5K Training Officially Begins

More specifically, it begins somewhere around 6,000 feet above sea level.  In case you’ve never attempted to do anything that high up, the general idea is that you can not breathe.  Being from a state like Pennsylvania, where our highest mountains are just barely touching the 2,000 foot mark, it’s a pretty big jump.

Despite the difficulties, I already started to find a rhythm in my short run and my breathing showed improvements by the end of the trip.  I won’t embarrass myself by tracking the distance I run JUST yet, but I ran enough to be thoroughly tired.  I’m looking forward to tomorrow’s run, as well as the rest of the week.  Training is hard, but the reward is amazing.

 

- Andy

Surprising Family

Driving 1,800 miles is a hefty task to begin with.  Doing it and staying quiet about your arrival is another thing.  Through several months of scheming and organizing, I was able to travel across most of the country to Colorado and surprise a few family members, including some I hadn’t seen in close to a decade.  All has gone over well though, and I’m recovering from a bear hug I got yesterday from one of my cousins.

Now that the cat is out of the bag, I can begin posting some pictures and other thoughts on the trip I’ve been on for close to a week already.  As a quick overview, I’ve headed west from Pennsylvania on Route 70 to Colorado.  I am now somewhere around Colorado Springs with my family and will be here for another week.

Surprising my family, especially my cousins, was great fun.  My cousins have grown up so much, it’s almost scary to see.  I need to do this more often.

 

- Andy

Training Begins

This past Saturday Matt and I officially began our training for the 2010 Livestrong Challenge in Philadelphia.  The ride was really a test to see in what shape we were in as we begin more consistent/rigorous training in a week or two, but it was important nonetheless.

We went on a ride that I did last season which in total is about 60 miles.  After about 40 miles a combination of fatigue and destroyed bridges forced us to pack in for the day, the final total being 42.5 miles or so.  It was a good ride and showed me how much my training at the gym this winter had helped, and it was nice to see that Matt is right there with me (oh to be as thin as him!).

The more serious training will begin when I return from my current trip in a couple of weeks, but until then I’ll be working on my 5K run by walking and jogging in some higher elevations.  I’ll see if I can’t get some pictures along the way!

 

- Andy

 

PS – If you’d like to donate to me or anyone else on the team, you can find us at http://philly2010.livestrong.org/teamzibings.  Feel free to join us too, we’re open to anyone!

An N2 CMS

As I wrote about earlier this week, we’ll be “forced” to move our company and personal blogs off of the Blogger platform come the end of March this year.  All opinion on the matter aside, we decided this was a great opportunity to test ourselves with N2F Yverdon.

Going in line with that idea, we sat down to catalog the features we needed to replicate from Blogger and WordPress to make the CMS useful to us across multiple instances.  Here is that list:

• Support for Windows Live Writer and other desktop publishing clients (Atom Publishing Protocol, MetaWeblogAPI, MovableType or Really Simple Discovery)
• Multiple authors with profiles for each
• Entry trackback links
• Comment moderation and spam protection
• Image upload integration with RTE
• Pings to services like weblogs.com
• Atom/RSS Feeds
• Code Syntax Highlighting
• Memcached compatibility

The list we have going is a bit longer, but mostly due to it digging down deeper with each of the above features and listing most of the common features you could expect in any useful blogging application.

You may notice that there is no mention of plug-ins.  Keep in mind that for the moment we’re building a system mostly for internal use.  N2F Yverdon is already so easily extensible we basically have a plug-in system already built.  We will be releasing the application somewhere (likely on the N2F site) under the same MS-RL license used for N2F Yverdon.  If any of you would be interested in helping us build a good plug-in system, we’re all ears.

That’s all for this announcement.  It’s looking like we’ll be putting down code as early as next week, which is good if we intend to have this ready for use by the end of March!  More updates to come as they’re available.

 

- Andy

The End of Blogger (At Least For Me)

For the past few years, I’ve been using Blogger as the service powering my blog (and recently it was chosen to power the blog for the company).  It made things pretty easy for me, as all I needed to do was open up an FTP account to the service and let it rip.  Google had announced a while ago that they were phasing out the FTP feature for Blogger.  Since I try pretty hard to ignore Google, I missed this notice.  They were kind enough to send me a reminder email of sorts yesterday, letting me know that sometime in March this year, the FTP feature would be discontinued completely.

In some ways, this is a sad moment for me.  I have enjoyed the service, mostly because of how easy it was to use.  In other ways, this presents itself as an opportunity.  I have no intention of allowing Google to hold onto anymore of my data than they already do, so the thought of switching to a custom domain is just unacceptable.  I’m left with two choices as I see things:

1. Install WordPress/Drupal/etc to replace Blogger
2. Create a new CMS/Blog, because the world doesn’t already have enough of these

It’s true, the world probably doesn’t have enough.  A Bing search for ‘free Blog engine’ turns out approximately 17.5 million results, which essentially means nothing.  There are a ton of good-enough solutions out there which I could easily utilize to take care of the switch.  Unfortunately for me, I am – by default – required to be an annoying advocate for my open source framework, the N2 Framework.  We love our little framework so much, we’d rather spend time reinventing the blogging wheel and show it can be done.

So it seems that is what I’ll be doing over the next month or two.  I might be able to rope one or two of the other N2F developers into helping, but I don’t have more than a few extra hours each week that I can devote to the project.  I’ll do what I can to outline our progress here and on the N2F site.  Our goal will be to simply replicate all of the features we have available for us with the Blogger service.  I’ve got two months, here’s hoping this framework works as well as we need!

 

- Andy

Going Back…To Old Methods

I’ve been teaching a very close friend how to program recently.  As we got close to beginning a full-fledged project (which we’ll be starting to show off sometime in February), he gave me a request.  For the most part, I’ve been showing him how to use N2F Yverdon through the lessons because of a pre-existing foundation in PHP syntax.  His request was to go back to the way I “did things before” so he could see where N2F was born.

My immediate response was a simple look of horror and sharp intake of breath.  Get rid of my beloved framework?  Go back to complete manual sanitization for data?  Use mysql_query() calls!?

After I was recovered from the shock, I realized that this is a great opportunity (or excuse) to revisit those old methods and remind myself of the very things that I hope to make unnecessary with N2F.  I agreed to the challenge, and my grin seemed to frighten my friend thoroughly.

To say it will be interesting doing this is probably an understatement, but I’ll be sure to keep you all up to date on the project’s progress.  Has anyone else done something similar?

 

- Andy

1 Update in 1 Year, 2 Months?

As I was putting the finishing touches on the new N2F website yesterday, I happened to notice that the release date for Yverdon v0.1 was November 2nd, 2008.  That’s over 1 year and 2 months for us to release a ‘minor’ revision to the framework.  Quite frankly, I was embarrassed at first, that’s a long time for an update that doesn’t really cover a whole slew of changes.

After that initial moment however, I did stop and think about what all has gone into producing this framework.  When Matt, Chris and I originally set out to build this framework from the things we’d learned using an old framework I had built years earlier, it wasn’t something that we were able to piece together over night.  If my memory serves me (which it usually doesn’t), we spent upwards of 8 months just talking about the way the system would work and what things we wanted to accomplish.

With that in mind, I started looking back on the past year and two months that it has taken us to build v0.2.  We’ve spent a lot of time and energy testing out the different pieces of the framework, and we know we still haven’t hit everything.  After all the testing was done (or in progress), we then had to sit down and go through the process of discussing what changes needed and what we wanted to accomplish.  We actually went through this cycle 2 to 3 times before finally getting things to the point where we could release them.

All in all, it’s been a long and busy year.  We hope that the v0.2 release reflects that to those of you who end up using the system.  I promise we’ll try to keep the release of v0.3 under the 2 year mark.  ;)

 

- Andy