Categories
Books

The Racketeer

The RacketeerAgain I didn’t really have much of a plan when I visited the library looking for something new to read. Conveniently the super fine librarians of Linwood had setup a popular books of 2013 area. Or at least it was called something similar to that.

There were only two books in the section that I hadn’t already read (yes, I have turned into quite the reader the past few years). So I went with The Racketeer by John Grisham. I have heard of Grisham, so I figured I’d give it a shot.

It is a legal thriller. Not quite sure if this was my first legal thriller or not, but it was pretty solid. Guy is framed, gets out, then pulls one over the federal government. Pretty solid concept.

Overall, I really enjoyed it. Not too much couldn’t put it down or had to read just one more chapter enjoyed it, but still pretty solid. Once again the library has steered me well.

Categories
Development

Google AdSense Responsive Ads

I was pretty excited when I realized that Google AdSense was offering responsive sized ads. Kinda surprised it took me so long to notice it, but I’m not exactly raking in insane amounts of AdSense dollars at the moment.

Their Smart Sizing option is very convenient in that it will automatically detect the container elements width and then serve up an appropriate add based on that. While this is really slick and convenient I was getting much too tall ads due to the layout of my blog.

Luckily they do offer an Advanced mode, where you can modify some CSS Media Queries to request specific sized ads based on browser width. This was perfect.

In my case I wanted 3 sizes.

  • mobile devices (320px x 50px ad)
  • browsers with widths over 1400px (300px x 250px ad)
  • browsers with width under 1400px (120px x 240px ad)

So, I just adjusted the CSS Media Queries as such, and all seems to be working pretty well.

1
2
3
4

.my-ad { width: 320px; height: 50px; }
@media(min-width: 500px) { .my-ad { width: 320px; height: 50px; } }
@media(min-width: 800px) { .my-ad { width: 120px; height: 240px; } }
@media(min-width: 1400px) { .my-ad { width: 320px; height: 250px; } }
Categories
Development website

Sea Isle City Website and Mobile Apps

Sea Isle CityJust wrapping up some work for Sea Isle City on a new website and some mobile apps as well. The website is www.visitsicnj.com and the mobile apps are available for iOS and Android.

This was a rather large project, and working with the folks at 7 Mile Times was a pleasure yet again. They are extremely organized and great to work worth.

Kim provided an excellent design to build upon and Patty was fantastic is organizing content and keeping things rolling along. It was pretty great.

We built the site on a very stable CMS that made it very easy for the admins to manage the site. Training them literally took minutes if that, given the simplicity of the CMS.

The calendar presented some interesting issues. They wanted the events grouped into months, and working with dates/events can always be a challenge. After much trial an error a solution was found, and it didn’t require much overhead at all to execute.

This is not the first website I have worked on with these folks, so we’ve got a bit of a formula down and it really showed.

A mobile app for both the iOS and Android platforms was to be developed as well. Given the nature of the apps, we decided to build on the PhoneGap/Cordova platform and them create builds for each respective platform from that.

Mobile development is still a bit of an adventure for me, but this one did go a lot smoother than my last. Just having more hours under my mobile app development belt as well as improved libraries/info on hand really helped out.

We are pulling info from the website view web services we created, and the mobile app is consuming those JSON feeds to populate the app. It really is pretty amazing  one everything is setup and producing and consuming the web services. Pretty amazing, slick, and efficient.

While we of course hit some bumps and hurdles along the way, I’m glad to say we did meet our deadline and on budget! Not bad for such a large and complex project!

Still have some minor loose ends to wrap up, but all in all this was a very exciting and rewarding project to work on! I’ve learned much and we’ve put out a very solid product(s). The clients are extremely happy and have been the utmost pleasure to work with.

Categories
Adventure Sports

Kevin’s 40th Birthday Bonanza

11+ season veteran Honey Badger Kevin always is kind enough to invite me to various activities. From Night in Venice parties, to Eagles games, etc. However unfortunately I’ve always seemed to decline such generous invitations.

Well it turns out the guy just turned 40 and was throwing quite the large party on it’s occasion. He had organized a large birthday bash in Philly including a Flyers game and other festivities afterwards as well.

He also invited Dustin and Jared from the team, but sadly they could not attend. So that meant I would be going solo into a party where I knew no one. A true adventure indeed!

So I drove up to the Holiday Inn in Philly to meet up with the crew. Amazingly I didn’t get lost nor take even the slightest of wrong turns. This is quite a feat for me.

I was interested to meet this crew. Kevin is a pretty interesting guy, and surely his close friends must be characters as well.

These folks were characters indeed. All very friendly and turns out I had many common friends with one of them. So that was interesting and gave the two of us much to talk about for a little bit.

Then we headed over to the Flyers game when Kevin had gotten a luxury box stocked with food and drink. It was a very nice setup, and a very fancy way to take in a game. Despite knowing no one, I was able to make conversation and it wasn’t too bad.

I did depart shortly after the game while the others seemed to be awaiting much more adventures. All in all it was a unique experience and fun to hang out with some complete randoms for an afternoon.

Categories
Design Development

joedag32.com 3.0 upgrades

I’ve been so busy that I keep putting off upgrades to this very blog. But I’ve finally gotten some time to get this blog with a fancy responsive design and make it a bit friendlier on tablets and larger screens too.

I looked over many CSS grids and decided that Pure would work best for me. I was very much impressed with their minimal footprint and it’s responsiveness. It was extremely easy to work with and flexible. I was very much impressed. Plus their blog layout example was almost too perfect for what I was hoping to achieve! It saved me a ridiculous amount of time!

While I mostly use jQuery for my framework of choice in most projects, I wanted to give YUI3 a crack in this one as my early roots go back to mostly YUI. It was a great working with YUI3, and I was very impressed with their TabView module. It worked great.

I really think that the new layout makes my posts much easier to read on mobile, tablets, and traditional users as well. So I’m very excited for that.

I’m still cleaning up my work section though. I’ve let that fall behind a bit, even neglecting to add many recent projects. So, that’s next on my list of things to do!

Categories
Books

Let Me Off at the Top!: My Classy Life and Other Musings

Let Me Off at the Top!: My Classy Life and Other MusingsWell, I really wanted something silly to read with all the recent harsh winter weather and the pretty intense books I have been reading. Let Me Offat the Top! perfectly fit that bill.

While I haven’t gotten around to seeing Anchorman 2 just yet, the Ron Burgundy character does bring some laughs from me (minus those recent Dodge commercials, they’re kinda dumb). This book was complete and total nonsense. It was borderline crazy at times.

However, since I was looking for nonsense I was happy with what I had found. There were times I was reading this doing some cardio in the gym and was laughing uncontrollably. I’m sure I must’ve looked like a fool to those around me, but a few parts were that funny to me that I just couldn’t contain myself.

His childhood really had me cracking up. That was probably my favorite part, though the majority were funny as well.

By no means would I consider this a great book, but it really does do a great job of nailing his character and doing him justice. Very funny.