With a lot of the time and effort I’ve been spending on my photography lately, I thought I’d clean up the Recent Photos view over at kris.nelson. I switched it from the small 75×75 square thumbnail view to a little bit more profound by comparison, as well as added a few details about each photo.

Behind the scenes, I did some housekeeping as well. Previously, the Flickr integration on this site was being handled through the phpFlickr package, as I’m using for Ka’anapali Dreamin’ (at least at the time this was written). Instead of using that entire PHP library just for this simple part of kris.nelson, I decided to switch over to the REST version and made a few corresponding changes on the scripting to display the results. It feels like it’s running just a little bit faster (without the PHP and MySQL overhead), but I haven’t actually don’t any formal testing with it.

Other Updates
In addition to just making this piece of the site look nicer, I also cleaned up a few bugs here and there, including a weird issue that I didn’t realize at first on the Twitter updates display. It turns out that the date format that is returned from the Twitter API (for example: Mon Nov 03 18:32:33 +0000 2008) is supported by and parses fine with Firefox, however IE treats it as NaN. I ended up just manually parsing out the fields and building the date parts manually. Oh well.

I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not going to win any awards for blogging, and although I currently write on four different blogs, I’ve only posted about 200 times in the last year or so. There are probably different reasons and/or excuses why I don’t post that often, but I’m putting forth a new effort to change that.

Like many people, I do well with rewards and incentives, so I went ahead and ordered myself a little Dell Mini earlier this month to make it easier to blog any time, any where. So to prepare for it’s arrival (since there are severe delays from Dell), I went ahead and created this fun little Blog Calendar widget to supplement the Blogger section at kris.nelson and my combined RSS feed. It’s a little motivation to keep me online and contributing to the Blogosphere on a more regular basis.

What it Does
It really isn’t that big of a deal, but I had fun putting it together. It’s just another little calendar control rendered with JavaScript like the 11,000,000 others out there, but it showcases days of a given month that I have posted on one of my blogs. You can see when I’ve been a happy little blogger, like back in April when I was in Maui, and when I’ve just been asleep at the wheel like this past July when I seemed to have taken the entire month off.

The days with at least one post are highlighted and when clicked, the posts from that day are displayed. And it all is done with a little flashy animation created with script.aculo.us. There are still a few quirks that I need to track down and work out, but it was working enough to roll it out and, of course, blog about it. There are a few interesting things going on behind the scenes to aggregate all the archive feeds from each blog and querying against them, but I’ll save that for another time.

To view it in action, just go to http://kris-nelson.com and navigate to the “Blogger” section from the menu. Once it pops up happily in the upper left hand corner, you can use it to travel back in time and view my previous posts (or lack there of), all the way back to my first post (I really need to update that blog template).

In the coming weeks, I’m thinking of putting this on a bigger stage instead of just a small little widget. But for now, I’ve been playing around with my newest camera and trying to be a regular contributor to my photos on Flickr as well. Not enough hours in the day, I tell ya.

Anyway, let me know what you think of the new blog calendar.

Here I am again, announcing yet another website. This is a small one, but it’s still a little different from the others. While it might still be cliche to buy a domain name of your own name, that’s what I did. And, by the way, the “-” in http://kris-nelson.com saved me $850!!! Not sure exactly who thought that particular name was worth so much without the hyphen, but they’ll have to get somebody else’s money.

This is just a single page site, but it features a few technologies that I haven’t been able to use on other sites as of yet. Most notably, there is animation with script.aculo.us, search powered by Google Custom Search, a combined blog feed created with Yahoo Pipes, and real-time updates from Flickr, Twitter and Blogger via their respective APIs.

You can read more about it in my portfolio section, and if it sounds interesting, check it out and let me know what you think.

Thanks.