Tag Archives: website

Recent Activity Update

November 12, 2009

It’s been quite some time since I’ve posted something to my blog and that’s due to a couple of things. One is church and school have been keeping me busy. School’s going pretty good, except for the fact that tonight we have a Pre-Calc take home test and this section is pretty hard in my opinion (and a couple of other people)! What’s keeping me busy with church you’re probably asking yourself?! Well, I’ve been doing a lot of research on how to get us to be able to record better and more professionally. After a ton of research and going to Guitar Center, I’ve found out that what we are wanting is a PreSonus FireStudio (Interface Only). You can go ahead and research it yourself, since I’m posting this while I wait… Basically it allows us to have multiple channels (or inputs) going to our computer, so then when we record it’s not just one channel but how every many we have set up. That way we can record and then later go and make it sound more professional than before.

Another thing that has been keeping me busy is work, which if you’ve read my blog that’s working for my school district. Well, I just got my check in the mail today and it’s way more than I expected! :) I’m excited about that, but I think half of it is going to be gone cause of paying my mom and dad off.

lhs01

Recently I’ve been spending a lot of time working on getting new features for my school’s websites. There are two main features that I’ve added, and you can see them from the picture on the left. The main feature is what I call “highlighted articles”. This is a scrollable list of articles that have been posted to the website, and it also can have pictures of the subject. I’ve ran into a ton of problems with this! I’ve over came a couple of them, but I’m still running into a couple of them. Another feature is the search bar at the top right of the menu. The positioning of this took more work than I had originally thought it would have, but hey I love a good coding challenge every so often! I also had to edit one of the Joomla! files to make the search appear in a different page than the front page. I’ve made a good amount more of changes to the site, but those are all little details that a majority of people will never know… Haha

I hopefully will be posting an article this week or weekend that has some good meaning behind it, and might get you thinking.. Who knows.

Bradley

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ApostolicBook

October 11, 2009

I’m sure that all my readers are well aware of the fact me and Aaron are currently working on a social networking site for Apostolic’s only. A while back I got a script that was a base for building a social networking site, but the problem I faced was it wasn’t very customizable and I didn’t have much control. So, I talked with Aaron and we finally decided that we would build our own social networking site up from nothing except our knowledge. Well, here’s my timeline of what has transpired and what I think might happen. I also will quote the introductory statement that we have stated on our Design Document.

First off, I got the idea to create a social networking site just for Apostolic young people around a year ago this month. I searched around a while for a script that made it easy to set up a social networking site that looked good and was easy for people to navigate around. Another thing that I wanted, was a script that took a person’s age and if they were under a certain age it wouldn’t let them join. After searching for a while, I finally found a pretty good script that did almost everything I wanted it to do, except I couldn’t figure out how to not allow people to join if they were younger than the certain age.

I found that script about four or five months after my first thoughts of a social networking site for Apostolic youth only. I had originally called the site “Apostolic Youth Connected” (a.k.a. AYC). Well, since I couldn’t restrict people who put in a date that stated they were under the certain age, I decided to stop messing around with the script for a while (it was also the end of my sophomore year and finals were taking place). So, since that didn’t work out and my school studies were requiring too much of my time, I decided to stop working on it for the time being. But before I stopped me and Aaron had already bought a domain name and set up a Twitter account, we also had decided to change the name to “ApostolicBook”.

Summer came and so did some major decisions. Aaron and I decided that since we had spend the money on the domain, we would try to get this going again, but this time we decided that we would build our own script up from nothing but our ideas and knowledge. It was decided that Aaron would do the main PHP, MySQL, and other server coding, while I would help him with that a little but mainly do the main CSS and styling of the website. As the summer went on we really didn’t get much finished, expect Aaron got some things here and there on the back-end done.

Recently there has been some major work being done on ApostolicBook. On September 29th, 2009 Aaron and I talked about what we wanted to do and how we want things done. After much talk and some research we decided that we would have a document online that was shared between the two of us (if you’re wondering, it is stored on Google Docs). We then set a couple of dates to get things done by a certain time because I knew we probably wouldn’t get stuff done if we didn’t set dates.

The first two dates we set was on October 6th and October 13th. On October 6th we set that we would have the Initial Design Document completed, which included the basic features, first version of our color scheme made up, and the first sketch of the user profile layout. For October 13th, we have set that we will have the “First layout draft complete”. This includes a first draft of every page that we have come up with right now in our Initial Design Document.

Small amount of the acutal 1st draft color scheme

The first draft of the color scheme has been chosen and the picture to the left are a few of the colors chosen. I’ve only included a few of the colors, cause if I did show you all of them, what would be the point of having a first launch date? Ha-ha

As ApostolicBook is under development, is there something that you as a user would like to see? If so, then please speak up and leave a comment on here or send us a direct message on Twitter.

God Bless,
Bradley Hilton

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Job Interview

September 12, 2009

I’m not sure how many of you know this, but I have been looking for a job lately (well ever since I’ve got my own car). I have scouted a couple of places here and there looking for a good paying job with the hours that I can do and a job that i would like. Well, I think that I may have got a job that fits everything like that!

So, you know how I have done my school’s website (http://usd469.net/lhs/)? I have also done the Lansing PTA’s website (http://usd469.net/pta). Both of those sites are based off the CMS called Joomla. I love using Joomla for websites because all that I have to do is create (code) the template and then install it and make it the default theme. Then train the people on how to update their website by creating articles and stuff. After I’ve done that it means that I don’t have to worry about updating their content myself, or I don’t have to worry about teaching them the HTML they would need to know to update the website.

You may also know that my 7th hour is dedicated to updating the High School’s website, Twitter, and other websites we’re doing. I’m not the only one in that class, but I am one of the four. Mr. Wessel is the technology coordinator for USD 469 (my school’s district). I’ve helped him a lot with some server, website, and computer things. Well I decided to ask him one day if there was any chance that I could get a job helping him out or something of that sorts. That was before school started, so about four or five weeks ago.

As time has went on, things have went slowly but surely. First it started off with he didn’t know if it was actually possible since a couple of things. Then after he found out it was possible, we had to create a list of things that I could do or things that I would do with some quick training. So, after we had that done another problem arose – he didn’t know how they would be able to pay me if this went through. He finally figured it out with the help of some other people. Now after 5 weeks (or more), I see the light at the end of the long torturous tunnel! (Got that from a song lol).

This Tuesday (September 15th) I have a meeting with Dr. Bagby, Mr. Wessel, and myself. I was told that we would discuss my pay, the things that I would be doing and/or helping with, and hours. I think that I will be getting $10.50 an hour starting off with, but probably will only be doing a couple of hours a week (like maybe 6-8 hours a week or less or more). That’s not a lot compared to normal jobs, but hey I think the pay is good for a first job.

Please pray that God helps me and He gives me the correct words to say when I’m talking to them. I really want this job because it’ll be a good one and I’ll enjoy it. Sorry for such a long post, thanks for bearing with me through it! :)

God Bless,
Bradley

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