RSS feed of VespaRos.com, the personal blog of Eric Westbrook; developer, programmer, and enthusiast of music, art, culture, technology, tea, wine, and beer. http://www.vesparos.com en-us info@vesparos.com (Eric Westbrook) info@vesparos.com (Eric Westbrook) Are you younger than 30? Do you enjoy the luxuries of technology? If so, you are ruining the world as we know it. At least, that's what author and English Professor at Emory University, Mark Bauer would like you to think. A couple of months ago, at my local Barnes and Noble, while prowling for some helpful programming literature, in the same section, a certain book caught my eye. The title? 'The Dumbest Generation - How The Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future (or Don't Trust Anyone Under 30)'... http://vesparos.com/blog?postid=22 Thu, 22 Oct 2009 13:07:35 -0800 http://vesparos.com/blog?postid=22 Ah, things are starting to come together quite nicely around here. As promised, comments are at least presentable now. Today, there has been some polishing of functions that already worked being done more efficiently as well as a few new functions. I added retweet and sharethis links to all posts. Now if I write anything worth while, it is easy to share. I have just a couple more core functions to solidify over the next few days and then you will start seeing more worthwhile content as promised. This initial build is almost complete, and it feels great. There will not be any more posts after this one discussing functionality, from a user standpoint, the blog does all of the functions that I care to give. The remaining work is asthetic and some slight functional improvements (such as the text in the comment and contact forms erasing it's self on mouseclick). Be sure to watch the projects page, some things are beginning to solidify and there will be project announcements shortly. http://vesparos.com/blog?postid=19 Sat, 17 Oct 2009 23:43:54 -0800 http://vesparos.com/blog?postid=19 Yup. I finally have them up and running, feel free to try it out. I'm warning you, they're ugly... I'll write the CSS to make it prettier tonight. I was waiting to do so until I could actually see what I Was trying to edit. I'm busy, that's all for now son. http://vesparos.com/blog?postid=17 Fri, 16 Oct 2009 15:25:34 -0800 http://vesparos.com/blog?postid=17 Yeah, it has been a long time since I have updated, my reasonings? I fell victim to layoffs and was not in the proper state of mind. Then starting a new job was some stress, yada yada. Well, I'm back. With a vengeance. Although I haven't been actively working on this site, I have been working on other projects that are in the planning phases. But last weekend I did next to nothing other than work on vesparos.com. I finally came up with a solid starting layout that I liked, made some quick logos, wrote some CSS, and got some core functions working. Basically every user interaction code works, with the exception of leaving comments. I spent the past couple days stressed over not figuring out why it doesn't work. I found out that by default, the host that I am using for my database has remote insert access shut off and their support has to be contacted to turn it on. So, you can't comment yet, but hopefully in the next couple of days (that's assuming that I have an audience). Well, I must at least have some one mildly paying attention because some one tried to exploit the contact page with an injection attack. So that's two bits of good news... http://vesparos.com/blog?postid=16 Wed, 14 Oct 2009 23:10:07 -0800 http://vesparos.com/blog?postid=16 Alright. A lot of progress has been made today. All available links now work. Clicking on a blog entry or the count of comments will take you to the page that just displays the entry. In the future, it will show the comments on these main entry pages as well. When you are on main post pages, it will show you if there are any newer or older posts. I have it setup to where the main page that shows 10 entries at a time will start giving links to other pages full of 10. Awesome. The specific post pages will also show a message if you end up on a page that doesn't exist or has been deleted. A lot more to go, but things are moving along quite nicely here. http://vesparos.com/blog?postid=15 Thu, 13 Aug 2009 22:40:46 -0800 http://vesparos.com/blog?postid=15 You may have noticed that now there are some links available. These still don't go anywhere, the code to make these work is still in production. I did however fix a problem in my counter. The main blog page is supposed to show the 10 newest posts. The counter function did not skip deleted posts. So, I altered it to skip them when factoring in the count for 10. I am currently working on pages for specific posts and for navigation to "older" and "newer" entries. The posts now show how many comments have been left and the option to add a comment. These links only appear if commenting is enabled. Good enough progress for one day. http://vesparos.com/blog?postid=14 Wed, 12 Aug 2009 21:58:19 -0800 http://vesparos.com/blog?postid=14 OK. So this is my first official blog entry. I am writing this in an SQL Query GUI and I am manually escaping all of my special characters with a '\'. That's how primitive this is. The whole purpose of this blog is to be able to sell my abilities. To show what I can build using the coding languages what I am learning and market it. If you visit often, you will see changes. Last week the blog database was built. Nobody would notice that. Today, the backend engine to display blog entries on the main page was built. That's why you can read this. The engine is built to show the ten newest entries. If comments are allowed, you see a display saying that they are. But surprise, you can't actually submit them yet. The next steps over this week are to create commenting abilities and create multipage browsing (for example, there are 10 blog entries per page and you want to see an entry posted before the newest 20). The available links will also be calculated based on the grand total of blog entries. Today, a column was also added to the database to allow the deleting of entries. A test entry has already been deleted. These don't actually disappear, but are skipped in the code that generates what you can see. If I want to re-activate the code, all that I have to do is change the attribute back to the default. As a developer it is important to not use any blog apps but to build your own. Your website as well as others that you work on become your resume. I am offering the unique opportunity to track progress from the ground up. Very often, you will notice changes here... First, you will see functionality build. Then you will see the CSS and other design elements fall on top of that. I doubt if many people will be reading from the beginning, but all posts besides tests will be kept and you will be able to track my progress. Cheers. http://vesparos.com/blog?postid=3 Tue, 11 Aug 2009 20:31:28 -0800 http://vesparos.com/blog?postid=3 This is a test entry. Testing testing 123. Echo echo echo. Can you hear me http://vesparos.com/blog?postid=1 Tue, 11 Aug 2009 19:32:30 -0800 http://vesparos.com/blog?postid=1