As I mentioned in the previous post, I wanted to buy books from the Twilight series for Seattle area charities, specifically those who were helping women and children. I was able to get 40 books — 10 complete Twilight Saga sets — to give away and found five great organizations to give the books to.

• New Beginnings Shelter received 3 sets of the Twilight Saga Collection.  They provide a home for women experiencing domestic violence abuse.  They also have a 24 hour crisis line, transitional housing, free weekly support groups, and legal advocacy. http://www.newbegin.org
• Roots Young Adult Shelter was excited they now had 2 complete sets of the Twilight Saga.  This shelter, located in Seattle, Washington, is the only shelter in the city that provides a safe place specifically for young persons between the age of 18 and 25.   Snacks, dinner, and a hot breakfast is also given out in addition to visits by healthcare providers. http://www.rootsinfo.org/
• Seattle Indian Center provides day programs for Seattle area teenagers. It offers a job placement program for adults among many other services in Seattle's diverse International District. Seattle Indian Center received two sets of the Twilight Saga for their library.
• Seattle's Union Gospel Mission has been assisting the homeless for over 77 years in the downtown Seattle area.  One set of the Twilight Saga Collection books went to the Women and Children=92s shelter.  While here, the women receive transitional housing, spiritual development, education and career training, and, if necessary, drug and alcohol recovery. http://www.ugm.org/
• Broadview Emergency Shelter provides confidential, transitional and emergency housing for women and children in the Seattle metro area. While at the site women have access to counseling, crisis intervention programs, addiction recovery services and goal setting meetings. Broadview received two sets of the Twilight Saga Collection. http://www.solid-ground.org/PROGRAMS/HOUSING/BROADVIEW/Pages/default.aspx

Each of the centers were really excited to get the books and I'm hopeful that they'll be put to good use.

I've been trying to get some side work done for some time, bouncing between several personal projects and a few group projects. I finally got one to stick and saw it through to "go live."

Over the past few months I've been working on Jayme Hughes' TxtVerse.com, and tonight wrapped up the final edits.

Through the process I tried to focus on simplicity and usability, and am really happy with the outcome. The site looks and functions great cross-browser. I got to implement what I think are very usable, smart forms, and wrapped everything up in compliant, semantic markup.

The back end is all in PHP. Even though I would have preferred building a Rails app, there were various constraints that made PHP a better choice for this project.

I'd love any feedback on the site, and if you want Bible verses text'd to you every day, by all means, sign up!

I've moved my site over to Go Daddy servers. This should resolve any conflicts of interest or anything like that. In general, the move over was smooth, but i realized there is a lot of work to make my site easier to maintain and much more portable.

I haven't moved my domains over to Go Daddy yet, but that will come soon enough.

I have about as much tact as hobo who just got out of jail and needs a bus ticket to see his family, so I have no problem pluging my friends and my own projects.

I think I might have mentioned it before, but Nick Pazoles's Wishlist is a fun little web app. Stemming from the same idea as Amazon's Wishlist (except without all the cross marketing involved), Pazoles's Wishlist is much more intimate, allows people to comment on and rate your list items, and let people know when you've recieved something you've been pining for.

In other news, Pazoles and I have started First Two, a website for Software Engineers (currently only for MSOE students and alumns). It's been fun to set up and I'm hoping that in the next couple months it takes off.

In ongoing project news, I'm starting to think about modifying Scrap, the system I wrote for maintaining hohle. to allow multiple users and making it much easier to add, edit, and delete posts and modify site-wide content. I'm also trying to integrate with things like del.icio.us and a few other online services. My ultimate goal would be to have something portable I could throw up on SourceForge.net or Fresh Meat,but I'm bad at maintaining things when I think they are finished, so that probably won't happen.

It seem that HostPC, my ISP, decided to change how I was allowed to connect to my database. Some people noticed this broke the ability to add comments. Well, it should be fixed, so comment away.

Tired of staring at the "Picture of the Day Missing" images for the last month and a half? Well, I was, so I did something about it.

Now, if I don't have an image queued up for the day, The image from the previous day will stay up. So there will always be an image.

To commemorate the slight change in functionality, I've queued about 7 images, and hopefully I'll do better at staying on top of it. As always, if you want to help me out, send some pictures, and I might put them up and you'll get the cred in the first comment for the picture.

Happy viewing!

After a couple months of mucking around here and there, I think hohle. in its current form is, for all intents and purposes, feature complete. This morning I made quite a bit of cleanups (at the PHP and HTML/CSS levels), added some nice usability features, and made it easier to add/modify content.

Here's a quick rundown of what I've done since the last update:

• fixed links that turn white on white backgrounds when you mouse over them
• made comments look nicer
• made Anonymous (IP Address) come up if the commentor didn't leave a name
• cleaned up ugly topic pages (these still need some work, imho)
• cleaned up resume (thanks Kortney ;)
• lots of css cleanup (removing colors from tags)
• added an advertisements explanation page (if you don't see ads, don't worry about it)
• in browsers that support it, when you mouse over the flavor of the day, you'll also get a description of the flavor (tested in Firefox)
• your comment information (name, and url) is now stored in a cookie so you don't have to re-enter it every time you comment

There are still some more things that I'd like to do, but if they don't get done, no one will notice (things like: dynamic templates or color schemes based visitor preferences). If there you have any feature requests or see things that are wrong or inconsistent, comment on this post or contact me.

I just added as many of the old POTDs as I could (about 120) and they are accessible via the POTD Archive. Many of them have been resized to save bandwidth and your screen real estate. The archive will probably get an update to be easier to navigate and gather info about each pic, but for now, it's pretty flat.

Oh yeah, and internet explorer users, you get the treat for the week. For IE users only, you get a banner at the top of the page for Firefox. Eventually that may get replaced by something else. I figure IE is the cause of many questions I get about computers (why do i get all these pop-ups, why is my computer so slow?) so I can give you guys a little more hastle.

BTW, Kopp's Symphony custard in a Waffle cone is amazing.

last night I added the ability for you to add comments to posts and POTD. So if you have something clever or insiteful (or not) feel free to tag a post/POTD with your thoughts. If there's any problems, let me know.

This will probably be one of the last big features added for a while. Next will be mostly cleanup and more posts.