Category: Site Stuff

I suspect that a lot of visitors to this site don’t take advantage of the tools I’m providing in the menu area above. Even Steph says, No, I don’t click up there… Come on, Click!

I’ve recently revamped the Weather option to be an everything you need to know about the current weather and conditions in Teton Valley, summary. If you live here, you should save this link.

Here’s a snapshot of our weather today, Saturday 1/28/12, at 11:15am:

The first thing you see is the current weather conditions plus forecast summaries for today and tomorrow. The links below this layout allow for more extensive weather analysis, plus a look at the local road conditions.

The Northwest Radar image shows the weather systems headed our way across the Northwest. It updates often and it’s very accurate. You don’t need local TV weather…

Local Radar is a closer look at what’s over us at the moment.

If you’re in the unfortunate position of having to commute over the pass, or you like to ski up there, here’s the looking back towards Victor view…

And looking towards Jackson…

So, there you go. This has become my personal favorite link for checking weather here, I hope it becomes yours!

I’ve been putting a lot of code time into my new PinPoint app. Right now the new data functions consist of three character codes, just hover over them for a description.

I’ve also written a new program that does two cool things, quickly. Pass it a zip code and it will display the polygon for the zip, or for the county where the zip code resides. For example, here’s the Driggs zip code polygon: 83422, and here’s Teton County’s polygon.

Hint: Click on the zip polygon for more information about that zip code. These polygons are available for all U.S. cities via PinPoint under the Oza and Oca functions.

Credits: Polyline data provided by my old friends over at PropertyMaps.com.

I’ve got a sweet little program in the works, called Geography. It’s a mashup of the column layout that I developed for the blog utilities and my new Bing Map program.

Essentially it displays over two hundred country names of the world, in column format. Click on a name and a high resolution digital map of that country will be presented. In some places of the world you can zoom down to street level, for amazing detail.

If you have a tabbed browser (and why wouldn’t you :-), leave the first map tab open, and it will be reused. Very handy!

And yes K-D, send this link to your tech-savvy dad, he’ll love it!

I’ve been writing some great code today. Following yesterdays Photos program, I’ve created an application that presents all Posts on a single page, in a drop down manner.

It really shows off the Blog, and detects any display issues that may exist. I’ll be fixing them as I encounter them, but feel free to Email me if you spot one…

I’ve added a new category to the right sidebar, called Links. These are new functions related to this blog. I also dropped Photos from the menu, since it’s now redundant.

Here are the current Links:

• Photos: This is a new, stand-alone app, built upon the previous Photos menu option. It’s improved in that the set names are alphabetic by column, not by row.

• Random Post: This link goes to a random post within this blog, every time you click it. It’s fun! I notice my current style has changed from my earlier posts, with bigger images.

So, please try out these new links, and leave a comment if you have questions. More links will be created as time moves on, and I stay alive…

I’ve been intrigued by the new Bing Maps aerial view. It’s based on their new v7.0 API and it’s noticeably better than the Google Satellite view, and the old Bing BirdsEye view, which isn’t even available for our neck of the woods.

What your looking at below is my new Bing Aerial Map program, focused on downtown Driggs, Idaho. You can drag it around, zoom it, or open it up fullscreen by clicking Here.

This is state of the art mapping code and the best view you’ve ever seen of a small town.

There’s nothing like staying in your pajamas all day, watching football out of the corner of your eye, while writing code. Know what I mean? Ok, maybe not the code part. I don’t know anybody here that does what I do. They all ski, bike, hike, hunt and fish. I code…

WordPress is the most popular blogging software in the world. I’ve taken a WP core implementation and modified it into this blog, using code techniques I’ve developed over the last 45 years. Photos are stored on my unlimited Flickr pro account.

I asked Steph today if she checks the News option. She said “No, I don’t click up there“. Man, if you can’t get your partner to check out your code, who will? So, here’s a quick summary of the menu above. Click away, you won’t break it…

• Home
  • Moves you to the top of the blog, showing the most current post.
• About
  • Shows you a shirtless picture of me, and provides some background info.
• Contact
  • Gives you an email link to contact me, and provides links for your feed reader.
• Archives
  • A cool drop-down entity, giving you access to All Posts by Date.
• Posts
  • Shows All Posts by Category.
• Popular
  • A sorted list of Posts that have the most Comments.
• Comments
  • All Comments, sorted by the most recent.
• Photos
  • All Photo Sets, presented alphabetically. Click on a Title to show the set.
• Videos
  • I’ve got videos stored on Flickr and YouTube. They’re all here, please enjoy…
• Weather
  • Shows the current weather for Teton Valley, with current radar maps of the U.S.
• Local
  • Local news from the valley and over the hill.
• News
  • Current news from Google and NPR, followed by the Doonesbury comic strip.
• Maps
  • My map applications, focused on Teton Valley…
• Sites
  • A summary of my other websites…
• Sandbox
  • My PHP testing ground. Before I go live with code, I test it here.

Reciting the alphabet backwards is an excellent skill if you get pulled over by the cops, and they want you to recite the alphabet. Just ask the question forward or backward?

If you can do it backward, they will probably just laugh and say have a nice day. ʘ‿ʘ

Click the Song icon to toggle sound On and Off. Click Play Again ↑ to replay it.

The Photo Viewer is launched when a photo is clicked. It’s an integral part of my FKScan sub-system, and I’ve implemented it here within the blog.

I went a bit overboard with the app, bringing in all sorts of info from the Flickr API, that most users don’t care about. Today I went in and striped that code out.

If you avoided clicking a photo because of the load time, that’s solved. Click away!

I’ve been beefing up my video tools lately. The main bad boy is MAGIX Movie Edit Pro 16 Plus. I’ve had this for a while, and it’s great. Over the weekend I upgraded one of my old standbys, Xara 3D. I was pleased to discover that it outputs text animations as a MAGIX .cfx file, which I can then process as video.

Here’s a short little clip that illustrates the concept. Possibilities, endless…

Click ↑ for Video

Here’s another…

Click ↑ for Video

I’ve been around the Internet, before it was the Internet. I actually wrote my first computer program in 1969, while attaining my Computer Science degree. I’ve seen every trend arrive in this business model of websites and email.

I saw Facebook when it was in college, I had an early Gmail account, and I’ve been an active Twitter user for some time now.

Below is a summary of my tweets, accumulated over the years…

My one follower? Steph, and she never uses Twitter :-)

I’ve consolidated all of my videos into the Videos page, on the Main Menu above. This represents every video I’ve shot over the years, some lame, some great.

I’ve been working this code for some time now, and I think it’s gotten pretty cool.

FKScan is an app I developed a while ago, that grabs the most current photos uploaded to Flickr, continuously, and shows them as thumbnails.

As I was developing this blog, I started using the Flickr API to display photos and videos using my newly designed Photoset and Photo viewers, based on the Bus Driver Jim domain.

Today it all came together. Everything has been moved under the FKScan domain, and I’ve added a Flickr video viewer.

Flickr considers videos uploaded to their site as long photographs. I consider them videos, and I’ve figured out how to discern between the two. Thus, when you click on a thumbnail, the code opens a photo viewer, or a video viewer, based on the type.

The PhotoSet Viewer shows information about the selected set, and hi-lites video content in yellow. When you launch the Photo Viewer, or the Video Viewer, information about that entity is available by right-clicking, or selecting the Info button.

• Launch FKScan.
• Press the Spacebar. (Or right click your mouse…)
• Let the thumbnails scroll until you see something interesting, and then click on it.
• The PhotoSet Viewer for the owner of that thumbnail will be opened.
• You can expand the photo stream incrementally, or present the photos within a set, by clicking on the set thumbnail or the description.
• Click the S in the upper right corner of a set box to launch the Flickr Slide Show.
• When you click on any photo or video, the appropriate viewer will be opened.
• Enjoy!

Steph’s off to Jackson Hole, WY to watch the latest Harry Potter movie, with my sister and my niece Catherine. I’m sitting here in my nice quiet office, writing code.

I developed FKScan several months ago, and it’s still one of my favorite apps. It’s role in the computer universe is to grab the most recent photos uploaded to Flickr, twenty at a time, and display them as thumbnails. It will keep doing this until you stop it, or until your computer is just plumb out of resources.

If you see a photo that interest’s you, click on it. Formally, it just went to the Flickr site for the person that uploaded the picture. Now it loads my Photoset Viewer.

All of the photosets for the owner of the photo are displayed, along with a single thumbnail that represents each set. Click on any photoset title and all photos within that set will be shown. Then, click on any thumbnail within that set, to open the photo in my Photo Viewer.

These tools open up the Flickr universe in a very unique and enjoyable way…

Try it out!

I have a real love/hate relationship with Social Media. On the one hand I think that it’s just for people that don’t know how to create and maintain a website of their own. I have over twenty websites, but all that does is make me a snobbish elitist. Nobody visits those sites anyway…

I’ve been doing this a long time. I was online the day that Facebook debuted, and Twitter, and Flickr, and Google. I developed my first website when Riley was about 6 years old. (He’s now 24). It was a Spice Girls fan page, well before Social Media hit the scene.

I have to admit that I have a Twitter account. I use it to follow tech things I’m interested in. I’ve only made one tweet, and that was to get a $5.00 credit for movies from Amazon.

(Update: I’ve now made two tweets, just got another $5.00 Amazon movie credit :-)

I’m also a total Google fan, my gmail account runs back many years, and I’m constantly turning people onto the cloud.

Facebook has always bugged me, for many well documented reasons, and I keep opting in and out with it. When I’m out, I lose track of what my family members are doing. When I’m in, I’m thinking “What the hell am I doing here”?

Today I discovered a plugin that automatically puts each post I make here on the blog, on Facebook. I had to do it: I built a new Facebook page, and activated the plugin.

It’s very cool! I’ve been posting to my blog daily, and this plugin sends each new one to Facebook. I’m liking this!