Website

And the silence is finally broken.

Yes, I’ve been absent for quite some time. It’s understandable, you see, for as many of you know, it will soon be Jim and Lissa plus one!! I know that is a scary thought, but there is no turning back now. Lissa will be 37 weeks pregnant — full term — tomorrow! So, this could all become a reality any day now.

This must be setting in for me finally. It is well known that pregnant women go through a nesting phase before giving birth. Lissa may be experiencing that, but I think I am too busy nesting to notice.

We have debated it, disagreed about it, and discussed it, but we finally decided it was time: time to get a digital camera. Actually, we already had one — an old Apple QuickTake 200 that I got for free several years ago with a PowerBook purchase — but it was so simple and had such low resolution that we rarely used it.

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After considering several alternatives and turning to my always-trusted Consumer Reports, we decided on the Kodak EasyShare DX6340. It appears to provide a good balance of features, ease of use, and price, and it has consistently received good reviews. Last Friday night we went to our local Target and purchased the camera, a 128MB memory card, and a miniature umbrella (completely unrelated to the camera purchase).

Finally! After I have spent over a month playing with, learning, and writing modules for Drupal, we are up and running. The site is by no means complete, and we have plenty more to add; however, there's enough here to get things going.

The "Main Menu" at the top left will help you get around. Here is the quick tour:

• Our story is, well, just that. It describes our lives together. We will be adding more to the story as time goes on.
• Blogs shows the latest entries in our personal blogs, while the jim and lissa links take you directly to our respective blogs.
• Links will take you to a category-based list of links to other websites. These sites may belong to friends and family members, or they may simply be related to our lives and interests in some way.
• The archives and search links make it possible to view and find past stories, blog entries, etc. Note that the search field at the top of every page can also be used for searching.

In preparing this site, Jim looked at many different open source web content management system (CMS) packages. After trying several, he decided on Drupal, a PHP/MySQL-based system. Drupal is well-designed from both a user- and developer-standpoint, and Jim has spent considerable time contributing to the project by developing modules.

Welcome! A gray, rainy, rather boring Labor Day yesterday finally gave me a little kick in the pants to get our website started (much to Lissa's delight). You see, we have owned this domain for two and a half years with the intention of publishing something...someday. Sure we have used it for e-mail and to publish the occasional photos, but it has much more potential.

Although I enjoy web development, at times it can be tiring and draining — especially for a perfectionist like me. I always want to hand-code all of the HTML and/or PHP to make it look and work just right. This is great in that the code is always readable and works as expected; however, it means that development is painfully slow at times. Once I get going, I work well, but building the motivation to start the project is sometimes tough.