Over the course of time, BGerdin.com has gone through a few major changes. Here is how I classify these changes:
1.0: The original instance of my website was built on pretty simplistic HTML with Blogger being used to host my blog. I had a basic main page with a few pages based on that same format. Nothing special, but it worked. This remained the format of my website for quite a number of years and allowed me to experiment with the world of web. Along the way, I made minor changes and additions that I wouldn’t really call major updates.
2.0: The way I see it, my first major upgrade to my website actually happened less than a year ago. This occurred when I switched my blog hosting from Blogger over to Wordpress. When I made this move, Austin told me I would never look back, and I sure haven’t. Wordpress is a much nicer blogging package to work with and it allows me to do many more customizations that I couldn’t do with blogger. The templates are also a lot nicer which enhances my site that much more. Along with this change, I eliminated the remaining portions of my site that were written in simple HTML and started to replace them with Wordpress pages.
3.0: That brings us to my latest major site upgrade. Many of you only check out my blog through RSS and probably haven’t noticed this change up until now. With the purchase of my camera in the last month, I have started to take many more pictures. Up until now, I haven’t had a real good way to display my pictures in a way that I have liked. All my options forced me link to outside hosting sites. While this worked, I didn’t like that I didn’t have control of my pictures and how they were presented. That, my friends, is now history. I now have complete control of my pictures and control over the way my galleries are displayed through the use of Smugmug! For those of you who don’t know, Smugmug is regularly listed as one of the best photo hosting site on the web. Using Smugmug, I am able to have professional looking galleries that are contained in the realm of BGerdin.com. With moving to Smugmug, I have also gotten rid of my main page and now have a great looking Smugmug slideshow as the main BGerdin.com page. If you haven’t been to my main page recently, you should really check it out. I am much happier with the way my site looks and with the functionality I have with this great addition.
One other thing that you may or may not be interested in is that a New Years resolution of mine was to take a picture every day of 2010. It can be of anything I see or experience throughout the day. This is to help me better understand my camera and to start visualizing pictures so I become a better photographer. I’m writing this on the 22nd day of January and so far, I haven’t missed a day. To give you a taste of my pictures and to show off a little of what Smugmug and Wordpress can do, here are three of my recent pictures for you to look at. Click on each to see them larger:
You will find a link to the full gallery under these three pictures. If you want to keep up to date with my daily pictures, you can add this gallery to your RSS reader. I have also added a little picture preview on the right side of my blog that shows off the most recent pictures I have added to this gallery. One caveat for you RSS people is that you won’t get to experience any of these cool features on my site unless you actually go to my site to check them out.
September is one of those transition months that we hit each year. It is the month where students transition from the summer break back to school. It is when the weather in Minnesota starts to change from warm and sunny to cool and windy. It is also the month when the biggest transition of all is made – from no football to many weekly games! Now that the end of the month is here, all three of these transitions are well under way.
This year, just like last, I am partaking in three separate fantasy football leagues. This year, however, I moved from playing in my work league to joining another league put on by another friend from Bethel. After the first three weeks of the season, my overall record is 4-5. It’s not too bad of a start. I’m at least competitive in each of my leagues. With bye weeks starting this week, now is when the season really starts to get interesting.
The other large transition that Bethany and I have been working through is the addition of our little puppy, Copland. We have had him for just about a month now which puts him at just over 12 weeks old. And let me tell you, that guy has grown a lot in the last couple of weeks! When we first got him, I was able to pick him up with one hand and flip him around at will. Now, he is big enough to fight being thrown around. He is getting to be a tank. That little guy really likes to eat. We have also started him in puppy kindergarten. So far, we’ve gone to two weeks of the six week class. His favorite part of the class is when he gets to go off of his leash and run around with all the other puppies. For him, it is more like run around and tackle all the little puppies. That might change in the next week because he might get bumped up to being with the bigger dogs – currently he’s with the little puppies. Then we’ll see how he does taking on a Great Dane! Otherwise, Copland is doing pretty well so far with his sitting and staying. He can’t stay for a very long time yet, but he’s getting there. He is also learning to climb the stairs. This is quite a process when your legs are only 5 inches long. But, he’s able to manage it:
I also just posted a bunch of Copland pictures that’s I’ve been neglecting to post for a while now. You can check them out on my pictures page or just click here.
Third, I finally finished up the revamp of Gerdinauto.com! The upgrade was quite significant and it looks MUCH better than I had ever hoped to make it when I began. Last weekend was the wrap up weekend for the site. I spent a good amount of time finishing up various pages, cleaning up many links, and transitioning the old site out and putting the new one up in its place. Check it out and tell me what you think. Over time, I plan to update some of the various pictures and add some new features, but functionally, it is good to go.
Lastly, I have been working on becoming a Crown Money Map Coach. This desire had been culminating for a few months now. Last summer, Bethany and I were in a Crown small group with a number of people from church. We were able to get all our finances agreed upon and used it as a great launch into marriage. Throughout the year, I’ve been listening to the daily podcast they produce and learned about this coaching service. This really interested me. So I ordered the books, signed up for the class, and away I go. Once I have completed everything in the next couple weeks, I will be certified and a part of Crown’s coaching network, which will allow me to be able to help others who are having any number of financial problems. I am really excited to complete the training and get started.
I’ll leave you with one more Copland picture. Aren’t they cute?
As you have probably figured out by now, I have my blog hosted on my own domain, BGerdin.com. I’ve had this domain since, oh, the summer after my Sophomore year at Bethel. I distinctly remember sitting down in the blistering summer heat at what is the ITS Helpdesk with nothing to do, causing trouble with Mr. Bleess. I remember that he had recently acquired his domain of bleaus.net (be sure to check it out, it’s pretty sweet!) and I was really interested in having one of my own. It didn’t take long before I had decided on and purchased my very own domain. At the time, it made way more sense for Austin to have a domain because he was, at that time, a computer science major. Me, being the finance major that I was, really had nothing to do with and shouldn’t have even been thinking of having my own website. But alas, here I was with my very own domain.
I thought this was pretty cool, however, I had no idea what I was going to do with it or even how to begin working on it. Thankfully, I was surrounded with all the computer people that I would need to start my site and get it up and running. Also thankfully, Bethel provided all of their students with a copy of Dreamweaver on their servers. This handy piece of software became the life vest for me out in the ocean known as the internet. I started out with a blog and it slowly grew to include regular html pages that I painstakingly learned how to code. This was quite a task for me being that I had never coded anything in my life. I asked both my coworkers and W3 Schools a lot of questions as I went along. Over time I moved my blog back and forth a couple of times from being hosted on Blogger’s servers to being hosted on my domain. Finally, I think finally that is, I moved my blog back to my server and started using Wordpress to author my blog. I have never had any second thoughts since that move.
A couple years ago, equipped with my vast knowledge of website creation, I decided that I could help my dad create a website for Gerdin Auto. As you probably could guess, my knowledge is no where near vast when it comes to programing. You could probably figure that out pretty quickly by simply looking at GerdinAuto.com. Looking at that site now, it looks like a bad site from the late ’90’s. Bad, I know. But hey, I was having fun. I had made a website from scratch for my dad’s business. Pretty cool I thought. But, let’s be honest now, I’m not really sure that I want to be associated with the site any more. It is pretty lame. So, within the last six or so months, I decided it needed an extreme face lift. But how, and where would I even start on it? Those were two very good questions.
I just started to play around with what was currently there. I became frustrated with that pretty quickly because I knew that it was just awful. I hit a road block and didn’t really know where to go from there. So what I did was look around for websites that I liked and take some ideas from them for the new site. Since all of the sites that I looked at were in simple html, it was rather easy to look at their code with the simple “View Page Code” in Firefox and figure out what was going on. After searching for a while, I found a great site and started to completely redo the shops site using their code as a guide. Along the way, I have created a Wordpress page that will be incorporated into the site and have also been doing some work in flash to add some special enhancements to the page. Everyone that I have shown it to so far has been blown away with how much better it looks from what is currently up there. Really, it’s not very hard to get that reaction coming from the current page.
So that’s really been taking up a lot of my time recently. I’ve been learning some flash, fumbling around with php, and doing a lot of trial and error with good ‘ol html and css. After I get some more of the content ironed out, I think it’s going to be ready for world to see. But as of now, it’s still in beta. I’m really starting to be excited with how it is turning out. I don’t want to link to it here on my site, so if you want to see the work in progress, let me know and I’ll send you the link to the testing pages. If you check it out, you’ll have to send me some feedback so I can make it even better than it currently is.
Keep fumbling around with your web skills, you never know what will come out on the other side!
