What have you been up this year

The year is quickly moving on what ya been doing

[bwnbwn]

This year has been a grueling heads down year for me.
I have converted 6 websites from aspx to wordpress (BTW WP is better than I thought). Having 0 experience nata none on WP I have come a long way baby.
Setting up thousands of redirects and dealing with a CMS I have never touched was a challenge all this remained on a windows server. We also moved from a dedicated server to a dedicated cloud server. That was fun. All this done I went to work on a long outstanding project I began my career under.

Today I launched a new website that is aspx and I built a subdomain for the website connected to the same SQL just completely different include files for the. m.domain.com

This probably was the most challenging build I have done.
Little history (Ted would know)
In 2000 went to work in a nitch with a company I am with today to SEO a certain website. Well we latter sold 6 websites I built in the same niitch in 2010 (or some were close) to internetbrands. 2 year no compete clause.
Our company went in a slightly different direction same nitch but is wasn't effected by the no compete. The CEO used the money to fund this new direction.

History done.
Our CMS is a custom built CMS that was done in 1999 (yep the year is right) I think he spent 400k maybe more and I think a Microsoft team built it. Pretty sure on that.. Folks it has (knock on wood) never been hacked and was all built in tables and trs. The ole saying goes if it ain't broke don't fix it. Actually is was far more advanced that anything close at at time

The code behind became my #1 problem. There was so much commented out crap (it will shown up on the internet if you view source) and bad editing I decided to clean her up.

Then the mobile came into play with creating new include files but having to work with the code behind. Figure out were this is coming from edit, break this fix this break this edit this break this and so forth. The site has to be mobile friendly because I expect 80-90% of our users will be mobile.

Then the redirect rules.
Our job application is a little complicated because we use a virtual domain to display the application. Set up years ago and so intertwined within the code it was not worth changing.

So in the process of building the sub I created rules to detect mobile users and redirect them to the M. domain retaining the url path. Being a virtual it is under the www of the parent domain I then needed to create a rule to ignore certain files so the m.domain application could pass through to continue the application process.

She launched today I am 1 happy camper that part is behind me now I can focus on what I am trained to do drive traffic.

Oh yea I also put all the websites under SSL

So know you "Know the Rest of my Story"

What's yours.

[edited by: bwnbwn at 11:43 pm (utc) on Jun 24, 2015]

[Shepherd]

Glad to hear things seem to be going well.

Just another year of grinding away here. Almost recovered from the 2012 crash. Added a few more employees this year. Launched a few sites for testing, mostly trying to get better conversion/return on ad spend, no shining stars yet. Lots of stuff in the works/planning stages but having trouble committing/finding direction.

On the up side, been getting a lot of golf in this year...s

[bwnbwn]

Shepard got a funny story on my golf game.
About 15 years ago (memory issues) I played some golf with my brother in law (doctor) big club well we were on a par 3 overlooking a pond. 1st shot veered right (hook can't remember the golf term) splash had a sud, 2nd tee went left (whatever it is called) splash. had a sud 3rd shot went high but short , had a sud, broke out my driver and said if this ball doesn't make it over this #@* pond the clubs go in the pond. I took a couple of practice swings and let her rip . Well the ball went about a mile high and splashed about 20 feet in front of me. Clubs went in the water and never played since.

I commend you on not giving up 2012 was a tough year. You will do well with your attitude.

[Shepherd]

Clubs went in the water and never played since.

That is funny, I've got more than a couple clubs at the bottom of a watery grave, then one day I realized I was never going to make a living playing golf so maybe I should stop taking it so seriously, Every since I've never had a bad day on the course.

[engine]

Nice bwnbwn, on all counts. Great progress on the cms, and sorry you had to lose the clubs. The 19th is a much better place, imho. Shepherd, I have a friend who's extremely competitive, especially in his golf. For many years i've watched him stress out as his game is never as good as he'd like. He gets frustrated with himself, and then plays worse. Another friend gave him some advice, as the appropriate time, and it was exactly the same as you'd said. On most days he remembers that advice and has a better, and more enjoyable game. The days he forgets his competitive streak kicks in and he seems to play a whole lot worse. The 19th is less fun on those days.

[tangor]

As a "one man shop" for the last 20ish years, not much has changed on that side, but the extra consulting side (regional) has been more fun as I've been hired three different times (four year period) to come and beat the head and shoulders of "design teams" with commonsense and sales experience via the web. Just because you CAN do something (tech wise pretty) doesn't mean you SHOULD if you lost a sale by failing to sell the "product"!

I love these bright kids teams hired from all counties mind you, but they don't have a lick of sense regarding BUSINESS! That's where I've made a different progress the past few years.

[bwnbwn]

Tell ya the truth guys I really didn't like the game to me it was boring and a waste of my time. I know bwn is nuts. I would rather spend my time weeding my garden or mending my fences on my mini-farm, yep know ya know bwn is nuts.:) Just me. I grew up on my Uncles Farm in the Alabama mountains he plowed his fields with a mule and we used corn husk for toilet paper. Took a bath in a big tub 2 times a week wed and sat nite.

tango I have as well noticed the young people today lack common sense. I watch the kids today and their interaction is with a screen and not face to face. They maybe smart and can fly around a computer board but dumb as hell on life skills.

All these warfare games are probably training material for the younger generation. I wouldn't be a bit surprised.

[piatkow]

For me:
Mainly feeding the beast of a regular music magazine
Gone live with cloud based accounting software for the magazine
Installed software to create photo galleries hosted on my site rather than building page by page in Nvu or hand coding
Got my garden back into shape after years doing more work on my elderly mother's than on my own

[Shepherd]

the game to me it was boring and a waste of my time.

Not nuts, by itself the game is boring... that's why we gamble ;)

I guess it's a bit like this interwebz game we all play, it would be kind of boring to build sites that no one ever visited or did not generate revenue.

[grandpa]

I've been trying to get my head back into thinking like a programmer. Along with catching up with the changes in PHP and MySQL over the past few years, I'm finally making a serious attempt to learn the OOP approach to programming. I've always been a procedural type of coder, sometimes 'head down and bull my way through' a solution... but I always got it done. This framework and OOP stuff isn't all that difficult, but I find myself slipping back into my old ways. Alas, that learning curve seems steeper than it used to be.

I know I'll not be as sharp as I'd like to be, (most days I got to remember my name and what city I live in when I wake up) but I'm satisfied in knowing I can do what I enjoy - creative development. For practice I've set up a little throw-away site; gives me raw data to use.

[lucy24]

veered right (hook can't remember the golf term)

Isn't that direction called a slice?

Disclaimer: The sum total of my golf knowledge comes from one quarter (half-semester, not trimester) in high school when golf was a PE elective. There were two guys who actually knew how to play, and all the rest of us just signed up because you didn't have to dress out.

At one time, golf was what NHL players did for fun. Could never quite understand this. But then again, I have also never quite understood why Jujy chooses to pee on the keyboard when her cage includes several litter boxes.

[Shepherd]

Isn't that direction called a slice?

yep, hard right (slice), soft right (fade), hard left (hook), soft left (draw)

I've got my daughter (teenager) into golf, she likes it which is good because here in the U.S. if a girl has any, ANY ability to play golf it's an almost guaranteed scholarship.

I never did anything when I was young. I remember I saved up some money and got a Tandy CoCo when they first came out. Did the BBSs, played with coding, then I guess I just got bored, didn't write another line of code till I was in my 30s. Can't help but think that if I had stayed with it I would have owned at least a medium sized island by now ;)

I didn't start playing golf till my late thirties.

I started snow skiing in my early thirties. If you are over 30 and considering taking up snow skiing I would HIGHLY discourage it.

I guess, as they say, youth is truly wasted on the young.