David's Blog

If you love someone, let them go. If they come back to you then they are yours forever. If they start acting like a completely different person, then you have lost nothing, because the person you loved was a figment of your imagination: and you still have that awesome imagination!

You see it all of the time in Hollywood’s action flicks. An old vet pulls a box from under his bed and unveils a totem from a war he fought in. It might be a knife, or a headband, a gun even. The item itself and its retrieval is only a visualization of the metamorphosis of the individual. The transformation from man into soldier. It is always a last resort, and while many may recognize that it is the que in the plot for upcoming climax. I argue that for the character that moment is the climax of the story. Read more »

A year ago when I was attempting to set up a classified adds site with a bit too much ambition I ran into a small problem with a minor security addition I wanted to implement in wordpress. In an attempt to get some expert advice I posted a ticket on the wordpress.org forums:

I would like to remove my users ability to change their email, and/or allow them to select a second email to receive notifications without it replacing the first email. Any thoughts on this? I don’t know where to start.

The post collected dust and the issue was never solved. To this day I am not exactly sure why my cry for help was ignored but it may have been that the answer was so pathetically simple no one wanted to bother with an answer. It also may have been a lack of communication and the term “I don’t know where to start” scared everyone away. Read more »

I spent a good portion of the past two weeks, aside from regular work, putting together a classifieds add site for my fellow students at North Georgia. Its simple, its secure, and it’s free to use.

The Why:
The idea for this site came a year ago as one of my teachers ineffectively fended off the complaints of his students. The textbook for the class cost over $100 and those students were obviously miffed, and tired of paying exuberant amounts of money for books. I get it. The publishers need to make money, and books are not cheep, but the system is fundamentally flawed. Editions are printed too often at too high a price, and yet not printed often enough to retain up to date information. Students get caught up in the crossfire between academia and the publishers. While electronic copies of books are quickly becoming the norm, this new classifieds web-app is geared towards alleviating some of the costs for those students who need it. Bottom line: I don’t like paying so much for books

The Who:
I designed the website with a mandatory locked user login with a very specific, but somewhat general key hole. The key is the schools domain name, a user must sign into the website with their school issued email address or be refused access. The idea behind this simple identity check is to keep spammers and worse from the students. It basically creates an open market within the confines of the schools community. So, only people who have been given an email address by the school can create an account and post, or respond to, ads.

The How:
Some wordpress, a handy theme and a lot of dreamhosting.

The Where: NGCSU.net

Now I’m tapping my head as how best to advertise the service without spending all of my money printing fliers and paying for adds, or wasting my time online pushing it to anyone who will listen…

I think I have completed my twitter integration, and have added a new plugin: Blackbird pie, which will allow me to link to twitter posts instead of taking screenshots. I am not sure if I will actually use it, it is nice to have possesion of an image opposed to leaving twitter up to serving it over to me.

This post serves as a test.