the weblog of m.kelley

Jedi Do.

Ping – Should Design Be Held Back by a Tyranny of Data? – NYTimes.com.

“Data eventually becomes a crutch for every decision, paralyzing the company and preventing it from making any daring design decisions,” Mr. Bowman wrote.

Google is unapologetic about its approach.

“We let the math and the data govern how things look and feel,” Marissa Mayer, the company’s vice president of search products and user experience, said in a recent television interview.

• Jello Pistachio fat & sugar-free pudding
• Perseverance
• Google Maps

Chattanooga Times Free Press | Report exonerates Soddy-Daisy police officer in Taser-related death.

Officer Daniels then deployed her Taser seven times, stunning him in the left thigh/leg area, left upper arm and underneath his left arm, according to the report. Following the stuns, Mr. Redden remained combative and uncooperative. He then was handcuffed to the stretcher, according to the report.

The officer tried to shock the man 7 times – imagine getting that type of voltage running through your system just once or twice. How can that NOT be excessive force? Before the Taser, the man was just a naked medical case. The main issue, is that he’s dead after the Taser.

Early-on, Chattarati occasionally received invitations to help with outside projects. We were briefly involved with a business venture and discussions about starting up a new magazine in Chattanooga. Part of this idea, was to have a monthly publication and fill in the gaps with a website. As we started going down this path, I wanted to run the magazine’s site, similar to how we run my employer’s main site. We have work flows and various environments (prod/beta/test/dev), so we can see applications and content in states of working before we make a production publish.

Because we were looking at becoming a start-up, funding was non-existent. So like a lot of people, free sounded good and we decided to use WordPress. So my main thought after making this decision was, “how do we maintain two environments using WordPress?” In this exercise, we won’t use beta as a naming standard, they’re “Production” & “Pre-Production“.

How we differentiated between the two environments was, production was the latest edition of the magazine along with daily posts about x topic. Pre-production was the test page and where we built out the next month’s edition. In the original thought process, this would be two WordPress installs, two DBs, two of everything. In the maturing of this plan, we’re using one singular WordPress install and two sets of information based on the WP-Hive setup. (more on this in a bit)

Now, if I were a decent coder, I could probably have one install and code in a mechanism pulling from a different database, based on the URL. That’s what we do in a lot of instances at work. Like, I said, I’m not a good coder but I do know how to install WP-Hive. With this WordPress plug-in, I can have one DB and one WordPress install, but install lots of independent sites. So for the example above, we could have the templates, graphics, and WP setup equal among the enviroments but have both the prod and pre-prod environments. Moving the latest edition to production would be as easy as using WordPress’ export mechanism, trimming out everything but the recent edition, then importing into the prod server. Not perfect but less complicated.

I’m still investigating improvements for this plan, MovableType (for instance) has a work flow plug-in which could be used to do similar things as well as have user signoffs in the process. But having the ability to have seperate but equal installs, sold me on making WordPress more of my framework than just a blogging engine.

Forever Lulu (1987).

- Debbie Harry and a very young Alec Baldwin didn’t save this movie. It was painful and we even gave this movie a shot, but it was painful.

Rating:

Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986).

- Back to a time when Harry Caray was alive and calling Cubs games while Wrigley Field remained light-less.

Rating:

• Sugar-free Popsicles
• Petron Tequila (Friday)
• moe. – “The Conch”
• WordPress

The original mkelley.net lasted from 2000 until October 2005 and a few different variations on different sites until I decided to merge everything together and relaunch the site you see today.

Merging 5 years (1,300 posts) from Movable Type and then another 1,400 posts from other MT, WordPress & Tumblr sites was quite a feat but it’s well worth having 9 years of blogging in one location (I did something similar back in 2002, combining handcoded, Blogger and ancient blog system formats). It was an occasionally odd project, where I wound up reading some really stupid shit from 7 years ago. At times, it was also emotional because I put so much into those first few years and so much happened from 2000 until 2002 (major illness, moving, 9/11, marriage, being laid-off, etc).

My main goal for having a site to begin with, was to archive my life for not only myself but to my family. I gave up hope for a few months, where I thought I lost all copies of these early databases. But a last minute discovery put this project back on track and ultimately met my goals.

I normally do not like website welcome messages, but Welcome Back to mkelley.net!