include my friends Neil, John, and a few other soon-to-be bloggers sounding off about God, politics, theology, sandwiches, Dutch sayings, and anything else that needs to be discussed.

I’ve just really discovered ShawnBlanc’s blog and found out that beyond being another Mac user, he is at IHOP and involved with the onething conferences, which means we probably know some of the same people without even knowing it. Anyway, I’ve been thinking more about having two separate blogs like Shawn has, one for Christianity/ministry and one for technology/freelance stuff. I do miss writing the great theological debates of my past, after all. So, in the coming weeks, as I transition our sites to MediaTemple, I am planning to either post my own blog or start a group blog with some friends. I’m still just working on names… I’ll let you all know how that goes.

My Pastor’s got a blog! I installed Wordpress for him real quick and gave him a basic template, but hopefully he and his son, Ryan, will have time to customize it more in the future. Still, not bad for five minutes worth of set up. Go to JimHennesy.com to see the blog or jump to his first post here. He was also nice enough to link back to me, so “Hi Trinity folk!”

Catching up on my reading today, and I found a great link on O’Reilly Radar to MySQL’s Twelve Days of Scale-Out. They’ve already featured two of my favorite scaled MySQL implementations: wikipedia.org and Zimbra. Personally, I use MySQL every time I get a choice early enough in the development process. I appreciate that it’s open source, even though I’ve only had to make use of that once (the developers were extremely helpful in helping us when the new version of MySQL broke some important key lengths). It’s nice that you can do almost everything with the free version. Mainly, though, I just like using the same platfom that scales for Wikipedia, Google, and Yahoo! offerings. It gives me the warm fuzzies in a way that only Oracle used to do for CTO’s in the 90’s.

Hey all, I’ve been way too busy and sleepless to post this week… but I’ll have a lot to say once we launch our new site at Generals International to promote the Light the Highway movement. I could probably post three pages just on things I’ve learned again in this project like “Don’t be a hero.”

Anyway, I’ve been trying to stay up to date on the Where 2.0 conference through O’Reilly Radar. Check out the Google Maps announcements:

• Where 2.0: Google Launches Streetside View with Tech from ImmersiveMedia
• Where 2.0: Google Releases Mapplets — Gadgets for Maps