nerd

I'm back. Fran forbade me from posting. She wanted all the comment love for herself. She's tried to keep me out of this game, but I can't leave all the Pat Reed fans hangin'. 2009 is my year.

As you can plainly, see we have revamped pnf.com. It was long overdue. We launched the site in November of 2002, and we really hadn't updated the back end or look of the site until now. Ooops. Hope you like it because we are not due to update it again until March of 2016.

If you like the nerdy crap and want to know about the site development, keep reading.  If not, skip it.
I ditched the old home-grown blog platform in favor of a Drupal-based site. Drupal is an open-source content management system (CMS) that is developed and maintained by a community of thousands of developers (and it kicks @$$$$). I started messing with it about a year ago when RIT Libraries was looking for a CMS for our sites. RIT Libraries now has about 12 sites running on the Drupal platform. I am definitely partial, and when I decided to ditch the home-grown system, it was the clear pick for me. Porting the content from the old site to the new one was a bit of a biatch. We had roughly 700 blog posts and almost 6,000 comments. I had to spend several hours understanding the database differences and working on the scripts to massage and port the content. Now that it is done, I am really excited about all the possibilities. I created the custom site template. It is based on the Genesis framework. I'll be prettying it up some more over the next few days/weeks. I wrote most of the JavaScript on the site using the jQuery library. I plan on writing a lot more Ajax-y site functionality soon. I configured Drupal to work with the TinyMCE WYSIWYG editor. Our home-grown CMS required us to write the HTML for the posts, so this is a welcomed addition. I think that about sums up the majority of the technical aspects of the project. If anyone wants any more information on any of this stuff, please don't hesitate to get a hold of me.

The things that I am excited about:

• A stop to the daily hate mail demanding an RSS feed
• Relief from the shame and ridicule that I had to endure for the outdated site look
• The ability to easily reposition site elements
• Easier site updating
• Larger images in blog posts
• Keyword tagging
• Picture of the day
• WYSIWYG editing during blog posts

-Pat

A picture of my girl.

The Bean - 1/2/2009

Check out this picture of Pat and his classmates at Kojak. Now that I see the looks of this motley crew, I can see why Pat was picked as proctor.

Note: Pat is the one in the purple fidora. Um, is that Dave Chappelle playing the white guy on the top right?

In other news, we went to Baltimore this past weekend, to visit Mike and Holly. We had an absolutely fantastic time. The flights were good (and cheap), the food and beer were good, and the company was great. I made a statement, in a joking manner, that this trip was better than our honeymoon. Sadly, it may actually be the case. Baltimore was a really cool city. Okay, so it’s no Jamaica, but it was pretty darned cool.

Friday night, we got in around 7ish, checked out their new house, met their new kitty, and freshened up a bit. We went to a Mexican bar/restaurant that Holly suggested was the Baltimore equivalent of our beloved Mex in Rochester. It wasn’t as cool, but it was a good substitute. After dinner, we went to a couple bars around town. Unfortunately, I can’t remember the names of any of the places we went to, or parts of town we hung out in. If you really need to know, maybe you can request that from Holly in the comments section.

Saturday, we went to an oyster festival. We ate raw and fried oysters, and went to some nearby bars for some cocktails. As we were enjoying ourselves inside at one of the bars, we saw that there was some pretty nasty weather outside. The next day, we heard about what they’re calling Maryland's worst multiple-vehicle accident. Crazy!

Saturday night, we just laid low and watched a couple movies. Undercover Brother, anyone?

Sunday morning, Mike and Holly made a fantastic, huge breakfast, and then we got ready to go to the airport. Thanks to Cima for dropping up off and picking us up, and thanks to Rebecca for watching Maynard and Ruby while we were gone.

Other than that, we’re looking forward to my annual birthday celebration at Mex on Friday, and then going to see David Spade on Saturday. My birthday’s the 27th, and I have to say, I don’t think I could be less excited about it. Turning 28 isn’t something I’ve really been looking forward to. It just seems officially…old. (Sorry to the people out there that are actually old.) Anyhoo, feel free to stop by Mex on Friday. We’ll be kickin’ it from about 9 on.

-Fran