What I've Been Doing
5 July 05
So I realize that I have written up anything for about a month now, and it's eating at me since I have so much planned to add to this site. But I think I have a legitimate reason for the lengthy delay. Here's what I've been up to:
Lenya Upgrade at Hiram
This actually wasn't the biggest time-consuming project, although it did take up most of the past week. This turned out to be harder and more time-consuming than I wanted it to be. Hiram originally had one instance of Lenya running (both authoring and live) on one server. We were also using Tomcat for the servlet container.
As of today, we now have four instances running, a pair for production and another pair for pre-production. The authoring and live environments are now split onto 2 different servers and we're now using Jetty instead of Tomcat. One of these days I'll write up what I did to get to that point, but it wasn't a fun process. Hopefully now we're in a position where upgrades will be a lot easier.
New Hiram Events Calendar
This one is still very much a work in progress, but it was enough to launch it officially on the site. It has a completely revamped database design, a new viewing interface, and a new area to submit events to the calendar. I'm finishing up the administrative interface for assigned individuals to approve, edit, and cancel events. The calendar also boasts a "Live Search" feature using XMLHTTPRequest that Google Maps suddenly popularized. Much more is in store for the calendar, but that will require even more of my time and I'm just not there yet.
Updates to the redarrow site
I have a brand new design in the works that I think will make it a lot easier to read articles and such, as well as some more personal touches that I've been wanting to add on.
Freelance work
I'm starting to work on a redesign of the Ohio State University's School of Music website, of which I am also their webmaster. The design was done by the College of the Arts, and I'll be marking up the site and installing Lenya for them.
On top of that, I'm working on another exciting project that I won't say much about other than it requires quite a bit of coding. I also have things related to Lenya and personal items that have forced me to keep moving forward without much pause. As these things comes to fruition, I'll keep you posted here.
Thanks
By far, the people that read this site keep me going, so I appreciate everyone's patience as I try to catch up with life. Look for an article on the upcoming Lenya 1.4 release as well as a synopsis of the recent Lenya upgrade at Hiram.