Josh Gomez

It seems like this weekend was never going to come. I’m glad it is here.

Still feeling sick, I decided to stay home and work on the AMBER Alert project. I have been preparing for this project since the first week I started at Global Alerts. Plenty of sketches and rough drafts of the interface have been drawn up, along with simple compositions of the layout for the website and active alerts.

Working from home is always a challenge for me because I’m easily distracted. Today was a different story. I was focused and ready to get my ideas onto the screen. I jumped right in and started cutting the page templates down to the bone, adding some reset styles to the sheet, and cracking open Fireworks to get the graphics flowing.

After a few hours I had the general template structured and working in the major browsers. Next came the main navigation, which is a simple unordered list styled as an offset horizontal bar. A couple of Internet Explorer height issues put some bumps in the road, but nothing deep. It was only eleven o’clock and I already completed more than expected. Lunch.

It was a bit slower after lunch, but I’m blaming it on the pasta for weighing me down. I tinkered with the alignment and padding for the main content areas, which was a waste of time. By the end of the day I found myself bored, playing with content for the sidebar. Tomorrow should be exciting since I can return to work with something to bounce around the rest of the team.

I made it halfway through the workday, then I came home. Now I’m here with a box of Puffs Ultra, strategically scheduling my NyQuil dosages. I would like to give a shout out to those people who decided to come to work sick last week - “Thanks for helping me out, and giving me a reason to work from home, I might actually get some things done. I owe you big-time”.

This week, I was going to begin working on designing a new look for our AMBER Alert website. We’ve decided to develop it on Wordpress. We’ll use the multiuser (MU) platform since state specific subdomains (az.amberalert.com) are part of our plan. The new theme will focus on promoting our alerting platform, explaining the history of AMBER Alert, and spotlighting our award-winning Child ID Kit software.

Tomorrow, Wordpress 2.3 will be released. You’ll need to sit down for this exciting list of things that happened here while getting ready for the release:

1. Lost my database without creating a backup.
2. Deleted my theme, thinking I had an up-to-date local copy.
3. Tried to configure my blog at blog.joshgomez.com, only to give up after wasting my entire Saturday because of my stubbornness to have a specific set of rules for my URLs and only knowing enough about mod_rewrite to feel like it was possible if I just kept searching for that regular expression and figure out the new way Wordpress handles canonical addresses.

I am glad all of these things happened, because I would have nothing else to do this weekend since my paycheck never showed up in my account and we recently cut our cable television. My keyboard is so dirty after all of this, I think I’ll soak it in the bath tonight.