I feel as if I should start the year off with a posting, but I have no New Years resolutions nor do I have any lofty goals. So I am stuck what shall I write. The first challenge of the year will be the Doopy Challenge and I hope I find time to register for a few more events over the year. I hope to do a local event or two and I might consider doing RnR Chi again.

I’ve been putting of creating a plug-in that would take my images from flickr and embed them on pages here… was able to make a local working plug in fairly quicky. However, everytime I tried to push the site to heroku everything would fail with an error, Liquid Exception: No API key or secret defined! Well the solution was simple and I kept glossing over it heroku labs:enable user-env-compile Yes, thats right.

So I quickly learned CloudFlare isn’t for me as it add to much overhead for such a minimal ROI. Around the same time I noticed my Bootsrap base was no longer current, I stumbled upon jekyll-assets and bootstrap-sass which started to get me thinking why not use the two and customize it for my needs and serve it all up as one file. It works faily well, which then lead me to wonder if I should keep using Bootstrap or find something a bit lighter.

As I mentied before, I think the time has come to refactor the sites stack. First and foremost I wanted to be enable to deploy a test version of the site locally, running just like it would in the server production environment. I don’t know why but this didn’t work well with my old method. I think it might had to do with using Rack:Jekyll, but I can’t be sure.

I was able to to bring my Digital Ocean ‘cloud’ up without to much trouble. I was able to bring up an ngix server, server up encrypted content all while keeping the all three version of the site in sync with the git repo. The hardest part was the how, what is the best way to keep the Digital Ocean version of the site up-to-date with the git repo. After some searching I stumbled across jekyll-hook, by the same creators of Prose.

When I was spec-ing out a way to develop a site and return to the web my requirements where fairly simple. I wanted to avoid running or maintaining any of infrastructure. I first started using tumblr, moved to jekyll with github hosting, then to heroku. They are all fine options. I am however am finding, what I always knew, I enjoy the technical side far more than content creation. I think I’m getting close to setting sail on my time at heroku and take my toys to a bigger Digital Ocean.

My final vacation for the year is just around the corner, which of course I’m looking forward to. I have spent the last week thinking of different projects I want to tackle over the week. I of course want to fin down some of the details to my January vacation plans… the quantitative self side of things. I played my order for the Magellan Echo, which I plan on using all four days of the Dopey Challenge.

I was a huge watch person in the later years of high school and most of my college life. Then sometime in my senior year I stop wearing a watch. It wasn’t until early this year I start wearing a watch on a semi-regular basis. But first let me back track, once I decided I was going to make an attempt at the Goofy Challenge in `13 I wanted to find a way to track my effort in a quantitative way.

I do have a problem with the media chart, I’m fairly certain General Electric doesn’t own Comcast.. and I’m just a certain, positive, that Comcast owns the NBC properties. However the graphs make your think about about consolidation.