Reinspire
Relocation
May 9, 2007, 11:29 PM | 6 Comments
So things have been a little quiet around here lately and I haven’t been posting as much as I want to. I haven’t been actively reading or commenting on other sites or articles either, which is a little different from my usual routine. In fact, I haven’t been spending as much time in front of a computer at all recently (which is arguably a good thing anyways). Outside of work lately, most of my time online has been spent checking emails and very casually sifting through my feed reader.
Having a Bad Dream(host)
March 29, 2007, 9:02 PM | 12 Comments
For the past 16 months I’ve been using Dreamhost to host this site. For the most part, I’ve been pleased with their service and support, but lately things just haven’t been the same.
I originally switched over to Dreamhost at the recommendation – either personally or through what they’d written about Dreamhost on their sites – of quite a few “high-profile” designers (Mike Davidson, Jason Santa Maria, Dave Shea, Dan Cederholm, etc.). At the time I sent a few emails back and forth with Jason just about his personal thoughts towards Dreamhost, their reliability, support, bang for buck and a few other things. All in all I came away with a fairly solid opinion and recommendation of Dreamhost, and eventually I made the switch.
Gravatar 2.0
February 27, 2007, 8:30 PM | 0 Comments
A few weeks back I was asked about the comment avatars that are displayed on my site and how to use them. Since August of 2006, I’ve been using a great service called Gravatar that allows users to have an avatar associated with their email address.
Why do I blog?
February 19, 2007, 10:00 AM | 2 Comments
Fresh off my vacation I found out this morning that I’ve been tagged by Adrian with the latest blog meme that’s going around. Why do I blog?
I’m not quite sure how I feel about the whole meme thing and I know a lot of people find them annoying, but like Adrian said, this one is particularly relevant. It’s always good to state (or even question) why you do the things you do even if it’s only to justify them to yourself, so here are 5 reasons (in no particular order) why I still bother with this blog thing.
I Need Your Help!
January 26, 2007, 10:53 AM | 8 Comments
Over the past several months I’ve been putting off re-writing the back-end of my site. As some of you may know, everything on this site I’ve built from scratch and the main purpose for doing that was to learn. The problem I’ve been experiencing lately is that I just don’t have the time to re-write my custom CMS and continue to publish content on a regular basis. There are only so many hours in the day and I just can’t do both.
It’s De-lurking Time!
January 8, 2007, 11:10 AM | 3 Comments
It’s De-lurking time! I kind of missed the boat on this last year, but I thought it was a great idea and was determined to make sure I took part this year. I first heard about “de-lurking week” at Veerle’s blog, but the idea it seems was originally started at Papernapkin.
Introducing the Switch Journal
December 30, 2006, 12:29 PM | 5 Comments
Back in August I wrote about wanting a MacBook Pro, but also voiced my hesitation because of the rumored processor upgrades coming to the MacBook lineup. Well, that upgrade happened in late October and I’m glad I waited because Apple decided to update more than just the processor. In early December I finally got my MacBook Pro (it’s a 15 inch 2.33 GHz Core 2 Duo in case you’re wondering).
Portfolio Updated!
October 4, 2006, 9:21 PM | 4 Comments
Well, it’s been in the works for a while now, but I’ve finally gotten down to finishing up the updates to my portfolio. So, go ahead and check it out!
I’ve decided to let my portfolio take on more of a standard blog format rather than the typical portfolio format that I’ve seen on other sites. Here are some of my main reasons for following the blog format:
Random Thoughts for August
August 28, 2006, 10:50 PM | 2 Comments
Some thoughts that ran through my head this month:
- If anyone has a spare 90 million dollars, I want one of these. I figure the extra 10 million will be enough to pay for fuel and travel expenses for a while ;)
- NFL opening day is in 10 days. I’m pretty excited about the upcoming season… hopefully the Packers can be a lot more competitive this year. Look for my week 1 prognostications to fly early during the week of September 7th.
- Speaking of the NFL… ESPN’s super slow motion is awesome for Monday Night Football (or any sport really). If the pre-season is any indication, NBC and ESPN are going to do an excellent job with Sunday and Monday Night Football this year.
- Tiger Woods is the best golfer ever. I’m sick of hearing people say that he “could be” the best golfer in the history of the sport. Even if Tiger decided today that he’d had enough of the PGA you could still make a case about him being the best. Jack Nicklaus played in a different era on shorter courses. Yes, the technology these days is way better than it was in the Golden Bear’s day, but golfers are also stronger and more athletic than ever before… well, some of them anyways. A couple of stats to back up my claim: Tiger is 3 years ahead of where Jack Nicklaus was when Nicklaus won his 50th PGA tour event. Nicklaus won his 18 majors by a combined 44 shots… Tiger has won his first 12 majors by a combined 56 shots. (Source: ESPN). Now, I never had the privilege to see Nicklaus play but there is currently no one who comes close to competing with Tiger - now, either everyone else on the tour is really bad, or Tiger’s just that good. To me, there’s no argument, I am convinced that we are watching the greatest player in the history of the sport of golf.
In some site related news, Portfolio updates are coming in the near future and probably will be launched sometime in the next couple of weeks. I’ve spent a while re-thinking my portfolio and how I wanted to go about updating it. I think I’ve come up with a pretty good solution, so I’ll be rolling it out soon. Stay tuned.
Site Redesign: Design Phase
August 6, 2006, 11:55 AM | 0 Comments
In my limited design experience, I’ve come to realize that the hardest part of any re-design (or any new project for that matter) is deciding on the look and feel of the site. Truer words could not be said about the road I took to come up with the new design for this site. It took me three completely different design iterations to finally come up with something that I wanted to stick with and develop. The process was long and drawn out, lasting two and a half months and getting squeezed into whatever free time I could find while preparing to move into our new house.
Version 2 Launched
August 1, 2006, 12:00 AM | 0 Comments
Well, it’s finally here! Reinspire version 2.0 has officially been launched. If you’re viewing this content in your RSS reader, be sure to check out the new site, a lot has changed.
In the near future I’ll be posting a few entries on the redesign process as well as obstacles and challenges I came up against along the way.
At time of launch there are still a few things I’m working on. Some of those include cleaning up the CSS and adding some more minor tweaks for IE. Most of the issues with IE have been worked out already, but there may be some left overs still waiting to be found.
Version 2 Launches August 1st
July 31, 2006, 1:15 PM | Comments off
It’s been a long time coming, but I’m happy to say that Reinspire “version 2” will be launching tomorrow, August 1st, 2006!
I’ve been extremely busy over the past couple of months preparing to move into our new house and making sure all the legal and financial stuff was taken care of, so I haven’t had as much time to work on the site as previously hoped. Off and on though I’d get a spare hour that I could devote to the re-coding of the site and I’m finally at a point where I think it’s ready to be launched. It’s not totally finished, but at this point I think it’s better to get it out the door than to worry about the little things that I still want to change.
Redesign Progress Report
June 5, 2006, 7:45 PM | 0 Comments
For anyone interested, the redesign of this site that’s in progress is coming along quite nicely. After a nice relaxing vacation in Cayo Coco, Cuba, I went back to my Photoshop file of the new design I’d been working on for a couple of weeks and decided throw out the idea completely.
Redesign in Progress…
May 13, 2006, 5:21 PM | 0 Comments
I’m going to re-design this site. I haven’t been totally satisfied with the look and feel of this site for a while now, but it wasn’t until earlier this week when I looked at my site on a really nice LCD flat panel monitor that I really decided to do something about it.
Back in January I gave the site a bit of a facelift, but I didn’t really change the layout or even the site’s code for that matter. Basically I just changed some of the colours around and created a new logo. Consider it version 1.5 of Reinspire.
Step Up to the Microphone!
May 2, 2006, 7:00 PM | 4 Comments
Are you a lurker? Well, if you don’t know what a ‘lurker’ is, there’s a good chance that you are one. Don’t worry, it’s nothing to be ashamed of - it’s actually quite common.
So what is lurking? Well, it’s a term used for people that read blogs and join chat rooms or newsgroups but don’t participate by commenting.
Welcome to May
May 1, 2006, 9:03 PM | 1 Comment
It’s hard to believe that it’s already May 1st. Even counting the first 4 months of 2005 (in which I was not only enduring my last semester of college, but also preparing for my wedding, searching for apartments and weighing career options), this has been the busiest 4 months in memory by far.
So here’s a run down of what’s been going on in my life lately, and why the posts around here have been few and far between.
We’re Going Streaking!
April 3, 2006, 5:35 PM | 4 Comments
OK, I don’t mean this in the literal sense obviously - let me explain. On Wednesday April 5th I will be taking part in the first annual CSS Naked Day. Dustin Diaz has come up with the idea that on April 5th, hundreds of blogs will streak around the internet to promote web standards and usability.
Many popular bloggers will be taking part in this exercise including Dustin Diaz, Mike Davidson, and Nathan Smith to name a few. I thought I’d join in the fun and strip my site of all style for one day, all in the name of accessibility. So don’t be alarmed when you come to my site on Wednesday and it looks a little… uhm… bare.
February’s Random Thoughts
February 27, 2006, 10:05 PM | 0 Comments
February turned out to be a much busier month than I was anticipating. Despite being extremely busy though, I did manage to find time to work on the site. For those of you who subscribe to the RSS feed - you’ll notice that I’ve added the Recent Links section of the site to the feed. A lot of the other things that I’ve been working on will be launched soon.
Getting back to February, there were a lot of ideas I had to post about, but never got a chance to actually write them. Plenty of ideas, but not enough time right now. So here’s a few of the things I’ve had on my mind over the past 27 days.
Reinspired
January 28, 2006, 11:05 AM | 3 Comments
If you’re a regular visitor to this site, you’ve probably noticed the design change that has taken place around here. I mentioned a few days ago that a new design was coming, so here it is! I’ve made changes to several areas of the site and most are pretty subtle. The biggest change (obviously) is the new colour scheme and logo design.
The new colour scheme kind of speaks for itself, so I wont say much about it. The logo is something that I don’t know if I was ever happy with before, so I started over… sort of. The copy hasn’t changed except for a lighter gray for the ‘re’ of reinspire. For the icon part of the logo I wanted to create something simple, but strong, and this is what I came up with:
Random Thoughts
January 25, 2006, 9:55 PM | 1 Comment
Over the past few weeks I’ve had a lot of things running through my brain that I felt like I wanted to share. None of them really constitute a full entry in my mind, so I’ll just post them all at once.
This is something that I know many people do on their sites from time to time and I would imagine that more and more of these entries will show up here in the coming months as well. Wait and see…
Redesign Coming Soon
Well, I said way back when that I had wanted to give this site a facelift, but I didn’t really know when it would happen. I’m happy to say that the redesign is in progress, almost complete and will probably be uploaded this weekend. New site design, new logo, and new posts that actually relate to web development will all be coming in the near future! Check back often.
Heading for the Polls!
November 28, 2005, 11:54 PM | 1 Comment
Well, I wasn’t exactly planning this, but it turned out pretty well. Canadians are headed for the election polls on January 23rd. Today, Prime Minister Paul Martin’s Liberal minority government was finally defeated by a non-confidence motion, effectively ending his current term as PM.
Reinspire.net is also heading for the polls, but I’m talking about a completely different type of poll. I’ve been hard at work on a polling system for this website that I’m happy to unveil today. As I said, I wasn’t really planning this to coincide with the election call, but so be it.
New Hosting Provider
November 19, 2005, 3:47 PM | 0 Comments
Well, after 3 months with my old host, I’ve moved the site to a new hosting provider. My provider of choice is now DreamHost.
I’ve been reading about DreamHost for a long time now, and I’ve heard nothing but good things about them. After a few bouts of frustration with my old provider, I decided that it was time to make the move. It’s really a good thing that I only signed up for a 3 month term in the first place. I would suggest this method of sign up if you’re going with a host that you’re unsure of, or haven’t heard much about before. Actually, I’d suggest going with DreamHost in the first place so that you save yourself the hassle.
Looking for Something?
November 2, 2005, 11:08 PM | 0 Comments
I figured it was about time that I added the search component of this site. I actually had it ready to go about a week ago, but just haven’t found the time to sit down and finally implement it. Well, it’s here now, so go ahead and try it out.
I’m not completely finished with it, as there’s still a lot of things that I want to do with my site search, but I decided to throw it online in its current state anyways, as “some search” is better than nothing at all.
Portfolio
September 27, 2005, 1:08 PM | 0 Comments
Finally, the portfolio section of this site is now online. I’ve been working on it over the past few weeks and actually got around to ‘finishing’ it up today.
It’ll probably see a lot of tweaking and updating in the weeks and months ahead, but at least it’s online now. Check it out.
CSS Tips
September 6, 2005, 7:37 PM | 0 Comments
I’ve been thinking about this for the past few weeks now, and I’ve finally decided to move on it. I’m going to start a CSS Tips library that will be updated frequently and filled with tips and how-to walkthroughs of various CSS techniques.
These tips will probably start off at the beginner level and will progress in difficulty as they move forward. In honour of these new tips, a new category has been added to the Blog called CSS Tips, where all of the Tips will be filed.
Site Updates…
August 30, 2005, 1:10 PM | 0 Comments
Over the past few days I’ve made a few updates to the site. As I continue to build it, I’ll keep posting on my current progress.
The latest sections to be added to the site are the ‘Contact’ and ‘Etc’ sections. The About and Résumé sections will be the next ones developed, followed by the Portfolio section.
Once all of the basic sections are online, I’ll be working on the search functionality.
The site is still in the development stages and I’m experimenting with many different ideas at this point. Feedback is always welcome. You can use either the comments section to comment specifically on each entry, or you can use the contact form to send me general feedback, errors, questions, comments, suggestions, etc.
Dynamic RSS Feeds
August 21, 2005, 11:17 PM | 0 Comments
I was trying to decide how I was going to implement an RSS feed for my site. My original thought is that I would just generate a new XML file every time I posted a new entry to the blog using PHP and creating an XML file much like a text file. (Using the Filesystem functions).
I fired up Google and did a search for ‘PHP Generating RSS XML File.’ After browsing through the first few results I came across this site which has a brief tutorial on how to create a dynamic RSS feed.
First Post
August 20, 2005, 1:58 PM | Comments off
I finally got around to creating the back-end pages today to add Blog Entries to the site.
There’s still a lot of work to be done, but the site is finally coming together and is in a state where I can at least add entries and stuff without interacting directly with the database (or by using phpMyAdmin) entering XHTML code.
I’ll be working on this site as much as I can in the coming months, but now that I have the main functionality of the back end done, I’ll be updating the site on a more frequent basis.
Site construction underway!
August 15, 2005, 5:59 PM | Comments off
Reinspire.net is currently being built.
I’ve had the domain name registered for a while now, but I’m finally getting to work on putting the site together.
As soon as I get the Blog and Home pages almost completed, the site will launch, with the Portfolio, Resume, About, Contact, and Etc. pages to follow when I get around to it.
I think I’ve decided on a hosting company: the Toronto, Ontario based Canaca.com. For the money, they offer the most available disk space and bandwidth as well as a host of other features unrivaled by any other hosting company.
Potential Logo
June 18, 2005, 10:43 AM | 0 Comments
Well, this is the logo I’ve been working on over the past few days. I’m not sure if I’m finished with it yet.
As you can see, this is a grayscale version of the logo. I haven’t decided on colours yet.
As far as the colour scheme goes, I’m still working on it, so expect changes in the future.
reinspire.net
June 9, 2005, 11:29 AM | Comments off
Welcome to reinspire.net
Eventually, this site will be a personal collection of anything I feel like putting online. Pictures, thoughts, interesting links, etc. I’ll also have a blog on the site that will be updated regularly with anything pertaining to the world of Web Development. Design, Coding, CSS, XHTML, Standards… You name it, it’ll all show up at some point here at reinspire.
This site started off as a free blog on Blogger, but from the beginning I knew that was just a temporary home. Being influenced by sites like Stopdesign, mezzoblue, SimpleBits and Mike Industries, I decided that I wanted to start my own site mostly as a programming project to see if I could do it. I knew I could, but I thought I’d put it all to practice and actually produce something.