Ourlinktoyou Blog

Browser wars have made it frustratingly difficult to embed video into a webpage without first routing it through Youtube.  Here’s a link I think will be the resource to lead me to success in this task: from developer.apple.com

Greg is potty training.

This morning, after wiping the drip and dropping the paper into the watery abyss, he brought out his empty hand shaped as if he were holding something of great value.  “It’s an ipod!” he said with great excitement.  Matter-of-factly he added, “There’s no pee on it.”

Greg picked up a small worm on our walk around the block this morning.  “I [will] hold it in my hand [so] it won’t wiggle out,”  he said.  “We [will] look at it under [the] microscope.”  This was at the beginning of our walk.  We walked over rocks and I lifted him to see the neighbor’s backyard water-feature.  We stopped to pick up a stick, a twisted tree seed pod, and a dandelion gone to seed.  We stepped on a sprinkler that hadn’t receded back into the grass, picked a pear from our tree, and came inside.  The little wiggler was in one piece, but wasn’t wiggling any more.

We brought the microscope upstairs.  Under the microscope at 10x we saw the segments.  At 60x we saw colors, and at 200x the color patches were easier to distinguish.  Yellow and blue.

Greg found the letters of his name and typed them in one by one as I coached him.  Then he wanted to type my name.   He thinks it’s great when he hits delete and it all goes away.  It’s even more exciting to move the cursor to the oversized undo button and make it appear again.

This morning, I took a walk around the block with Greg and his green, salt dough, caterpillar.  We picked dandelions.  Before making it around the block, he had sat in wet grass, tripped and scraped his knees, and broken and reformed his now slimy caterpillar.

Upon arriving back at home, we picked pears from our tree.  One came off with a bit of branch attached.  The last one we reached for wouldn’t budge, but we somehow slingshot its neighbor across the yard.  Many are left on the tree.  We gathered our pears and brought them inside to place in the paper sack for ripening.  A couple we had picked a day or two ago were still in the bag, and were perfectly ripe.  We sliced them and enjoyed their almost unbelievable sweetness.

As I began typing, Greg showed me the “blade” in his toy mower.   Now he is asking me about two different shades of purple dry-erase markers.  “Is this purple?  Is this purple?  Do you want to draw with purple?

I must draw with purple.

Reading about Wordpress mu was exciting to me until I learned my Economy, shared Godaddy hosting plan wouldn’t support it.  I guess you have to pay extra for the Deluxe plan, and a dedicated IP address or something like that.

There is still hope, though.  Because all I want is a second blog (not the plethera that would necessitate the dedicated IP), I may yet be able to set it up.  First, I upgraded my Wordpress to 2.8.4.  My intention was to then install a second Wordpress directory for the new blog, and create a second database to facilitate it.  However, now I seem to already have two blogs: one with all of the posts I had previously made in my first blog, but in the old WP version, and a second blog in WP 2.8.4 that looks a lot like my old blog, but with only about half of my posts.  I’m wondering whether they’re both referring to the same database, so I’m writing this post to see whether it shows up in both, or just one blog.

Here’s hoping for the best.

Thanks to Akismet, I no longer feel obligated to waste time manually sweeping the spam off my moderation queue.  Of the 12 billion spam messages Akismet reports it has screened today, 151 + 67 were from my own moderation queue.  This automatic spam recognition has made the thought of reading comments to my blog actually something to look forward to again.

Check it out: cottonwoodheightsstormwater.org is now up and live!  I’m calling it Stormwater for short.  It took a while to move, as I didn’t realize at first that Stormwater’s mySQL databases should be called in the site files’ configs by the name “localhost” rather than the host name provided in the JustHost control panel.   Now off to the next task:  adding the news clip/video.

Thanks to Chris Coyier’s screencast on the subject, I am beginning to see how to incorporate the Stormwater site’s skin around the phpBB Teachers’ Forum.

Am using ikemcg’s phpEventCalendar on both MagicontheMountain.com for the Draper Community Foundation and the Stormwater Coalition page currently under development for the city of Cottonwood Heights.  It’s user friendly, and easily adaptable.  I’m thinking of using phpBB for the Stormwater Teacher’s Forum.  Am updating to Wordpress 2.8 for this ourlinktoyou blog.

In July, Mercantec added a feature to their free shopping cart that allows multiple types (e.g.  sizes, colors, and therefore prices) for each item.  I’m using this feature on Brad’s site to let customers distinguish between the types of files they want to purchase, whether they want a .jpg, a .gif, or something else.   I still have much work to do on the back end, though.  My goal is to use PHP to make it easy enough for Brad to scale up and update his site himself without having to learn a new language or two.  I don’t expect to have much time in the next month, but maybe after two.