The new Batesbunch.com

It's finished.  Now if my haunts page looked anywhere near as good.  Most of my visitors are headed there anyway.  Oh well, I can say that I did it!!  It now has dynamic blogs feeds as well as the flickr stuff.  Hopefully my cool little css tricks are making it look nice and slick on your computer.  If they aren't, then you should get a better browser.  

Speaking of browsers.  Firefox's problem with negative css z-index values was causing me all sorts of problems with my semi-transparent backgrounds.  I think I found a solution though.  Once I explicitly set the z-index of the containing divs to 3 the problem went away.  My guess is that Firefox doesn't mind if 3-1 is greater than 0.

Dynamic BatesBunch

I put in quite a bit of time this weekend into an upgrade to batesbunch.com.  My goal was to turn my old fashioned home page into a dynamic RSS aggregator of all of our stuff.  I started by finding pageflakes and google widgets, but no one made the widgets I wanted.  They didn't work, or they weren't configurable enough.  So I ended up deciding to write my own. 

I am a jquery fan (at least a fan of the library's power, if not the chain writing style), and I started to look into JSON so that I could eliminate the need for backend processing of my feeds.  It has worked out great!  I now have a nice dynamic flickr slideshow (which took forever to get firefox to do right), as well as a list of my photosets.  Flickr's api rocks!

I am now working on my blogger stuff (which does not rock as much...lots of garbage in the interface).   I expected more from google...but.  Then add some layout work and voilla!  

I want it to be an easily lifted template for others, so everyone can leverage my work.  Still working on it, then I'll stuff it in a library for others to use.

Flickr rama

Ok, after much investigation I have decided to start using flickr for my online photos and videos. I chose flicker because of their nice slideshow interface, and better price compared to smugmug (which has a slightly better interface).  Also because of the nice plugin for iPhoto I found to make it soooo easy.

I will slowly be uploading my whole huge iPhoto library.  I am not sure if I will leave it all public or not.  Now my sister-in-law can start commenting on my photos like she always wanted, and you can see nice slide shows.  I am using ffexport for iPhoto.  A very nice free plugin that just lets me ship off my photos and videos in a few clicks.  Maybe batesbunch.com is just going to become a landing site without much real meat.  We'll see.   

http://www.flickr.com/photos/dhbatesbunch

Too bad someone already stole batesbunch... Oh well, I'll always have batesbunch.com.

10 Days and No Sign of Lice

I like that stuff.  Also my wife did a wonderful job of getting rid of the nits by working on it for many hours in the full sun.  At least it worked!

Head Lice treatment LiceMD

Last Monday my daughter came home from school with a full on attack of head lice.  Very exciting.  Well anyway after searching on the internet looking for the right "cure", I came across a post about LiceMD which is available at WalMart.  All natural (so they say) and non-toxic to humans.  Too good to be true?  Well, all I can say is that after 10 minutes I combed out tons of bugs, and they were all dead as a doornail.  The stuff didn't seem scary at all.  Seems like it is kinda like a premixed blend of all the other stuff they say takes care of the bugs, eggs, etc.  It's kinda like bug killing mayo with some solvent for the egg glue and some tea leaf and other oils to keep them away.  Really cool, and it left my daughters hair really nice.   

Everyone said how badly the Rid stuff stinks, and I believe them.  I tried some of it too, and it has horrible chemicals and is dangerous in about every way possible.  Made my daughter start to have an allergic reaction.  Didn't do anything to help their hair be smooth and uninviting to the bugs.   Seemed like it was designed to burn them out, taking your hair with it.

I'll let you know how it goes in a few days.  We of course worked tirelessly to pick every last non hair out of her hair too with one of the metal combs.  Hopefully we won the first time, and we won't have any more trouble.

Pay Pal Buttons

Pay Pal makes it really easy for you to add "shopping" to your website.  I was surprised about the little button creator that have on their site.  It was very slick.  Now people can click and buy stuff from me.  Of course, now I am stuck with a Premiere account, and the constant fees.  They offer a great service though, so I'm not complaining.

Maybe I should put something here

Well, I guess i'm gonna start putting something in here.  This blog should end up being a pile of junk that I figure out every day.  I hope it can help others, and I can look back at it and say "hey, I actually did something."