Saving Energy

I’m a big fan of saving energy, living simply and living below my means as a way to increased happiness. With that in mind, I’m always interested in simple ways to incorporate energy savings into everyday life without making into an inconvenient slog. Apartment Therapy’s blog has an article on easy ways to save energy (and money) around the house, each easy to implement when replacing an appliance or looking to spend some money upgrading your house. Many of these wouldn’t be useful for renters, but the biggest energy savings (50% more energy saved than your old TV!) is in transitioning to an LED-backlit LCD television, which does move from apartment to apartment.

Some SSL magic

My field is primarily web design and development, but my main employment also includes some end user support duties. Aside from day-to-day tasks like adding users or restoring files from backup, I primarily have left the administration of the server to a network consulting agency. We recently purchased a new server and began migrating from our old server, which was a task I left largely to the agency. I wanted someone with more experience to handle it, since downtime while I muddled through a task I’d never tried would squash my co-workers’ ability to do their jobs, and I didn’t have the resources to do practice runs. But, after some hiccups with the consulting agency, I found myself needing to move our SSL certificate from the new server back to the old server so that Outlook Web Access could continue to run on the old server while some delays with the new server deployment were worked out. I’m pleased to say that after some careful research and some really great phone support from GoDaddy, I managed to move our certificate back to the old server, and got our OWA working again for our remote staff. While I’m not going to try tackling the migration of the Exchange mailboxes, I have decided that my success with this experience was good enough that I’m now going to try installing our anti-virus remote server and our printers onto the new server. My strengths are definitely in web design and programming, but I think that having some level of confidence in networking matters (and knowing when I’m out of my depth) bring a richness to my understanding of the issues involved in keeping a web server running. While I’m not going to pursue networking as a passion as a result of this experience, I do think it will make me a better developer, since I’ll understand issues on the networking side of the fence.

Learning from mistakes

I just read a really good essay on Lifehacker about identifying and learning from mistakes. Honestly, I’m blogging about it so that I can find the link later, but I thought others might benefit from it as well. So often, when navigating our career and life paths, we can abandon a particular path because of a mistake, rather than using that mistake to improve how we walk on that particular road. The key is striking the delicate balance between learning from mistakes and punishing yourself for them. In both programming and design, mistakes are inevitable and learning won’t happen without them.

PHP book review

I recently completed a PHP refresher course titled PHP Essentials. The instructor, editor of php|architect, was looking for someone to run through the course to work out any kinks, and I was looking for a PHP refresher. While taking the class via Skype over the course of several months (it is hard to align the schedules of two busy women!), I decided that having a book to work through at the same time would complement the course and provide another way of looking at the same material. The first book available through interlibrary loan was PHP 5 / MySQL Programming for the Absolute Beginner, so I checked that out. I worked through the first few chapters, but I ended up returning it unfinished. Unfortunately, I cannot recommend the title. It presented the information in a way that didn’t seem to build logically. For instance, it presented the $_POST concept before discussing arrays. It also advised the use of the print function instead of echo or print_r. I seldom run into the use of print in PHP projects, so I found it odd that echo and print_r were not even mentioned. It’s back to the library and the next book in the queue for me.

New site launched for APA Editor

I recently completed a new site, built in WordPress. The site is for APA Editor, Ardell Broadbent. She previously had a site built in GoDaddy’s Website Tonight product that was no longer serving her needs. Despite the fact that Website Tonight does not have an easy export function, I saved all the content for the site, converted and updated it, and optimizing it by stripping out extraneous html and spacing along the way. We redid the color scheme to match some color research she had done and added some downloads. The client was very happy with the site, and we will soon be working on another site for her vacation rental property.

Tags: websites, WordPress