Swingleton Blog

Out of Date Blog

  • Using the Weather.gov API

    I live and ride bikes in Lawrence, Kansas. I used to be active in the Lawrence Mountain Bike Club, and I helped with their web site. One of the things that we needed to communicate to mountain bikers in the area was how much rain we’d gotten recently, so that we can help folks judge…

  • Ideas

    It’s been a year since my last post. Might as well go for a poem, then. Digging down into the minutia; crawling back out, to bring an idea to the surface – The goal is not necessarily the light, it’s just the dirt layer on top. Yet it’s still an idea, drug up from the…

  • Patching OpenSSL on Windows running Apache – fixing the HeartBleed bug

    I woke up this morning to learn that there’s a week-old bug in OpenSSL that is all over the news. I feel very guilty for not knowing about this sooner, as I am running OpenSSL on my Windows 2008 that we are using for data collection at my job with the university. But, better late…

  • Opposition to Kansas House Bill “concerning religious freedoms with respect to marriage”

    So, I live in Kansas. There some really nice things about this state, but lately politics and state governance are not part of that set. Today, the Kansas House of Representatives passed a loathsome bill (HB 2453) that legalizes a business’ right to discriminate against a person, “if it would be contrary to the sincerely…

  • Summer Stroll

    I did not abide the sunny paths But instead, waded through shade Beneath boughs between swaths of green grass The gorgeous but searing sun screened And the cool breeze amplified under the canopy. Across the glade, shade pool to shade pool, I strolled to the pond, joined by bluebirds, Red-winged blackbirds and butterflies. Garrulous frogs…

  • Facebook apps

    So this post is really an experiment. I’m hoping that when I post this, I will see a link show up on my Facebook feed. If that works, I may have successfully integrated Facebook with this blog. The crazy thing is that, of course, there’s really no coding involved with this process. It’s something that…

  • Fickle April

    Fickle April, startle me. Spring’s shaky hold knocked loose by the whimsy of the jet stream, pulling a curtain of wintry air and icy dampness from latitudes far to the north. But freezing rain is no match for the inexorable tilt of the globe and the radiant sun, even through clouds, draws the dandelions on…

  • Another WordPress site

    I finally got around to updating www.lawrencemountainbikeclub.org with a new design and moved it over to WordPress. I’m not ashamed to admit that a big hurdle for me was my existing PHP code for allowing people to join the club via our PayPal account. I loathed the idea of having to create some kind of…

  • First Drupal site is live

    I successfully converted my brother-in-law’s static and Dreamweaver-templated web site to Drupal this morning. I don’t know if he will like it, but I can certainly see where it’s going to make my life a little easier. Plus, now he can login and add and edit pages himself. The URL, by the way, is cjhodge.com.…

  • Responsive JQuery rotating images

    Sometimes, when I’m in the weeds of a thing – say, figuring out how to build my own custom Javascript solution for rotating images – I wonder if it wouldn’t just be easier to download someone else’s solution and just live with that. But then I figure it out (eventually) and it almost seems worth…