Tag Archives: website

Apostolicbook Entry 3

July 9, 2010

About four months ago I posted Apostolicbook Entry 2 and was hoping that by now we would have our first Alpha testing going. Has that happened? No. Why hasn’t it happened? Because we could never decide on a layout we wanted and none of us could design a logo worth keeping. Also, during this time we lost one of our team members, Jared Hilton. Has that affected us any? Yes and no. No by the fact that we all really weren’t motivated and yes because he did have a good idea or two.

A week or two ago I talked some with Aaron Ogle and we decided to try our hand at things again. After a couple tries of trying to create a logo, I gave up and told him that we needed to find an Apostolic graphic artist. He agreed and I started looking, and it was God that I found one (and a very good one at that). Apostolicbook now has it’s very own graphic designer. What does this mean for us and for everyone else? The world!! Or at least it seems like that.

Last night we had a so called “business meeting” that lasted from around 8 till 11 (my time). You’re thinking “Wow that’s a long time!” and you are correct, but we needed that. I think we all went away from it feeling very accomplished. We got several things much needed out of the way. Of those things, the main one I’m happy about is our logo! It’s very sweet looking and most defintally will be recoginzable any where. I won’t give any details of what it looks like (and won’t post pictures of it), as it’s not time for that. :) Cause like the Bible says, there’s a time and place for everything!

We did a lot of other things about Apostolicbook last night, and they are all very important too. The last thing I’m going to say is this… Be sure to start checking our Twitter, Status blog, and our homepage for updates! Cause who knows, sometime soon we might reveal a little here and there!

This is all for now! Hopefully you can tell I’m ready to start doing stuff on Apostolicbook!!! :) God Bless,
Bradley Hilton

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1st Real Project

June 8, 2010

Svcliving.com

Here’s just a quick update about something I recently did. As many of you know I love coding, especially website coding. Many people have asked me why I like it so much, and the only truthful answer I can give is the fact that it’s sometimes a challenge. I love challenges even if I get mad or angry while doing it. Why? Because after I’m done and get it working 100% correctly, I’m happy and excited about it. :)

With that in mind, you also know that I’ve coded a couple websites. Including but not limited to My Pastors, My School’s, My School District’s Welcome Center, and mine (new one in the process).

As of just recently, I can now add another one to that list. Also in a couple days from now I’ll be able to add two more, but for now I’ll just talk about one.

This picture is a screenshot taken from my phone (since it’s what I’ve typed up this blog post with) and it’s of the site I can now add to my portfolio. It’s for a real estate company as you can maybe see from the screen shot. It is a Joomla! template and it’s also a Joomanager theme. There was a little bit of a learning curve going from just coding a Joomla! template to adding and making sure that Joomanager worked and looked correctly. I was excited to do this site and glad that I got it done before my deadline. The link to the live website is: http://www.svcliving.com/ even though they currently don’t have it all the way up as they are learning how to use Joomla and Joomanager. Just thought I’d share this with you all.

And upcoming sometime soon is a post called “Who Are the Best Actors”. I’ve still got a ways to go before that post is complete, but I’m hoping it’s going to end up good.

God Bless,
Bradley

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Recent Happenings

March 18, 2010

Wow it has been a long time since I have posted anything to my blog!! I’ve just honestly been so busy with life that I’ve rarely had any time to do anything. My life has consisted of going to school, going directly to work after school, and church. School’s been some what a drag because it’s so much harder than the first semester of this school year. They didn’t put me into an English class the first semester so then they had to place me into two English classes this second semester. And let me tell you this much, it is insanely hard!! Plus taking PreCalc doesn’t help make it any easier, it actually has made it a bunch harder!! Then there’s work.. Actually work isn’t all that bad since I enjoy what I’m doing. I work for Summit Solutions and I am in the FRD (fix & repair daily). Basically what we do there is repair computers and remove viruses (and any other harmful things on a computer) for people that bring their computers in. I enjoy doing it and I also do it as a side job/hobby. So if you know me and want your computer cleaned for a cheap price get a hold of me and we’ll work something out!

Then there’s awesome church!!! I love my church (Truth Tabernacle) and love being an Apostolic young person! I wouldn’t and won’t trade it for anything this world has to offer!! As most of my readers know I am my church’s lead sound man. What does that mean? It means a lot of different things, but I’ll summarize it for you.. We have a very nice sound system and a very nice mixer, there are areas of it that we could improve on but you have to have money for that. We also have a very nice piece of equipment that let’s us record professionally. This was a somewhat expensive too, but it wasn’t too bad. In fact here in the next couple of months we (the other sound man and I) are thinking about adding onto this so that we can have all the drum mica recorded separately and not remixes like we are doing now. We make preaching CDs and we record all the special singing so that we can make a special singing CD and sell. We’ve made one in the past, but it was all remixed and so we couldn’t really make it sound better and more professional. (As a side note, if anyone wants to buy the first special singing CD please let me know.) Back in the sound booth during worship service we control the projector that displays the lyrics to the songs that are being sung. We also display the first scripture that the preacher reads. I personally am not a fan of this because some people no longer bring their Bibles, but that’s why we only do one scripture so that if someone really wants to follow the scriptures that the preacher is reading they will bring their Bible.

I’ve learned a couple things since I’ve made a blog post. One of those things is the fact that if you give God your tithes and then more than just the 10% that he requires, He will bless you. I’ve experienced that first hand. Ever since I got my job I’ve been getting paid every other week (I think that’s how it is) and so I get to pay my tithes to the Lord. Well the other week I was going to put the money into the offering and realized that I had money the a spot where I usually keep the money for tithes. I was confused by this cause I was pretty sure I had paid tithes last time.. Well just to be sure that I did pay it I put it in the offering. That week I got some side jobs to do that are earning me some extra money! It’s a total blessing from the Lord!!!

I’ve recently been getting some thoughts for articles. The thing is though that I’ve yet to have enough time to actually sit down and collect my thoughts together and write a good article. I want to do this so bad!! I’ll have to make some time to sit down and write an article. One that I really want to sit down and write badly is “What Will It Take – Part II”. I’ve got some other thoughts running through my head, but I won’t want to share them with you cause you might steal them. Lol :p

That’s it for right now.. I’ve got to start studying for a practice A+ test I’m taking tomorrow morning before I head out for a youth service that I’m going to in Guy, Arkansas.

God Bless,
Bradley

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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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