It appears that it is a time of change for me at the moment so I thought I’d take a moment and let you all know what’s going on. The first and perhaps the most obvious is the theme for the site has been updated, after close to two years I felt the old design needed a bit of a refresh. The new site is using a lot of HTML 5 and is all semantically marked up with sections, articles and such, I’ve got to say HTML 5 is makes a lot of sense for a site like mine allowing a lot more meaning to generated from the code itself. I’ve also increased my ‘social presence’ in the sidebar adding in links to my github, Google+ and Stackoverflow profiles.

Now I’ve mentioned github I think that it’s worth noting that from now on I’m primarily going to be using that for hosting my source control, I’m by no means an expert with git but I’m learning and enjoying using it so far. The only legacy codebase of mine that I’ve migrated to github currently is gIDE which can be found here. Thinking about projects going forward I have two projects which I haven’t mentioned on this blog, I’ll briefly mention them here and later provide a more indepth post about each of them.

CRAPI – One of the projects I have worked on in the past was a REST API for Coldfusion, during which I found CF to be a bit lacking in what I wanted it to do. So to remedy this I have started CRAPI which stands for a Coldfusion REST API. This framework is inspired by the various MVC frameworks that I have toyed with (though it supplies no ORM functionality) and I like to think that it is reasonably easy to use. The name is only a placeholder at the moment and I will most likely be changing it to CFRest before I make a post about it.

MarkPDF – I like markdown, I think it is fantastic for a quickly written document to get some formatting. Recently I have been playing around with taking a document formatted with markdown and transforming it into a PDF, MarkPDF is my progress so far it’s a small commandline app written in C#. I’m working on adding more functionality to it at the moment (mostly around metadata) before I make ‘proper’ post about it.

Finally I’m going to end this post on a bit of a downer. February the 10th marked my last day working for LayerX, unfortunately I was made redundant. I started at LayerX on the 6th of July in 2009 and I enjoyed my time with the company, I’m looking forward to what the future has instore for me and I’ll update this blog when I find as things progress.

If you have actually browsed to the site to read this post you will have noticed that Mike’s Musings has had a fresh coat of paint, also if you’ve read my previous entry you will have noticed that it is not the theme that I mocked up. In the end I thought that the first theme was not a good fit for the site, though one day I might turn it into a real theme.

The motivation for changing the theme in the end came down to a mixture of the following factors:

• Fluid Blue the old theme had been in service on this site for getting close to four years now and it was time for a change.
• I wanted to try my hand at a bit of design, I knew it was not going to be any hugely fantastic but I’m happy with the result.
• Finally I wanted to integrate some of the various social networking sites that I belong to into the site, I found that fluid blue didn’t really lend itself to how I wanted it all displayed.

As I noted above I wanted to integrate some of my social site activity into the site to that end I have also integrated my twitter stream into the left sidebar.  As with any new piece of code I will not be surprised if there are bugs, I have tested it in IE 8, Firefox and Chrome and it appears to work fine but these are not the only browsers in the world.  If you do happen to find anything wrong with the site don’t hesitate to report a bug over at the mlowen.com bug tracker.

So a quick post to let those who might’ve wondered that yes this site is still semi-active, I haven’t posted as much as I would’ve liked to due to being busy at work.

Enough of that though and onto the purpose of this post this site and the collection of other sites who share the same server as I do have just finished transitioning to our new server at xlhost we decided to leave layeredtech after spending a couple of years there due to layeredtech shutting down the data center our server was hosted in and xlhost offering a better deal.

I was able to export all of the content from my old wordpress installation to import here. However it appears that I was not able to get all of the images which is a little disappointing, I might go looking through the google cache and hope I stumble upon something. Due to importing all of my posts from my old wordpress installation into this new one I’m not sure if people who subscribe to my rss feed got swamped with entries or not, if you did I apologise.

Well it would appear that I’m not dead yet and rumors to that effect may be slightly exaggerated. The main reason I have not been posting lately is because I’ve been in a bit of a funk where I haven’t had the motivation to work on any of my personal projects. With nothing new to show off I have had no real reason to make a post.

What is different with today you might ask? Well not a lot in relation to the lack of motivation to work, however enough semi-interesting – and one important – things have happened which together warrant me writing something.  Yesterday I finally upgraded to WordPress 2.8 any issues the site might be having will probably have been caused by the upgrade.  Last week I brought a HTC Magic (which runs Google’s android phone OS) I plan to do a post in the next couple of days about how the phone is working out for me so far.

Most importantly, a month ago I quit my job (that was the required notice I had to give) because I was approached with an offer I felt that it would be foolish of me to refuse.  Today was my first day at my new job working for LayerX, a small software company based here is Hamilton.  Like my last job I’m a software developer and I am looking forward to the oppurtunities that this new position has.  Due to this happening I finally got around to updating the about page, it still is not anything fantastic but at least it is up to date.

So I think I’m becoming addicted to statistics, for those of you who have either been reading my blog for a while or have gone back through the archives you will have noticed that it wasn’t until recently that I started posting frequently.  I’m going to come out and say that I think that this is because I’m now collecting statistics about visitors to this site.  I recently installed StatPress Reloaded largely out of curiosity to see what sort of data I could get from it.  I made a couple of posts here and there to see what sort of traffic I got, from there it has turned almost into a craving to see the graph peek after each post like a junkie seeking their next hit.

I find it odd that my motivation to blog wasn’t triggered by the urge to show off the work which I have been doing, but instead it’s by a group of coloured boxes that vary in height and I wonder slightly what that says about me.  Whatever that does say about the kind of person I am it has the good side effect of I’m now doing more work on my personal projects, due to the more work I do the more material I have to blog about. It has thrown up a couple of interesting facts that I wasn’t expecting as well such as – currently I get over 4 times more referrals from Windows Live search than what I get from Google (which was perhaps the biggest surprise), that some of the most requested pages don’t actually exist and it’s mostly Canadians that are requesting them (I’ll let you draw your own conclusions there).

I’ve been back at work a couple of days and once again settling back into the daily grind.  I had originally decided to make a series of posts once I got back from holiday called ‘Holiday Hacking’ which would detail the coding that I got up to during my time off, as it happens there was just one small hitch in that plan – I didn’t do much coding in my time off.  It would seem that I choose to relax these holidays rather than try and chip away at my to do list for gIDE.  While I didn’t work on gIDE this holiday I did however start a new project: Cuttlefish.  I plan to go into this in more depth in a later post so for now just let me say that it is a syntax highlighting Textbox component for .Net written in C#.

I have been doing a little bit of work around the site as well, mostly involving integration with my facebook account (which I’m intending to give more attention to this year).  For those that haven’t noticed (or read this via rss) a link to my profile now appears in the in the sidebar and all of my posts should hopefully be appearing on said profile. This has the added side effect of some of my friends who hadn’t noticed it before get to see how truly geeky I am.  For those who are interested the two plugins I am using for the integration are Wordbook and Facelook.

Today I decided to upgrade this blog to version 2.7 of wordpress, which I managed to screw up royaly.  I somehow managed to accidently delete most of wordpress file including all of the files for the theme and the plugins, thankfully I wasn’t touching the database or shit would have really hit the fan.  So after wasting time and finding everything again it is all up and running, nothing seems to be breaking so I’m quite happy at the moment.  I also finally took the time to enable OpenID for comments, doing this also turned this blog into an OpenID provider as well which is neat because I’ve been meaning to get myself an OpenID for a while.

So far I’m impressed the wordpress 2.7, the work they have done on the admin area is top notch both functionally and aesthetically.  It seems to have a much more professional feel to it than the previous versions did, I’m not sure if this was intentional or not but it is nice.

A quick update on gIDE while I’m at it.  The new add file dialog hit trunk earlier this morning it isn’t quite what I wanted but it is an improvement over what was there.  As I said earlier the remove file dialog was done away with entirely, just using a message dialog seems to be a lot better.  Along with those changes I finally got around to adding a right click pop-up menu to the project browser which allows you to add, remove and soon rename files in the project, I should have done that ages ago but I was lazy.  Hopefully the last of the overhauls will be finished this weekend so I can get back to adding new features.  To round the project off I thought I had better provide a screenshot of the new add file dialog.

Today I upgraded to the latest version of WordPress (2.5.1) from 2.3 and I’m happy to say that it was a very stress free and quick upgrade.  It was nice and easy and I’ve found no problems so far.

With a new blog comes a new license this blog is now licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 license, I’ve wanted to do this for a while but figured with the change of server that was coming up I would wait until it was done, the losing of all the old content just made it a cleaner break.

Also for a list of plugins that this site is running  check the about page, which I just finished writing.

Welcome to the new mlowen.com if you’re here it means the the dns has swapped over. The story behind it is we found out that for the same price as what we were paying GoDaddy for a virtual server we could get a dedicated server from Layered Technologies and so here we are, once again I’m sharing this server with Paul and Ryan.  Unfortunately after installing our blogs we found out we couldn’t import the posts from out old blogs so here we are with a fresh start.