ben robison
when only more words will do
Subscribe to RSSDusting Off the Developer Skills, Stem Cells, & Consulting
So after my recent Christmas break addiction to computer games, I’ve once again sworn them off (for the most part) convinced that there are better things to do with my time. Of course I already know this, but once or twice a year I forget and spend all my spare time after Abby’s asleep playing games. This usually lasts for a week or two.
PSCB - Public Stem Cell Banking
It was actually a favor for my wife that drew me out of it again. 
She started up two blogs, one for the family and one for her long time goal of public stem cell banking. Not the controversial embryonic stem cells, but the umbilical ones that come from the baby’s umbilical cord after it’s been severed. Normally these cells just go to waste, but there are actually a few places that can collect them. These cells are just as useful as the embryonic cells, but it conveniently avoids all the controversy.
If you want to donate your stem cells for research or for others to use, it’s actually quite a laborious process and she wants to raise public awareness so that more people can do it. This started off with registering a domain for her and then putting up a site. Then we had to find a nice theme, get ready to play the SEO game, and start designing.
TheRobisons.org
Then I figured as long as I was putting my web developer hat on again, I might as well update the family site. My family isn’t the most techno-savvy, but I thought that after an entire year with no one posting new content it was probably time to rethink the site. Most of the family members had started up their own blogs, so now therobisons.org is a feed aggregator of sorts, grabbing content from everybody’s blogs and putting it in a central location. I grabbed the Post Titles only and the links push visitor’s back to the writer’s own blogs.Another look, more tweaking, no SEO for this site, and we’ve got another site up and running.
Benrobb.com
And for those of you actually on the site reading, you’ll notice a new look to my own site as well. This one probably consumed the most effort, but I’m happy with the outcome. I obviously didn’t do the theme myself, but there’s always the tweaking that has to happen to make everything look the way you want. Along the way I discovered that disabling the WP-Cache plugin does not turn off the plug-in and it continues to cache pages, but other than that, things went pretty smoothly.
It’s another right-side nav theme, which I used to really hate, but in my efforts to branch out, the last theme on the site had a right-side nav and it kinda grew on me. This one’s got a nice reddish-brown color and I’m a fan. Hope you like it to.
Freelancing
Then suddenly, my father-in-law contacts me and says he’s actually got two sites that need to be put together for two new businesses that he’s starting with a partner. They’ve already got contracts coming in for whatever it is (I’m not clear on that yet) and they need sites right away. They’re going to be pretty simple, and hopefully it’ll bring in a decent amount of extra funds for the help-ben-and-alison-buy-a-house fund. When it rains it pours I guess.
Tags: dev, robisons, stem cells
Desktop Application for Blogging on a Mac?
I know that there are a few applications that do this. I seem to recall looking at a few several months ago, but didn’t feel like I had a big enough need that I wanted to pay for one. Now that I’m looking to increase the frequency of my blogging, I thought it might be nice to give them another look.
Problem now is that I can’t seem to remember any of the ones I looked at before, and I’m really drawing a Google Blank. Any help from the masses?
Time to Roll Out the Upgrades
Just upgraded wordpress to the latest version. It was a little more involved than I liked, but once I got the latest version of my theme, then everything went off without a hitch. Now I’ve got database backups and code lying all over my desktop, but that’ll all be cleaned up in short order.
I’m excited for this version of Wordpress however, since it now has native support for tags. This is something that has been in Typo for ages, but the lack of a really good/cheap Rails host (well, maybe it’s laziness and lack of willingness to try different hosts) means that I had to wait for Wordpress to include it before I could use it.
Yes, there were plugins before, but I try to keep the mgmt of my site to a minimum, and stay out of the code as much as possible. I consider myself fully capable of diving into the code and the hardcore database stuff, but when you’ve got better things to do, why spend the time doing it?