My Web Development Recap for 2008

This post is coming in a few days later than I had originally hoped, but that's okay. 2008 was a very busy and successful time for me in regards to my personal work online, and I wanted to take a moment or two and recap some of the highlights and numbers.

Four New Sites!!!

With the launch of my largest site, Ka'anapali Dreamin' back in 2007, I would have figured the majority of my time the following year would have been spent with upkeep and expansion of that site. Indeed, I put quite a bit of time into it, with close to 20 updates released last year, not to mention all the new content around our April '08 trip to Maui.

But who knew I'd also be serving up 4 new websites in that same year, bringing the total of sites in my portfolio to 9. Here's a quick recap of each of them.

• Maui Wall Candy - This is my online photo store powered by smugmug. While the Pro account that I'm subscribing to handles most everything for me, there was still a bit of customization to get the site looking unique, and it was anything but the traditional coding and markup process, either.
  View Site - View Announcement
• photonelly.com - This site is my portfolio site for my photography work, much like webnelly.com is the portfolio site for my web development. It was one of those that I decided to throw together in a matter of a few weeks and have been very happy with it.
  View Site - View Announcement
• kris.nelson - Shortly before completing photonelly.com, I came up with the concept for kris.nelson and literally launched the site in 3 days. It's not a traditional website and bends a few of the standard site design rules, but I think it's a neat little place to visit
  View Site - View Announcement
• Igloo Surfing - This little blog should have been the first site in 2008, but was put on the back burner almost the entire year. It's a small blog featuring photos of our rabbits doing cute things and my attempted humor with captions.
  View Site - View Announcement

While I have some site redesign and enhancement ideas for my existing sites, there are no plans for new sites (yet) in 2009.

Blogging

By the end of 2008, blogging finally became part of my daily routine, and I was very proud of myself. Setting small goes to start with, I finished the year with well over 200 posts on my four blogs, and in December I was averaging 2 a day.  Here's the breakdown:

• Ka'anapali Dreamin' Blog - 136 posts
• Kris and Cindy's Blog - 42 posts
• webnelly.com Blog - 28 posts
• photonelly.com Blog - 26 posts

Photos

With the launch of my photonelly.com site last year, photography, much like blogging, became a regular part of my life as well. As a result of our April '08 trip to Maui and my renewed interests in everyday photography, I posted 1,900 new photos to Flickr in 2008.  Checking the 2008 Archive calendar at Flickr, the biggest spike in April from our Maui trip, but the last 3 months really started to pick up in terms of frequency.

Twitter

It addition to making Twitter part of my Maui vacation in 2008, I've become a modest use of the micro-blogging service during the second half of '08. I recently posted my 1,000 update on Twitter before the end of the year, and while I only have a handful of followers, it makes a nice balance. My Twitter updates are already integrated into kris.nelson, and I have a few ideas on future uses as well. Fun stuff.

Pretty Much It

That about covers the major highlights. There were so many cool things that worked on this past year, it would just be too daunting to list most of the smaller ones. The new sites are always fun, but the blogging, photos, and Twitter conversations I engage in daily are really what is making it exciting to share my life online right now. The web is such a great place right now, and I'm happy to be a part of it.

Here's to bigger and better things in 2009!

Project Week Wrap-up, Ubuntu and Rails Installed

Well, tomorrow I go back to work after having this past week off. Time to get back into my normal routine, but before I do, I wanted to recap a few of the things I crossed off my list from last week.

Server Migration Update

I was able to migrate Kris and Cindy over to my new web host with only a few minor issues and fixes. Saving the notes of what I needed to fix for this site will help when I have to move the Nighthawks Hockey Online over next, which shares a few of the same backend coding designs.  Only two sites left to migrate.

Kris and Cindy Housekeeping

In addition to migrating Kris and Cindy to the new host, I also did a little housekeeping to the main site, too. While not the eventual site redesign that is needed, it helped reorganize things and remove some of the content that has since been replaced with the Ka'anapali Dreamin' site. That should be good enough for awhile.

Launched Igloo Surfing ... Finally!

As of last Wednesday, my ninth site officially launched after sitting on the back burner for close to 10 months. Igloo Surfing is just a small little blog I'm doing for fun more than anything else. It simply features a different photo each day of one of our rabbits doing something adorable, funny, or otherwise curious. Humorous comments are attempted, but feel free to add your own.

No Facebook Development Yet

I didn't make any direct progress on implementing my first Facebook application that I hinted at last week. The first stop at the bookstore last week came up empty in terms of finding a FB development book, but the latest trip this weekend was a little more successful. While I didn't purchase the book, I thumbed through it enough to see that it was covering Facebook Application Development with Rails. 

I'm choosing to save that for after our upcoming vacation, but in the meantime, I finally made the decision on what to do with an old Gateway laptop I had that was collecting dust. I went ahead and wiped out the Vista image on it and installed Ubuntu 8.10 instead. It's still a little buggy and in need of a few tweaks, but I was able to install Ruby, RubyGems, SQLite, and Rails on it to start with. I have a few example apps to work through before I dive into Facebook development, but no real timing on that yet.

A Successful Week

Well, overall it was a pretty successful week, considering how much family time we had last week (which is also welcomed). Believe it or not, it pretty much wraps up the year, which has also been very successful in terms of my web development. 

Look for a post mid-week that features the highlights some of the best of my work online over the past year.

Igloo Surfing Launch ... Finally!

It was 10 months ago when I posted that this site was launching soon. Well, I finally got around to finishing it and it is now live. It's not a major site by any stretch of the imagination, just a simple blog to posts photos on. Just thought I'd have a little fun for a change and not be too serious about things.

Check out Igloo Surfing if you wanted to take a look at what it's all about. I'm scheduling new posts in advance, so there should be a regular string of updates for a while now. Be sure to grab the RSS feed if you want to.

And if you're looking for more cute and funny bunny photos, visit the inspiration for this site, Disapproving Rabbits.

Project Time Next Week

Next week is going to be the second year in a row that I get the entire week of Xmas off, which is giong to be very nice. Since I haven't been skating as much I as want to, that leaves me with more time for working on different site updates and projects during that week.  Now, the only issue is deciding what to work on!

Here are a few things that I'm considering giving face time to next week.

Finish my host migration

Believe it or not, the host migration to a new web host has been going better than I had thought. In fact, I only have 3 sites left to migrate, upgrade, and test. They are, however, the largest sites that I have, which is why they're going last.

Add my Maui Photo Calendar to Facebook

I just recently launched my Maui Photo Calendar as an Google Gadget, and I was thinking yesterday about trying to add it as a Facebook application. I was doing some research and found opensocket, which is supposed to take care of much of the integration for existing gadgets to work on Facebook. Going through some of the settings, however, I think it would be more beneficial to grab a book and learn more about Facebook apps first.

Finally launch Igloo Surfing

It seems like only yesterday I had this idea of launching a fun little website named Igloo Surfing.  Actually, it was over a year ago. Going through the web host migration, I revisted were I had left off with the site, and I was a lot closer to finishing it than I remembered. So that makes this another good candidate. Odds are it could be my first new site of 2009.

Redesign for Kris and Cindy

Speaking of a year ago, around this time last year is when I put Kris and Cindy in a dormant mode. Not only is it long overdue for a redesign, but probably some restructuring as well. The current site structure and sections were good a few years ago, but SO MUCH has happened in our lives since then. Mainly for the good, the current structure just isn't going to hold all those new pages.

This is still one of the sites to be migrated to the new host, so that makes time for a redesign a good candidate, as well.

Minor design and layout changes for Ka'anapali Dreamin'

I mentioned last month that I had a few minor changes in the queue for Ka'anapali Dreamin'. The biggest of which I'm thinking of is a slight redesign and layout change to increase the standard page layout for 1024px browser widths, rather than the current 800px width. My other motivation is that we leave for Maui in less than two months (yay!), so I really need to get caught up before we come back with even more content to add to the site.

New feeds for kris.nelson

Last week I shared something I discovered with Google Reader to be able to share my favorites from the different RSS feeds I follow. That, and a few other similar additions, are racing around in the design part of my brain right now, and are itching to come out.

Flickr and Google Map integration for photonelly.com

Just this week I quietly snuck in some new changes to the home page of photonelly.com to include recent posts and photos from Blogger and Flickr. That was more of a spur-of-the-moment idea because of recent work with the Blogger Data API I was doing, so it was completely unplanned. What I really want to add to photonelly.com is an integrated photo gallery like I did for Ka'anapali Dreamin'. You can view that here, and as you can see, there is both Flickr integration and maps displayed with Google Maps. 

So that's what I have to look forward to next week. Obviously I'm not going to get to all of it, and I don't really have a set idea on how to prioritize the above. I'll end up playing it by ear, but if I can get at least two of these things knocked off the list by New Years, I'll be happy.

Launch of Igloo Surfing Coming Soon

My initial hopes was to get the Igloo Surfing site up by the end of the year. Obviously that didn't happen.

I got back into the site development about three weeks ago, and didn't I didn't like the color scheme I was starting with so I re-did it. I also worked on the logo for a little and came up with something a little more elaborate than just the domain name in bubble letters.

I have the majority of the supporting text and pages ready now in Firefox, so it's just a matter of testing it out in IE 6/7 and working out the bugs there. Once that's set, the next step is to create the blog for the site (it will be a blog-site rather than a site with a blog), work the layout and style elements into the blog template, and off we go.

My latest target is getting it launched by the time we go on vacation (mid-April), so that shouldn't be too difficult.

Igloo Surfing - November Progress

Obviously, the site isn't up yet, so all of the progress and updates are related to the initial launch of the site. At the moment, I pretty happy with the logo that I have designed and much of the main page layout. This isn't going to be an overly complex site like some of my other works, more of just a playground and photo sharing area. As with the Ciolinos site redesign, I am trying to push my limits of what I am capable of in regards to graphic design, and again not predicting that this will be the greatest thing since Google Maps, but something I want to be proud of.

For the remainder of this month, I'm hoping to finalize the main page layout for the site, slice up the comp and generate the core HTML and CSS, and get the foundation pages ready to go on a testing site. After that, it's gathering photos and planning out the mechanics of the site, and if it's up by the end of the year, I'll be happy.