Blogs

My family and I went to Disney World in October 2012. This is part 3 of my 4 part series looking at the trip. Read Part 1: Downtown Disney, Epcot, Hollywood Studios and Part 2: Magic Kingdom, Animal Kingdom.

My family and I went to Disney World in October 2012. This is part 2 of my 4 part series looking at the trip. Read Part 1: Downtown Disney, Epcot, Hollywood Studios.

It's alive! Nuketown 7 is now in production. It's not quite finished yet -- there are a couple of bugs here and there that need to be squashed -- but the site has been upgraded to Drupal 7 and it's running its spiffy new theme. The social media buttons are active and -- amazingly -- working and we can now post microcontent updates directly from the site to Twitter.

Up until October 2012 I'd been to Disney World five times, never with kids. This week that all changed as my wife and I took the kids on our first-ever destination vacation to Disney World.

The Nuketown7 redesign is finally done. Or rather, it's finally done enough to launch. Over the next two weeks Nuketown will be on hiatus as I upgrade the site to Drupal 7 and implement the new theme. During the upgrade you can check out The Atomic Age for status updates. That's my ancient Blogger site, and I'm dusting it off to support the downtime.

We're almost back to normal after Hurricane Sandy. We got power back Wednesday night, we got our landline, cable, and Internet late Thursday morning, and today the college where I work got power back after being down for most of this week. Easton, Pa. isn't 100% yet; I have a few friends who still don't have power, but we're getting closer to normalcy.

Hurricane Sandy has come and gone, living much of Northampton County, Pa. without power. Most of College Hill -- including Lafayette College -- doesn't have power, though there are a few streets where the lights are still on.

Two Rivers Brewing in Easton, Pa. has been running a kickstarter for the last month to pay for their new state of the art draft system, which will make sure that their beer is served perfectly. They made their $20,000 goal over the weekend, but there's still another two days to participate. There are no stretch goals mentioned, but it remains a good opportunity to help out a local brewer and get some nifty Two Rivers Brewing swag. Check out the kickstarter.

When it comes to operating systems, I'm not an early adopter. Part of this is work -- our support for the most recent Mac operating system tends to lag a few months behind the official release as we wait for software and network partners to replace upgrades that run with the OS. I'm also gun shy when it comes to upgrading my core operating system; when I have things working the last thing I want to do is break it.

It's the little things that kill you. Most of the broad strokes of the Nuketown Redesign are done: I have template for pages, nodes, microcontent, and blocks, and the site renders under the new theme without any major errors. Since last month my work has focused on building out the nooks and cranies of the theme. It's stuff like block headers, the "read more" links, and sidebar bulleted lists.

In short, the little stuff ... and it's time consuming. Each component takes about two hours to knock out (though in the case of captions for images that's more like 8 hours ... and I'm still not done) as I tweak css and tweak template files. It is satisfying, in that each small piece that I complete brings its own sense of accomplishment but man, there are a lot of pieces.

I was distracted from my theming adventures by needing to re-jigger how Nuketown 7 handles Twitter updates but that landed in a good place.