I’ve been meaning to get back to this for awhile, but I’m just not a big blogging type person.  My life schedule hasn’t really allowed time for extra stuff so I have backed away from any web projects I had.  I’m sorry if this is an inconvenience to anybody, but such is life.  Right now I am pretty focused on family and other more personal type issues.

I will be using this blog as a dumping grounds for my random life thoughts and things that are going on with me.  I may continue some small coding projcts as time allows, but I will make no promises about any of it.

Happy web surfing.

For anyone keeping track, life is still busy for me.  My work has actually been keeping me pretty occupied and I have been trying to focus free time on my family.  Sorry for the delays on any projects, but that’s how it goes when it’s just a hobby.  Something else always seems to have priority.

I just wanted to give anyone watching my site a heads up.  Life has been very busy for me lately.  My mother moved, I got a new car that needed some work, my day job got busy, and I owed some friends my help on some projects.  It hasn’t left much time for my family, let alone my side projects.

Rest assured I am still planning to get some of this stuff done, it just hasn’t been as quick as I had hoped.  Thanks for hangin’ around and showing interest.  Sometimes I get busy and start to lose motivation, so all of your comments are greatly appreciated.

Someone over at the zenphoto forum requested a google sitemap plugin.  It sounds like a good idea, so I’ve started looking into it.  I figure this will be a good experience for me as I have never created a sitemap before…  I know that makes me a horrible developer, but I guess we’ll just have to look past that won’t we.

Anyway, the idea is sound and it’s something worthwhile at least for my own experience.  I think I’m set as far as learning the structure of a sitemap, although I need to look into details for how many levels of childmaps you can have.  I am also in a temporary holding pattern as i decide where/how to break into childmaps.  It would seem that a childmap for every album/sub album would be appropriate, so that is my most likely avenue to pursue, although I will probably start off with just a single large map for testing purposes.  Maybe I should make it an option?

Here are some of the major features I’d like to build into the plugin:

• Sitemap entry for every gallery/album/image page.
• Do not create entry for unpublished albums (plugin option).
• Support childmaps on a per (sub)album level. (plugin option)
• Notify google of sitemap updates (optional)
• Notify other service(i.e. yahoo/msn/whoever) of sitemap updates (optional/long term goal)

I really don’t know what features are highly desired by people, so if you stumble upon this post and it’s fairly current, please comment and let me know.

My changes to the ZenPhoto Google Checkout Plugin have been accepted and released into the nightly build here: http://www.zenphoto.org/trac/changeset/1687

Everything looks pretty good and i have also added some more features including cart widget placement and some functions that will hopefully support switching to sandbox mode for testing later. All changes can be followed on the ZenPhoto Trac ticket here: http://www.zenphoto.org/trac/ticket/563

If you use the plugin please leave comments or pingbacks letting me know what you think.  You can checkout the plugin (no pun intended) on my test gallery.

I spent the last two days pounding my head against the monitor thanks to Google Checkout.  The great guys over at ZenPhoto put together a “experimental” (i.e. broken) plugin so that’s where I started.  It turns out that it is nowhere near their fault that the plugin doesn’t work since if you grab the code straight from google, that doesn’t work either.

Initially I was able to get the plugin working by getting the code generated from a google buy now link.  Having the form actually submit I decided to start plugging away at making a very feature slim cart that was really just an array of items stored in a session.  After spending a few hours working on it with little to now joy I was finally getting somewhere.  Then something pretty unexpected happened.  I stopped being stubborn and checked out the link my friend sent me that “should” allow quick and easy integration including a decently robust cart.  Wouldn’t you know, it turned out to be extremely easy to implement and after about 20 minutes I had something more usable than what I’d been working on.  A little more time tweaking and I was satisfied enough to leave it alone for awhile.

I posted about this on the ZenPhoto forums in hopes that I can contribute my code back to the project.  After I take a little break from it (Gotta put in a sprinkler system this weekend.), I will come back to clean it up abit and see if there’s not a more versatile way to manage the plugin options.  For now just relax and I’ll post some code later.

Hope you like the preview!

Oh, you mean that’s not how it works with personal blogs?  But it’s sooo amazingly “special” to get the first post in a new forum.  Oh well, I guess I’ll give up on that idea.  Seriously though, what the heck is that about?  Welcome to the Elementary School Tetherball court.

My plans for this site are completely vague for now.  I thought it was about time to register a domain for myself in order to show my accomplishments.  That being the case I will populate this site with links and pages to show the projects I am, or have been, involved in.

Thanks for swinging by and please come back later to see what new frameworks and tools are baffling me.