Why so busy?  First I spent a lot of time prepping for my presentation to a networking group on Personal Branding.  After that, I implemented a survey to gather feedback.  Then, a lot of volunteer projects suddenly came to a head.  On the plus side, I have some results that I can actually share with my readers.   It’s not Java stuff, but it is other web stuff that should help round out my knowledge for Web Application positions.

About two weeks ago, I finally completed work on the revamping of my brother’s website.  This took a fair bit of time, but was mostly limited to tweaking HTML and CSS, plus messing with images and such.  One of the hardest parts is always figuring out where to start with these sites.   It probably took me about two weeks to finish, which seems like a lot of time. Most of that is the going back and forth on design ideas.  I did get to do some Java work on this as well, although I was unable to use it in the end due to my web host being unfriendly to Struts2.  However, I’ll tell you about it anyway.  I designed a pretty awesome login system using Struts2 Interceptors that would have allowed me to have my brother’s site available for review in a private section of my own site, where no one else could see it.  Although it worked fine here on the development laptop, I couldn’t run it on my web site.  Plus side, I felt good about what I was able to do quickly on that project.   I’m still not sold on the Green/Black combo even though it was my idea, but I think it is a fairly serviceable site. More importantly, the client was happy.

See my work here:
http://www.ferguscullen.com/

I should note that you should check out the editorials on his “Recent Op/Eds” page.  Although many are political in nature, he is a talented writer and usually quite entertaining.

In addition, I have been working with the marketing team of a non-profit to revamp their multiple websites into one site.   This rolled out today for the New England Job Show, basically a WordPress self-hosted blog:

http://nejs.org

Initially, this group had a website, and three separate blogs.  This was an SEO nightmare, and virtually nothing was connected. I researched our various options, and was able to customize the blog theme to do exactly what the team needed.  This involved adding a PHP file, and tweaking a lot of other PHP code, plus some CSS, HTML, and image manipulation within GIMP.   The hardest part of this entire process was the initial selection of a WordPress theme.  I ended up doing customization on about five themes before we landed on one that worked for the marketing team.

So, were these efforts worth it?  Yes, in that my knowledge of the following technologies moved forward:

• HTML
• CSS
• PHP
• WordPress
• Struts2 (Java framework)

Oh, nearly forgot to mention that a “for-profit” organization saw this latest site today and has asked to meet with me for some paid work.  No idea if it will work out, but it’s nice to feel wanted.  It would be a single site, not a full-time gig by any means, but something anyway.

Hopefully more posts to come as things settle down.  I have a few topics in mind, but am feeling shy about sharing them at this time.

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