kjcrane.com » Web

She told me later she just really dug the British accent

Jason — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 03:20:47 +0000

Maya and I spent a little time recently catching up on old episodes of a web design podcast called Boagworld. They recently announced the show was ending, which is too bad, because Maya really liked it. I’ll still enjoy following all the cool stuff they do on Boagworld.com.

Do you see our slideshows?

Jason — Sat, 08 May 2010 03:06:33 +0000

With most of our posts, we create a slideshow with photos of Maya. They should appear at the end of the post. They show up when viewing them on my computer, but not on Kari’s. Do you see them?

Comment on this post and let us know. We want to be sure everyone who wants to is seeing as many photos of the munchkin as they want. An example slideshow that’s also on another post is below.

Thanks for taking a minute to give us your feedback.

Update (May 9, 2010): I just fixed a bug that may have prevented some or most of you from viewing slideshows that accompany our posts. If you still don’t see them, try refreshing the page. If then you still don’t, let us know. That’s a lot of photos you may have missed, so I’ll try to find a way to get all them in one place for you. Or you can go through some of our old posts to look for slideshows. Sorry about that, hope you get to see more of Maya now.

The new kjcrane.com is alive

Jason — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 03:43:35 +0000

It was about eight months ago that I first sketched out an idea for a kjcrane.com redesign. This doesn’t look much like that sketch; hopefully it’s much better.

Kari and I (occasionally) use this site to tell family and friends what’s going on in our lives (um, Kari’s pregnant; more on that to come) but I also use it to experiment and to teach myself web design and development. I’ve been doing that professionally (teaching myself, that is) for about the last year for Star-Telegram.com and DFW.com, and I’ve improved by leaps and bounds. But I’ve barely scratched the surface, and I have much more I want to learn. (This week: JSON.)

Warning: Your eyes are about to glaze over. What you see on the site today has been done in WordPress, with PHP, HTML, CSS and jQuery, an unbelievably simple Javascript library that I’ve learned without really having to learn Javascript. That’s the blessing and curse of jQuery. It lets me do some very cool stuff, but sometimes a task that uses basic Javascript takes me way too long to figure out. Thanks to Kari for her patience as I’ve tried to get this new site out the door.

A great byproduct of all this, one that I didn’t really expect, was that I’ve learned quite a bit about how to use WordPress as a content management system. I use a content management system every day at work, which, just as it sounds, manages all of our web site’s content. Now, I have basically built a simple content management system for kjcrane.com. Sounds boring, but I’m hopeful the experience will be a jumping off point for bigger and better things, and it’s very likely to help in my next career, whenever and wherever.

So, thanks for checking out our new site, and please let me know – in the comments or e-mail or on Facebook or however you want to get in touch – if you find a problem with the site. Like I said, this is basically my Web design playground; I won’t get any better, and either will your experience on the site, unless you tell me about all the bugs you may find lurking around the site. And since we’re all friends, and you’re actually still reading this, and I don’t have to officially support Internet Explorer like I do when I’m being paid, I highly recommend checking out Firefox or Google Chrome if you haven’t already. Just give it a week. If you hate it and want to go back to IE, I’ll buy you a cup of coffee. And I’ll be happy to help you upgrade to the recently released IE8.