In the past, beyond stacking the books on the night stand, I have never kept track of what I’ve been reading. I’ve always gone through periods where I would inexplicably stop reading, Just like exercise, it’s a hobby that is always more appealing after I’ve started. Or sometimes I wouldn’t know what to read.

Why I like Goodreads:

1. You can see what your friends are reading plus see their reviews.
2. You can get a general consensus on the book before you thumb through it by looking at other people’s reviews.
3. You can keep track of what you’re reading and what you like.
4. You can set see stats on what you’re reading.

My favorite part is this widget:

2012 Reading Challenge

Lee has

read 10 books toward a goal of 24 books.

hide

10 of 24 (41%)

view books

With this widget, I declared how many books I want to read this year (2 a month). With Goodreads, when you’re finished reading a book, you go in the app and select “Read date: Today” and it gets added in your stats as a book you’ve read this month.

This simple widget has become a major influence on me trying to reach my goal of reading more. I’m 41% and it’s only April! (I was a late believer in the Harry Potter series).

Using the same principals, I want to create a widget/app for another aspect in my life that could use some external encouragement.

I’m always conscious of improving the state of:

1. Mind
2. Body
3. Soul

After a rough and chaotic, yet immensely educational stint in NYC, I was ready to press reset when i went to the retirement land of 20 something year olds: Austin. The best (and hardest) thing I learned when I graduated college, is that I do not fully have control of my future. There is not a set path to follow. Unlike the rigors of organized education, there are not always
questions : answers
grades : tests
success : hard work.
Life can take you in a direction you did not even know existed and sometimes the best you can do is hold on.

In New York, I lived without abandon, knowing this would be the only time I’d have the freedom I had of being a single, young female without any responsibilities besides surviving. I traveled across the world by myself: hopped on trains and trams slept in bunk beds and monasteries. I frequented museums and art openings. I played soccer and Harlem and basketball in Queens. I met and dated people from countries I never even knew existed. I had 4 a.m. laughs (and cries) over beers with new friends. I lived and fed my soul.

But you know what else I did? I became a software engineer and took my career and craft seriously.

Fast forward to the present. I have a dog, a serious boyfriend and some hammock swings. I am now craving to take my soul and mind to a new level. I’ve constantly toyed with ideas for my own websites, applications, programs. I’ve always gone about it the wrong way and have tried to come up with things that was either part of the tech trend or appealed to a niche that did not include me. I have always thought of myself as the minority in the programming world, being female, and have tried to think of ways for computer science to appeal to other women. Why did I decide to get into programming and so many women did not? There’s plenty of reasons – the main one being curiosity and problem solving. I’ve always known in the back of my mind that I wanted to do something to help bridge the gap for other women. Teaching classes?

And then, yesterday, an ah-ha moment! I’m cutting through the bullshit and I’m going to start building apps that I want. These will be tools that will help me prosper and improve my body, mind, and soul. I’m not going to start crossing things off if they’ve already been done before. Chances are, they have not been fully programmed by a female for a female. I will use this website to help me play with new technologies and build a source of resources that will be unique and helpful.

Watch out because: echo "Hello World!";

I remember in college, when Livejournal was the way us Internet nerds gossiped and proclaimed our coolness, a friend wrote “Petition Facebook to include William and Mary as a school to use the app”! (Side Note: after several years of programming, I have completely forgotten the correct grammar for quotes and punctuation. I also use single quotes way too often.) Anyway, I think it was a way of showing look at us William and Mary people, we ARE the Ivy of the South, we’re on Facebook. “In March 2004, Facebook expanded to Stanford, Columbia, and Yale.[21] It soon opened to the other Ivy League schools, Boston University, New York University, MIT, and gradually most universities ” (Wikipedia) Facebook was a social status! Man has that devolved.

So, we all of course hopped on the Facebook train with the functionality limited to friending people and starting “groups”. That became the clever meter as we wrote up our own niche groups. My pride was the “Nothing Fazes Me Anymore” which I described as “Let’s face it, all our friends are weird and nothing really shocks us anymore. You knew it must have been one of your friends (or you’ve done this yourself) and you didn’t bat an eye when you saw..” where members submitted highly outrageous activities such as

Look out, America!

This was back in the good old days, when you had to manually stalk your prey. There was no “news feed” alerting you when your friends broke up or they had been tagged in a photo wearing lingerie and making out with your buds.

Fast forward several years to the mess that is facebook now. Here comes Uncle Joe trying to friend me, way too detailed picture of the first birth of your 10th grade chemistry partner, your boyfriend’s ex girlfriend “liking” your friend you met twice comment about ice cream sundaes, sending you to a deep dark place of pictures you never wanted to know existed.

Why do we stay on this site? We find out things we don’t want to know. We don’t really keep up with old friends like we convince yourselves we will. It’s addicting and it needs to be stopped. And by it, I mean my compulsive Facebook behavior. So, I deactivated my account. And Facebook KNOWS you’re addicted which is why they won’t let you deleteyour account. Oh no, you can only deactivate it, meaning all you need to do, when you get that hankering is just log in again. Just one more time. Come on. Who’s it going to hurt?

My progress: I must admit, I accidentally logged into my account. There was a lull in meeting! And, i didn’t stop myself from glancing through my useless news feed, but then I quickly deactivated. I’m trying to remain strong and it seems like I’ve replaced it with my recent obsession with celebrity gossip. I’m equating this to a nicotine patch, helping me ween off this debilitating website called Facebook. I’ll stick with this website, email, twitter, linkedin, phone calls, texts, and letters to communicate with people in hopefully a more meaningful way.

So, I decided to add the built in the web spam filter that comes with WordPress: Akismet. To activate it in your own WordPress website, you need to go to your Dashboard and then select Plugins. It should already be listed on the page, but if not, select “Add New” and do a search for Akismet. Surprisingly, it is not the first option that appears in the search, but a few entries down you will see it. Select install now.

After it is installed, in order to activate it, you need to get the API key. This is simple. You just click on the link and fill out the information. If your blog is like mine, i.e. personal, you can sign up for free. They have other pricing dependent on what type of web product you have and what the intention is for it. I’m not sure what extra services is provided with the extra cost, and that would be something you would have to weigh out for yourself (and maybe just try the free version unless you are told otherwise). Oh, freemium, it’s hard to know when you’re not a trap! I hope to look into some other helpful plugins soon and write up my reviews.

So, here’s to hoping the spammers stay away. Interesting side note, the Q3 2010 Kaspersky Lab report the region Asia as the main source of spam. Here’s the source and some other interesting analysis:

Do you have any particularly bad, annoying, or  funny experiences with spam? Spam Amusement is an ”internet old” (so, 2005) web comic where the artist draws cartoons inspired by actual spam subject lines.

Three Legged Babes Show Off Their Tools!

Recently, I purchased Apress’s PHP Objects, Patterns, and Practice by Matt Zandstra Third Edition and on the first page in the very first chapter there’s a section titled The Problem. Obviously, I was intrigued. And then, more eloquently then I could ever think, much less present to my bosses, was a perfect description of what I have been dealing with for the past few years.

The problem is that PHP is just too easy. You write much of your code straight into your web pages, because PHP is designed to support that. You add utility functions (such as database access code) to files that can be included from page to page, and before you know it you have a working web application.

You are well onto your road to ruin. You don’t realize this, of course, because your site looks fantastic. It performs well, your clients are happy, and your users are spending money.

Trouble strikes when you go back to the code to begin a new phase. Now you have a larger team, some more users, a bigger budget. Yet without warning, things begin to go wrong. It’s as if your project has been poisoned.

A simple change, estimated at a day, takes three days when you discover that you must update 20 more web pages as a result.
Because of the application’s popularity, you need to shift the code to a new server. The projected has to be installed by hand, and you discover that file paths, database names, and passwords are hard coded into many source files.

Phew, I’m not crazy. “Many PHP projects start their life small and evolve into monsters” completely resonates with me. Don’t let this mislead you, the problem is not the language itself, but the way it is used. I was hired to work on this project and it began with the majority of the code in the database including the business logic paired with a PHP view rendering system and a couple of long files with procedural code to spit out the data. Finally, finally finally! I get to rewrite this program. Part of my bargaining was to work with a designer so while the engine is being replaced, it’s also getting a shiny new paint job.

The solution is not just to rewrite the program, but to write it correctly using objects, an appropriate pattern, and good practices. That is what the remaining 500 pages of the book describes.

I Need A Website!

I was a computer science major and I’ve worked as a software engineer for an IT analyst firm, yet I’ve NEVER had my own website!  I’ve also had a problem of wanting to start everything from scratch.  I feel like this is a huge trap that small businesses fall into. They  know they need an online presence and therefore a website, but they start from scratch.  These days, if your website is only content based – meaning you don’t have any special web apps or need to save information online – it’s quite easy to get your own site.

I decided I wanted to have a WordPress website. One, because I wanted to dive a little deeper into WordPress development and two, it’s a fan favorite for quick websites.

WordPress has two options. There’s wordpress.com which is a blog hosted on WordPress’s website. This is great for starting a quick blog. It’s quick, you won’t need any hosting, and you can use the themes they provide and have a decent looking website. These are common for setting up blogs.

But there’s also wordpress.org. This is what I used for the website. For this, you have a lot more flexibility but you will need to provide your own hosting. You can have your own URL and tweak your website to your liking. It’s simple, all you need to do is:

• Purchase your URL
• Find a web host
• Download and install WordPress: a simple 5 minute install
• Find a theme
• Read the documentation, tweak your layout and maybe even become an expert!

For my URL I suggest using Nearly Free Speech. I think I purchased LeeHarper.com through GoDaddy, but between their terrible commercial campaign and their messy website, I try and stay away from them now.

If you’re having troubles figuring out what to name your URL ( I got lucky and snagged LeeHarper.com when it was briefly available), there’s a few resources out there. Domain Typer tells you if the URL you are looking for is available, and if not, has a very helpful domain name generator.

Web hosting stores all your files for your website and makes it appear on the grand World Wide Web. For my web hosting, I’m using DreamHost. I use them because they were the best deal at the time I got them and I haven’t had any troubles and the price is reasonable. It’s kind of like choosing your phone carrier. I did a lot of research in the beginning, found the best deal, got the cheap introductory price and have been hooked in year long contracts since. I’m sure if you shopped around you could find something that fits your needs.

For the layout, I used Theme Forest to find a theme that best suited my needs. This theme is called Identity and cost me $30. You will need to transfer these files from your computer to your web host using FTP. All you do is download it and then ftp transfer it to the themes folder. An easy and free ftp client is FireFTP, this is just an add-on for the web browser Firefox, which you should use instead of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer! FireFTP is a simple way to transfer files from your computer to your web hosting.

Finally, you add your images and content to make our theme yours! At the moment, I still have all my text and several images I need to add to customize mine. This is always the hard part for me – but from what I’ve learned working with clients that this will be the easy part for you!

Bonus: Learn WordPress better and tweak the theme to make it more personal for what you’re looking for in a website. This is what I plan on doing the next few days.

Sit back and watch the money come in. (If only that was always the final step to anything, ha)