I spent the day redesigning my website. What may appear to be just a simple visual touch-up was actually a major overhaul. I ported my site from Serendipity–which I began using when I first transitioned to a blog format in 2006–to the more popular WordPress platform. The template is my own custom design built on sandbox.
I have had a personal web presence for over ten years now, and interestingly enough, when I look back on previous sites, it seems I have upgraded the site look-and-feel about every two years.
For your amusement, here are some screen shots from the past (click the thumbnail or year to see a larger image):
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I was shocked to discover today that French PHP programmer Bertrand Gugger passed away last week due to a heart attack. Bertrand was co-lead on the Net_Monitor project with me, and contributed many valuable additions to the project, including all the SMS messaging support and end-to-end testing of European SMS messaging providers.
Bertrand was a character, to say the least. He was passionate about PHP and often had very strong opinions about how to write code well. This, combined with an imperfect grasp of English, often got him into trouble on the Pear Developer lists. Still, in the end, Bertrand and I always got along really well and he contributed some very valuable code to the Net_Monitor project as well as many other Pear projects. Whatever he did, he wanted to do right, and this commitment to writing high quality code–as well as a voracious interest in contributing to PHP development–will have implications and benefits for other PHP programmers for a long time to come.
Reading the news a week late on the Pear website drove home how little I have been involved with a community that used to be such a big part of my life. After James’s death, I began to refocus my life (and this website) on one of my original loves: poetry. And, with the growth of the company and my development team at work, I rarely delve in to actual PHP code these days.
That said, just the other day a new programmer signed on to the Net_Monitor project, and I am happy to see this work continue. Coding for love instead of money, giving something back to such an amazing community of talented programmers who have made so much possible for me in my own career and life–is a kind of lineage I have been proud to take part in. Bertrand was an important part of that lineage, right up to the end. He is survived by wife and children, who have my deepest sympathies now.
Que vous reposez en paix, Bertrand. You will be missed.
Even though it’s been awhile since I’ve made a major contribution to Pear, I’m still on the map. (Click the southernmost monkey in California.)
ABC News reports this morning that, “Officials credited a cool, moist ocean breeze Sunday night for slowing down the fire and putting communities out of immediate danger.” So, for now, a waft of sea breeze has put us out of this fire’s path. Unfortunately, “The fire, which has cost about $15 million to fight, also scorched a condor sanctuary in part of the Sespe Wilderness and fish and game officials closely watched a condor fledgling.”
Meanwhile, I set up a very quick-and-dirty command-line PHP script to check the Forest Service’s RSS feed and page me when the title of the most recent item gets updated. I didn’t have time for fancy XML parsing last night, so I just relied on regular expressions to pull out the title and stored an md5 of the title string for purposes of comparison. Works great so far, and helps me rest assured that I will get the latest updates when they happen.
David Allen’s GTD Connect membership program is finally live to the public. GTD Connect includes an amazing web site with tons of rich content, events, and interactive applications to keep members engaged with maximum productivity and cutting-edge ideas and tools. This is stuff everyone needs to keep up in the world of information overload. Just not everyone knows it yet.
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Last week snow settled into the stripes of the Topa Topa mountains above our house, and further up the canyon dusted all the trees. Then a few days of sunshine. And last night the rain came down by the bucketful. It has been surreal, the fact that the world goes on from here–and us with it. But I’ve been dealing with the mundane world again slowly, doing my best to remember what it’s really all about in the process.
Yesterday PHP Quebec published their list of sessions, and I guess the process was in motion before I decided to pull out, because I noticed my name still there. It just doesn’t make sense for me to travel so far and stay in a hotel, apart from my wife, so soon after the passing of our son. We need to be together, and I still need time. Still, it was great to see my name on the list with Rasmus, Ilia, and others major players in the PHP community. As Chris keeps reminding me, there will be other conferences. And as my heart keeps telling me, there are other, more important things in life.
