Introduction

It is time to update my home page and a lot has happened since the original page went into publication. The first page was more of a learning experience when I pretty much developed everything from scratch with little help from existing development tools. The experience was very informative and educational, but also a bit painstaking. This version is taking advantage of multiple publicly available tools some of which are detailed below.

The goal of the site remains the same - to have a single location that accumulates electronic information of interest to me (and hopefully others). Over the past few years the web has become an integral part of information and sharing for me. Below are some of the sites I use for various purposes:

Flickr - for photo sharing.

Polar Personal Trainer - keeps track of all my workout information.

Google blogspot - for day to day information publishing.

Fuelly - keeps track of gas mileage on my Ford Fusion Hybrid.

In addition I generate some information that is only published on this site:

Weather data - primarily for my weather station, but also for cities of interst to me.

Bowl Games - annual contest with my Dad to see who can best predict the winners of the various NCAA Football bowl games.

Links to where some of my photos have turned up on the web.

Page Layout - Dreamweaver

Having a page layout tool is very helpful. It saves a lot of time from writing a bunch of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), but it doesn't come for free (either in cost or in effort). I used one of the standard Dreamweaver design templates for this page and it works very well for text only designs. However, check the Weather page. Here I am trying to incorporate multiple graphical elements and it was a lot of work to get to a layout that would work without unnecessary wrapping of the divs. It was also a lot of work to convert the menu from a vertical list to a horizontal list. Apparently there is a SPRY widget that gives more flexibility in this regard which I will check out later.

Overall I have been very happy with Dreamweaver. My approach to learning has been to watch a few training videos and read a couple of introductory articles and then to dive in and try to develop a page. This works to a certain extent, but does not really make one an expert. Eventually I will either need to buy a book or attend a class to ensure that I am getting as much out of the tool as possible.

JQuery

JQuery is a real godsend if you are doing any Javascript development. Not only does it make your code much more concise, but also has some great functionality that saves one a great deal of development time. This is a highly recommended toolset.

Google Charts and Libraries

The weather section has an extensive amount of weather data both from the home weather station and also from a variety of other sources including WeatherBug sites and NOAA sites. This data is best viewed graphically. I have spent much time trying to find a JavaScript graphics package that was full-featured and well maintained. The Google Charts (or Visualization as they refer to it) is the best that I have come across. All graphics on the weather and other pages are driven by Google Charts of one type or another.

Other Sources of Information

In addition to the above useful sites there are some other good locations for technical information for anyone maintaining a site with JavaScript, PHP, and MySQL. Below are some of the ones where I have found the most useful examples and descriptions of how these technologies work:

PHP - The official PHP web site. This site cannot be surpassed for technical explanations of PHP and how it works. Highly recommended source of information.

MySQL - Official MySQL web site. Has lots of information and examples on MySQL queries.

StackOverflow - when searching for answers to PHP, MySQL or JavaScript including examples StackOverflow routinely has the best answers and explanations of how things work. Whenever I search for a coding problem answer these are the first answers I turn to.