1. Not enough emphasis on photos

2. I’m using a plugin that I think has a bad user experience

3. I’m hosting my images and want to use a third party instead

Using the picasa api I was able to write a simple jQuery plugin that will output the photos. Then I use slimbox2 to handle the ‘lightbox’ overlay (this was essential, I really didn’t like the plugin I was using). If you care to geek, I used modulo operator  to make the layout interesting. So I’m able to do two big thumbs and then a few little ones. I wanted to go with more of a pinterest layout but I liked retaining the grid as much as I could.

With regards to  the homepage, I got rid of the slideshow. Gone are all the words describing me and what I’m about. I’d rather show you.

Same thing with the photography section. Why spend all this time telling you about my photography then hiding the photos in tiny little thumbs? Gone! Just photos now.

Life is good. I can manage my photos with picasa (which is also handling the storage), I have a better lightbox experience,  and now my site is focused on photography.

Things I’ve been learning with this project:

• - cURL to access cookie restricted information
• - MySql database optimization (I say this with caution)
• - PDO methodologies
• - OOP
• - Google Maps API and GPS data
• - JSON

Currently, I have a script that runs every hour and utilizes a class I wrote to access two different feeds that has the Nike+ data. The first feed is a basic metrics list of all my runs in an xml format. The script first checks the most recent id in the run list against runs in the database. If it finds an id that isn’t in the database, it adds the basic run information and to a table and then it queries a larger JSON feed using the run id. The larger JSON feed has a lot more information so the script loops through it and add the data chunks it to various tables.

Nike also has two other feeds for user profile, and some basic ‘best times.’ While part of this project was so I could do my own analysis, there’s no reason I shouldn’t grab the math Nike has already done and it might be interesting to, for instance, see how my best mile changes over time. The user profile feed has some calculations that I could do like, total runs, but it also has average runs per week and preferred day of the week to run. While I could also calculate those myself, it’s an easy enough to just grab it and see how it changes over time.

Check out the some of the results here

Yes the rumors are true, after 6 and 1/2 years with Hays Companies trading between creative and administrative hats, I have decided to strap on my creative hat full time and accepted a job at Star Tribune as an Associate Web Developer. Today was my first day with the warm and welcoming digital media department at the Star Tribune and despite anxiety associated with a break in 6.5 year routine, I am extremely excited to get started on this new chapter. Now if only I could get that house thing figured out… well, that’s a saga for another post.