Archive for March, 2009

A decent chunk of my time as of late has been spent working on a website for an aunt’s new wedding/event hosting business.  It’s been a fun (at times painful) project that has provided some good hands-on experience.  I realized that while I could build a static html website fairly easily, but a much better solution for the situation was using WordPress.  WordPress is traditionally a blogging platform, but it’s versatile enough that it is being used more and more as a website design tool.  The big plus in this case is that it means after I finish the site I can hand it off to my aunt, who can edit basic content without having to worry about understanding code or layout.

Step one was getting WordPress installed on her Godaddy hosting, which proved to be a pain compared to my one-click experience using Fatcow for my own blog/website.  Whenever you switch a domain or hosting setting, it can take hours for the changes to take effect.  I had to switch from Windows to Linux hosting, and that was only after I wasted several hours creating a hosting plan through their free hosting with domain plan when the .net adress was the paid account, not the .com.  The problem that results is a large Godaddy ad at the top of all pages. That wasn’t going to work.  So I deleted that account and switched over the .net to the .com address, and waited.

Then I shuffled through Godaddy’s uneccesarily bloated interface to create a MySQL database required by WordPress.  The WordPress installation finally took!  That was the easy part.

Next up we decided on a theme I could work with to modify fairly heavily into a website.

The next part was the real learning experience, as I have limited knowledge of php.  However, I’ve always had the ability to read code and understand its function pretty well.  My shortfall is more that I can’t write it from scratch.  So I spent a while sifting through different .php files looking for things I wanted to change.  My strategy was generally to cut out chunks of code that I thought might be whatever I wanted to get rid of, and then refresh the site to see what happened.  Often I got it right, but every once in a while the entire sidebar would disappear or some such.

After adding some basic content and pages, the website is now in a useable form.  Still to come is some minor design tweaks and probably an overhaul of the current basic content, but for now there’s a working, half-way decent looking blog masqeurading as a website!

Today was a great day for a bike race – cold, wet, and miserable.

It gets you in the right mental mindset rather quickly when you’ve got spray and mud from the road in your face in the first mile of the race.  The race went well and I was really happy to get back to racing.  The team had planned to try to get me into a breakaway group in lap 3 of 4, and I saw my moment of opportunity and took it by attacking the field to bridge up to a rider that had gotten away solo.  The two of us were joined by three other riders that bridged up, and we had a 5 man break going that at one point got probably 45 seconds ahead of the main field.  Unfortunately we eventually got reeled in as is common in Cat 4 racing.  I managed to make it over the last big hill with the front group and rolled into the finish near the front of the pack for about a 15th place finish.  Not bad considering I’m not a sprinter and I’ve only been back on my bike for a month or so.  My legs feel good and I could have gone another lap or two without a problem, but I definitely need to get in a few more intervals to see if I can increase my top power a hair.  Overall, I feel pretty happy with my conditioning currently and how the day’s race went.

Among the more notable events on the day was a teammate’s total bike implosion caused by a jammed chain.  If you look closely, the chain is mangled, the front derailer is snapped in half, the rear derailer is in pieces, the derailer hanger is bent, spokes are broken… at least he stayed upright.

So what’s the result of 44 miles of riding in the rain on dirty roads look like? Something like this:

It was also great to catch up with some friends from UO, including Chris, who was also filthy.