Our Story

Snow days lead inevitably to template hacking. Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve noticed that my “weatherbox” has started to show a broken image under certain conditions. I discovered that my XML stream is sending me an empty tag where it should be sending me the name of a graphic.

Under these brilliant conditions, my PHP was set to display “nothing.gif”, which, of course, led to the decidedly-unprofessional looking red X in place of the graphic. Today I made the PHP code just a tiny bit more robust by bracketing the <img> tag with an if condition. Read on to see the resulting code.

“I’m all about open source.”
View Full Article »

John Bell’s new site, gomercentral.com, has accounted for 68 referring links (about 11.43%) since, well, Saturday. John, are you running banner ads for kennsarah.net or what?

Man, there’s nothing interesting going on in the world of the Internet today.

Here’s some news about kennsarah.net: I’ve discovered server-side includes. Since my webhost is running Apache, I can use the standard syntax for includes which looks something like this:

<!--#include virtual="../relative/path/to/file.shtml"-->

The question is, of course, what in the world is this good for? Well, in order to update different aspects of this site, I’ve been “versioning” different parts of my HTML code. You can see this if you view the source for the site: the banner has a version, the left column has a version, and so on. Once I’m happy with a tweak, I’ve been taking that bit of code and cutting and pasting it to the different templates across the website–a tedious procedure, at best.

With SSI’s, I can create templates for each segment of my code (such as for the Banner, Left Column, and so on), which can be “snapped into” the Main Index, Archive, or any other templates. Any templates with the <!–#include–> tag need to be renamed to filename.shtml to indicate to the server that the file needs parsing before being served to the end-user.

John Bell had pointed out that MovableType also supports variable includes but, as with most MT solutions that I’ve seen, the code for the included templates is merged into the calling templates when rebuilding the site. That’s nice, but can (unnecessarily) cost some disk space on the server (although it is useful to point out that I’m wasting just as much space with the current monolithic setup I have now). Another issue is that there’s no way to call that bit of code from another blog on the site because MT includes are limited to the scope of one blog.

The result? My HTML code can be broken up into easily-managable pieces which can aid in maintaining current templates and quicken development of new ones. The cost is a tiny bit of server-side processing before the page is served. My résumé shows the result of a SSI to a bit of code that is generated by the main site blog. Boo-yah.

Note: this is not an original idea by any means. Mark’s been using SSI since April.

Update: I just finished this tonight–the whole site is now as modular as a Lego project.

Hi!

You have reached the Internet home of Ken & Sarah Walker. We’re not here right now because Ken is busy hacking templates on the beta site. If you’d like to leave a message, please leave one at the tone. Be back Monday!

*beep*

I’m just now looking at kennsarah.net via the Solaris stations here at NJIT (I’m killing time until I can talk to some guy about class registration–of course). These terminals only support Netscape Navigator 4.76. Not suprisingly, the site is near-unusable. I guess I’ll be looking for some tips from Mark to fix it.

Stinkin’ Netscape. I’d love to just totally ignore this browser as it is finally becoming totally obsolete on the web. Thing is, though, if NJ’s “Most Wired University” is still running it, it makes me wonder what other public institutions still are, too.

It’s official: we now Google-own the phrase “ken sarah walker.” This was quite intentional: I’ve been trying to up our Google ranking by setting ken.walker.net to automatically redirect, and encouraging friends to link back. It will be interesting to see what happens when ken.walker.net and kennsarah.walker.net expire.

I had also tried submitting our site to the Open Directory Project and Yahoo after hearing a rumor that these directories seem to have some sway over Pagerank. However, months went by since that happened and I haven’t heard back from an editor. Humans may catagorize better than computers, but they sure are slow.

Apparently, the Christmas letter didn’t hurt our page rank either, as I used third-person throughout. It scored its own #2 spot on the Google-search.

Interestingly, though, Google still doesn’t acknowledge our site when you type “ken walker,” though ken.walker.net makes the top 10. A search on “sarah walker” only brings our site up in the top-40. Apparently, Google is sensitive to context rather than just counting the number of words on the page. A search for “sarah posegate” will bring up the Engagement Story on kennsarah.walker.net, which I’m working on porting to here, as well.

An extreme bout of long-lived geekiness, I set up a weather side-box to let you know exactly what the conditions are over here in Wharton. Why is this so geeky? Well, although you will never have to deal with it, our little weather box is the result of an XML stream formatted through custom PHP script. Yeah, I could have gone with any number of solutions all over the web (such as weather.com’s Weather Magnet), but I didn’t want any of those loud banners tarnishing our site. If you really want to read about my misadventures in the consumer-XML space, you can look at our beta site. Enjoy!

This is the new home of Ken & Sarah Walker of Wharton, NJ! With the purchase of our old address at kennsarah.walker.net, it occurred to me that we were paying way too much money for way too few features. And, being the economically-minded (nerdy) husband, I thought it best we move on to bigger and better things.

I hope you like the new redesign. It attempts to capture where we left off with the wedding. You’ll notice that the home page will show a random photo of us each time you visit–reminiscent of the slideshow. The color scheme attempts to pick up on the wedding colors as well. As to the geekier technology considerations, this site is running on a server in the UK with an extremely reasonably-priced host, PlugSocket. The site uses what’s known these days as a “content management system” called Movable Type which makes my life quite a bit easier in constructing and maintaining the site. You may also have heard of CMS systems referred to as blogs or online journals.

When I find free time, I try to update the site with new and interesting things going on in the life of Ken & Sarah. Check back often for news, pictures and clever anecdotes!

Enjoy!
K&S