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22 years and counting

December 9, 2010 By

Today, Andrea & I celebrate the 22nd anniversary of officially meeting. Technically, we had had a few conversations before that. But those were the “Is this seat taken?” type conversations. It was at the college Christmas party for the program we were both attending. I was in second year and she was in first. Witty repartee ensued & it was pretty much a done deal from the get go.

Of those 22 years, I’ve spent about half my career working from home. A little over 2 1/2 years ago, we decided that we would have a go at doing WordPress consulting & services full time at home. It took about five months to get things sorted and shifted from a full time corporate income to a more volatile freelancing income.

We set out on this part of our adventure with the goal of being captains of our own ship at least until I was ready to retire from information technology based work. During the 5 1/2 months I was working on the merge of WordPress and WordPress MU, Andrea & I a good chance to assess our experience over the previous year and draw some conclusions & plans from that experience.

Once WordPress 3.0 was released and my commitment to WordPress core was over, we dug in full steam toward developing a stable revenue base doing the things we both enjoy doing the most. While we haven’t quite reached the level of income I had as a corporate lead developer, we are getting into that range and can see it on the horizon.

Our goal from 2 1/2 years ago is still our goal now. I’m looking forward to another great year with Andrea who is a great partner both in business and in life :)

Filed Under: Us Tagged With:

John Cleese on extremism

December 5, 2010 By

HT: Kim via twitter

This one pretty much speaks for itself

Filed Under: Video

Starting the transition

December 3, 2010 By

For whatever reason, yesterday I woke up groggy. By suppertime I realized I wasn’t going to get into a groove and do a significant amount of programming. Instead of trying to plod away at that, I decided I would work on the color scheme & layout which I had talked about in my previous post. The theme I’m using is Prose. Because I work with nearly all the StudioPress Child themes doing the BuddyPress support, I usually grab the beta of a child theme as soon as it’s available. Prose wasn’t an exception.

Prose has a built-in designer that I added BP support for. I actually spent quite a bit more time working with Prose than I do with most child themes (as far as the BP support goes). While I was working with the beta, I decided I would use it on this site. Most of the time that went into the design was choosing the colors. The Prose designer makes it really easy and quick to implement.

I have plans to add more functionality via plugins. I’ve started those and hope to finish and have them live on the site by Christmas.

Filed Under: Site News

Changing things out

November 21, 2010 By

In two weeks, this theme (Atypical Christmas) will be 5 years old. One of the things that has made WordPress a popular publishing platform is the stability of the theme system. Even though this theme is 5 years old, it’s never needed an update (nor has any of the themes Andrea & I developed for WP 2.0). We did add tag support to the themes running on Homeschool Journal when tags were added to WordPress, but other than adding that functionality nearly all of the themes on HSJ are circa WP 2.0.

I haven’t developed a theme from scratch in over 4 years. Over the last year, I’ve been working extensively with Genesis and most of the Genesis child themes. We use Genesis on Ron & Andrea, WP e-books, WP MU tutorials and Premium BP Themes. So, the new theme will be a Genesis child theme.

Over the last few months I’ve been thinking that I really needed to refresh the site. I’d like to have that done for the fifth anniversary of the Atypical Christmas theme, but I don’t think I’m going to make that. However, the last two weeks of December is typically quite quiet for us, so I’m setting my goal at having the theme changed out before the end of the year. I do have some interesting plans, but will save talking about those until I get a little further along in the process. As with all of the themes I’ve developed for blogging, the color scheme will be based on an image. The image that I selected for the header is one I took while we were on a nature walk early last month.

Filed Under: wordpress

Quick Move

September 19, 2010 By

Yesterday, I was planning on starting migrating Homeschool Journal over to a new server. That had already been delayed by a couple weeks due to our quest to replace our defunct 10 year old Ford Focus. For moving sites from one server to another I always use SSH which gives me command line access on the server. With SSH you don’t have to download and upload content, backups, etc. You can do direct server to server transfers.

The original plan was that I would make some backups, start the transfer process and break for lunch while the transfer was running. But, when I went to connect to the old server, it wasn’t there. Due to long standing & recurring issues with the billing system (and company) for the old server, the outstanding credit in our account was not applied to our bill and the server had been shut down due to non payment.

Enough was enough. Whatever else I had in mind for yesterday, I had no intention of going to bed before Homeschool Journal was moved off the server & running on the new server. I already had a test account set up on the new server, so the main hurdles were getting the old server re-instated and waiting for the DNS to propagate.

Last night and today, Andrea & I put a few hours into cleaning up dead blogs (ones that had never really been used) and deactivating the themes that were unused or unpopular. Even though the priority of the migration & cleanup was cranked up by a hosting company that’s gone downhill over the last couple years, Andrea & I we glad to be finally getting to the tweaking, cleanup, etc. I’m going to try to set aside an hour a day for the next few weeks to see how much we can have done by the time Thanksgiving (the Canadian one) rolls around.

Filed Under: General

Workspace

July 31, 2010 By

When I bought this computer a couple years ago, I settled on Debian Etch for an OS. I tried both Gnome and KDE for session management/desktop UI. KDE seems to be better equipped for developers (or, at least, for a command line/terminal based developer like me). Over Christmas break I upgrade to Lenny and left it with Gnome as the session manager. Shortly after the New Year, I started working on WordPress 3.0.

One weekend in February I switched over to KDE, but found there were things I had set up in Gnome that I was going to have to recreate in KDE. I didn’t have the time to do it then, so I switched back to Gnome. After working with Gnome for seven months, I’m somewhat used to it. There are still some things that are faster/easier in KDE than in Gnome, but I can still do those in KDE (by choosing KDE when I log in) and use Gnome as my day to day session manager. Switching to KDE briefly only requires logging out and back in.

The first time I was a FTE (full time employee) was a little over 4 years ago. Prior to that, I spent the majority of my work time working on clients’ computers with a typical time range between one week and three months. So, I’ve gotten used to working with whatever is available. Even though I upgraded over seven months ago, I hadn’t taken the time to really settle in. I got the urge to do that this morning. Here is what I ended up with (if you click on it, you can see it at 50% scale):

My rearranged workspace August 2010

  • The background picture is of the rose bush that Andrea bought me for my birthday this year.
  • The yellow notes are a handy sticky note application that I found this morning. I often have bits of text I want to hang onto short term and these are pretty handy for that.
  • The system menus are the equivalent of the start menu in Windows. I’m not sure what the equivalent is called on a Mac.
  • The quick icons are single click quick launch icons. Four of the seven are different web browsers which I use for various things. The other three are an X terminal (bash shell), my mail client and NetBeans. One of the things I miss from KDE is that you can set it so everything is single click launch.
  • The workspaces are essentially virtual desktops. I started working with X Windows in the early 90s and this was one of the features that I really liked. I think both Macs and Windows have similar functionality although I’m not sure whether in Windows you need to run virtual machines to achieve the effect. Usually I run up to three applications in a virtual desktop. Each virtual desktop has its own Z-order and focus which allows switching desktops (and applications) without losing the focus in the one you are leaving.
  • I think everyone has a system tray. The last icon allows me to switch to any active application. The only time I really use that is when I have more than 10 apps running at the same time.
Filed Under: Articles