Side Project: Grouse Mountain Skyride Availability

I haven’t had time to work on many side projects lately. I think I generally am most effective at programming when I have a long stretch of uninterrupted time (on the order of a few hours or more at a time), and I have found the same at work. These long stretches of time are difficult to find these days. However this was one opportunity that came up this week. Many of my side projects are born from automating repetitive manual tasks, and this was one of those.

Post-summer update

I can’t believe it’s September already.  The weather is starting to become cool and wet, days are becoming shorter, marking the end of what has been an incredible summer (and year to date).  It’s been a while since I’ve written here, so with the changing season I thought I’d share a bit of an update of 2016 so far. Some of these warrant their own blog posts, but until I have time to write the full thing here is a summary.

When frames are too many

I was digging around my backups and came across this mockup of a site my friend and I worked on ten years ago, but never published.  This was when Microsoft FrontPage was still around, frames were OK, and <blink>, <marquee> and animated GIFs were the rage, and when the whole world used Internet Explorer. I guess it didn’t occur to us back then that nine frames were eight frames too many.  Oh, have times changed 🙂 Today, HTML framesets are rarely used.  Server-side scripting such as PHP is used to replicate common code across multiple pages.  Client-side alternatives such as CSS Continue Reading