theCircumlocution

BlogCFC to MovableType anyone?

2008-07-12T20:26:58Z

Ever had the need to move blog data from one platform to another? If you've ever worked with clients or more than one blog before, you're sure to have your own favorite blogging platform. Maybe it's MovableType, Blogger, Wordpress, or maybe even BlogCFC. If you're lucky enough, maybe you'll be moving from one platform to another that's made by the same company. Six Apart at least at sometime owned or operated MovableType, Blogger, Vox, and LiveJournal, and typically have a really easy way of porting data from one to the other. Wordpress has a couple of nice tools to importing from other platforms as well. But what I have noticed is that many of these platforms lack one major import tool. And that's the one from what was the only ColdFusion Markup Language blog, BlogCFC.

]]> I set out to correct that problem, at least for exporting from BlogCFC and importing into MovableType. Luckily there's a basic import from plain text file available in MovableType. However, I didn't find a real good example of what that text file would look like provided the blog article had all the information possible in it. Luckily, I had used a plugin that populated a blog with all kinds of data so I could export it easily into the plain text file and make sure all the data stored in BlogCFCs databases could be written to that file.

Eventually I came out with a CFML file that did the trick when connecting to a MS SQL database. Looking quickly at the SQL, it should also work for MySQL databases, but I make no guarantees. Feel free to download it here and take a peek.

This is a version 1 and with that statement comes the call for feature requests and ways to make your life easier. Here's what I want to add so far:

Selectable Datasource
Input for column prefix
Checkbox for including pings/trackbacks
Input for blog to export

Mostly, those would all be accomplished with a GUI. I'm not a fan of having to always change code while using a tool, so why should I make other people do that?

Download it now!

Are websites software?

2008-05-20T00:53:00Z

Over on Jesus is my Sword this weekend was a post wondering if websites should be thought of as software and free updates should be expected. It felt to me like he was saying that they should be expected. I don't think that same way. I'm much more under the opinion that a website servers a specific purpose now and that anything other than potential security issues should not be "given" as a free upgrade.

]]> Now there are definitely some exceptions to this. The main is the Software as a Service model (or in the web's case, Site as a Service model.) This model gives developers and designers time to focus on pretty much one product that the client has to accept for what it is with the notion that in subsequent versions more features will be added.

Most clients want a solution for the here and now. They're not considering what might help them in 3-5 years. Maybe that's a good thing based on how liquid the current web development market is. So why would a firm give away code when more than likely the client will want a whole new website in 3 years anyway? And why not give them code that's 3 years better with their new site rather than smaller, more incremental changes over those 3 years that will increase the WOW factor 10-fold. After all, in order to make money, you want to not give away free WOW, right?

Model-Glue 3 Alpha

2008-05-07T02:26:00Z

This last weekend at cf.objective(), Joe Reinhart gave a presentation about what's new and upcoming in Model-Glue 3 (gesture) and then announced it's alpha release. That night I downloaded it and got it running with the 6 4-bit Coldfusion 8.0.1 with Apache 2.2 on OS X leopard in no time at all. However, on my test machine running Fedora Core 9 I had a few problems.

]]> I had Model-Glue 2 (unity) up and running with no problems so I thought I'd just extract MG3 over the top of it. I updated the mapping and tried to load the modelglueapplicationtemplate in my browser only to get the infamous "Could not find the included template /ModelGlue/gesture/ModelGlue.cfm." error. I checked and rechecked the path only to see that it was right each time. As usual I jumped into the terminal and started traversing through the directories.

For some reason unknown to me, I tossed a [jameaghe@shindaiwa]# ls -la into the folder that holds all my "coldfusion frameworks" and noticed that the newly extracted ModelGlue folder had drwx------ permissions meaning only the owner had any access. I switched it quickly to drwxr-xr-x and refreshed the browser. BAM! the template was up and running.

I did wonder why the default permissions were 700 on that directory, but I'm hoping that will be remedied in later releases. Or, quite possibly, I'm only supposed to give my webserver user access to those files. Still, though, giving write access to the webserver user to framework files scares me a bit. Until the next release, I'll just wait in wonder.

Is a CMS the Kiss of Death for a Programmer's Marketability?

2008-04-13T18:45:00Z

Recently the company I work for made a decision to make a decision to choose a content management system (CMS) to use for most of our clients. In all, it sounds like a great idea for us programmers as the workload from designer to programmer would hopefully move from 30%-70% to closer to 50%-50%. But by being able to lessen our work load, do we essentially loose our marketability for the future?

]]>

According to the OECD's Economic Survey of the European Union (which for some reason included the US), the average lifespan of a job in the US is 4 years. By that measure, I have only 3 years left at my current position. So by taking a decent year to really learn a CMS and get an excellent handle on creating plugins and continuing to do so for the next two years, do I essentially loose my marketability for web development?

There's so many languages available today and each has its own plethora of CMSes and frameworks, does sitting down and picking just one or two trap a programmer into that life for the rest of his career? Hypothetically, we end up picking MODx Content Management System. It ends up being amazing easy to use (I have no idea if this is true yet.) Our turn-around time on a site goes from being about 6 weeks to 2 weeks. It has definitely been a good decision based on the "bottom-line" that the higher-ups are always talking about. Three years from now after putting most of my energy into this particular CMS, I decide that Myrtle Beach is no longer the place for me for whatever reason (I'm sick of the ocean, sick of the heat, sick of the humidity, annoyed at all the tourists, etc), and start looking for a different employer. This is when the real test comes.

Do employers look at your experience and decide for or against you based on what you've spent your last 2 years doing? I don't think I would if I was ever put in the hiring position. Employees are supposed to be investments, right? So shouldn't employers be looking for potential employees that have a great personality and thirst for knowledge and a great potential without focusing too much on past experiences? Personally I think a good programmer is a good programmer, regardless of the language they "know". You could be programming with Adobe Coldfusion for the last eight years and suddenly be looking for a job in PHP. Should that candidate simply be dismissed because he/she has no prior PHP experience? I don't believe so. If he/she programs well in Coldfusion, with a little investment into mentoring him/her, he/she can be just as good, if not better, at programming in PHP.

Now, can we expect the same sort of attitude for those of us that may end up being stuck using a single CMS for a single language? Will potential employers consider theses CMSes simply another language and put the investment in employees if they fit the team well, or will they simply be tossed into "temporary storage" until the office cleaning team comes to move them to "long-time storage" at the city dump?

With the wider, mainstream adoption of CMS and custom websites becoming more scarce, now is the time to really think about if a web firm's adoption of a CMS really is the kiss of death for a programmer's marketability.

Biking Casualties at Michigan Tech

2008-02-20T03:26:00Z

Five years at Michigan Tech means I spent a lot of time mountain biking. From the single track to the technical rides, urban assault to road rides, I've tried to ride it all. Lucky I found some great guys that were just as crazy about biking as I am to go along with me. Unluckily for them, 50% were injured. Here's a few pictures of their injuries and even one of an injuring in the making!

]]> The first injury I can remember hearing about I wasn't even biking with the group. Turns out I had some sort of exam — probably some sort of calculus — that took up my time instead. For this one, the guys were flying down a single track that had a sharp right-hand turn through sand. The last guy was catching up real fast and didn't make the turn through the sand and went over about a 3 foot cliff. Below is the aftermath of his bike. Notice it's a Trek 800 which is a steel-frame bike.

Next, we have a guy that came up for a long weekend while on co-op. We hit up the dirt jumps after a nice technical ride. My buddy and I waited half way through the jumps to regroup, but the third guy never came. We took off slowly back up the trail. Slowly since we didn't want him to just come flying over a jump with some mad air and land on us. We started hearing, "Um, hey guys!?" Turns out he got some unexpected, yet mad air off a jump and rammed the front wheel into the take off of the next jump. His bike wasn't hurt as bad as the first guys, but he did end up breaking some bones by his shoulder. What a way to spend a vacation, huh?

The final casualty ends up with a guy bending the crap of out his front rim. Somehow one of the guys caught him in mid-action before messing up that rim. Lucky for him, has wasn't hurt any more than being slightly sore the next day. By far, I think this is my favorite biking picture from my days at Michigan Tech.

There's something in the Air...

2008-01-30T03:15:00Z

That's right folks -- and it's going to be legendary!

Check it out!

Myrtle Beach: Thanks for Visiting

2007-10-21T22:49:51Z

Just driving to work the other day, I got behind a Myrtle Beach police car that was heading to its headquarters -- which just so happens to be only a few short blocks from my office. The thing that caught my eye this time was not how old the police car was (most of the county and state have gone to 2006+ Chevy Impalas, and this was still an older-style Ford Crown Victory) but what it said on the car. It had the normal, "we're here to protect, but call us if you're in trouble" stuff. So I got to thinking about what the city slogan of Myrtle Beach because I didn't know if there was one. The only other phrase on the police cruiser was "Thanks for visiting."

]]> There's not much more to say except I have been living the last 18 months in a city that promotes not wanting anyone to stay here. I'm starting to get more and more surprised they aren't trying to kick all the transplants out after reading that slogan. Nothing like dropping the proverbial "we don't like you so get out of our town after your visit" bomb.

Myrtle Beach, SC -- Thanks for Visiting!

Welcome to the Tobacco Belt

2007-07-28T19:25:34Z

Soy milk, cottage cheese, bread, and mozzarella cheese. Sure, they have nothing to do with the tobacco belt, but they're where this story begins. Just yesterday after a joyous stop to blockbuster, I ran into the neighboring FoodLion and ran into a not-so-joyous time. Seems the person in charge of scheduling thought it'd be a great idea to only schedule two cashiers on a Friday night at 7.00pm. As I was standing in line, it all happened.

I'd heard around the office that a neighboring city had a bill to ban smoking in public restaurants. Even though it's not news that smoking bans are being passed in many cities, i thought it was interesting that there was one being passed in a city with such a high population so smokers. Moving here from the Midwest and then going back to visit after a year down here, I was astounded by how few people smoke there (or how many smoke here.)

]]> The previous day in the office, those who pay attention to the local governments had a very interesting story to tell. Turns out that one of the higher-ranking city officials pushed in an addendum as he didn't want to see the bill passed that not only made smoking illegal in public restaurants, but all public places -- including the beach! Figuring that would stop people from passing the bill, it was slightly over-looked and the bill still passed, now making people realize that they had actually banned smoking everywhere -- the first city to do so in the Grand Strand. Pretty stellar stuff.

So back to the story at hand, as I was waiting in line to checkout my 5 items this group of stereotypical southern rednecks lined up behind me. They started talking about what they were going to do that evening before suddenly remembering they forgot to pick up sour cream for the evening's dinner. When the lady who ran across the store to get it came back -- the line still hadn't moved -- the lady whipped around and started this conversation:

"Did you hear what Surfside is doing?" the lady said.
"No, what?" one of the men responded.
"They've just passed a law saying that starting October first," she continued.
"Oh, right! They've decided to ban smoking," the guy said, cutting her off.
"Yeah, they've banned it everywhere, even on the Beach! And a just got that job back at [insert some restaurant], there goes all my tips," she said. "I can't believe it," the other guy said shaking his head. "I can see banning it in the restaurants for those people who don't smoke. But on the beach and within 30 yards of buildings? What are these people on?"
"Yeah," the lady says jumping on the bandwagon, "the only reason I can see for banning it on the beach is because of litter."

It was after that that I laughed a loud. I just couldn't believe it. These people thought the main reason for a city-wide smoking ban was to just clean up the beach of cigarette butts. Seriously, how can you be so ignorant. Maybe it's just part of the culture of the "tobacco belt". Maybe it's the result of the 49th ranked public school system in the united states. Or maybe it's just the mentality of a small group of smokers. One may never know.

But regardless of these possibly crazy people in the grocery store, I sure am glad I'll have a beach to go to now that is smoke-free!

MovableType 4 Beta 2

2007-06-18T02:07:43Z

Tonight I “upgaded” to MT4 beta 2 from MT 3.35. So far, the administration/backend is lovely. I can’t quite yet figure out how to change my picture, but I’m pretty sure I came across something that said that’s not yet implemented. But as I, like a lot of others, don’t simply use the basic MT templates, I ran into a rather huge issue. Ever since I started using MT back in version 2.661, I’ve been a fan of the the tag as I hate the never-ending blogroll pages. However, when I went to rebuild my templates with MT4b2 tongiht, I was told that no longer exists!

]]> So I tried to run over to http://www.movabletype.org (MTs development site) to see if they said anything about this tag becoming obsolete as I figured a bunch of people use that tag and it’d be on their blog. To my disappointment, it was not. So I googled it - to no avail. For all the hype on MT’s dev blog about the community rising up with the beta release, I was surprised not to find more blogs about this. So until I find a way around this, I’ve taken out the check to see if I’ve used the Extended Entry and simply add a read more link to every entry! Not the best way, but at least it works for the time being.
So if anyone has an answer to my issue or running into the same problems, let me know!

The Shad Show

2007-05-07T00:14:21Z

Recently the project manager and a fellow programmer where I work have begun a podcast, old-skool style. No video, just audio. But none the less, they're doing it. So far there's been two episodes which you can download from the is that what you think website. Over there they describe the show as a place where "you will find topics ranging from Web Development, Video Games, TV, Movies and all kinds of geeky stuff." So if you're a hankering to get your geek on and have an hour a week to spare, check it out.

]]> I haven't yet made it through the first episode, as it's 80mb and over an hour long, but the word around the office is that it has its moments. This weeks, episode 2 from season 1, was a bit better with respect to time and file size. Dropped down to under and hour and less than 30mb! I just might have some time to check out this week's before next weeks comes out. Yet I don't suppose that the Is That What You Think? podcast is a must-see-each-week show such as Lost, which means I could probably just pick it up whenever i feel like it.

One of the main things this podcast was created for is the spreading of everyday cheer for the web-programming language Adobe Coldfusion. My first experience with this language came from the first job I had out of college. Now even though that experience was less than stellar, I still wonder about the reliability and performance of the language. Is That What You Think is trying to persuade the rest of the world about the benefits of Coldfusion. A recent post of theirs starts by destroying the "myths" that the media has been spreading about coldfusion. Their article brings up a few good points, but they all come back to the same issue: if you build shit applications, they're not going to run well. The fact of the matter is that Coldfusion allows it more than other web languages. Mainly it can be traced to Coldfusion's ease of learning, meaning that any dumb schmuck with a hint of programming knowledge can quickly pick up Coldfusion. So that would make you think there's a lot of coldfusion programmers out there since it's such an easy language to pick up, right? That would be the case if you didn't have to give up your car in order to afford one license of Coldfusion. And not just that, Coldfusion is only officially supported on a few operating systems -- some of which are old linux distros that aren't supported by that distro anymore! I mean, even Coldfusion 8 beta 2 (codenamed scorpio) won't automatically install in windows Vista. In fact, it completely breaks Vista's IIS 7's isapi modules. You won't find that problem with PHP, ASP.NET, or any of the the other more-popular web languages.

So with the invention of the Is That What You Think podcast, my attention will be on how they're going to keep coldfusion at the top of the list of cool. And I do hope they guys over there can turn someone onto Coldfusion -- it just won't be me.

Coldfusion Scorpio and Ubuntu

2007-02-23T02:04:33Z

With starting a new job, I've had the opportunity to engulf myself in a new and "interesting" language: Adobe/MacromediaColdFusion. Because I'm starting out as a total beginner with CF and moving from PHP, I thought I'd sign up for some mailing lists from House of Fusion and also to be a beta tester for Adobe. I got a copy of CF 8 (codenamed scorpio) for linux and decided to take my old-school Mac and turn it into a ubuntu server with mysql 5, php 5, apache 2, and CF 8.

So I ran off to Ubuntu and grabbed a copy of their server edition of Edgy 6.10 and installed a LAMP server i just under 2 hours (slow computer and all, takes for a while.)

]]> So the LAMP server worked great, although php is a few versions old. So I quickly installed the default packages and got an SSH and Samba server up and running so I could transfer the Scorpio image to the computer. Turns out my cdrom drive in the Mac wouldn't read the cd I burned it to.

Sadly, the ease of installation stops here where I ran into a nasty little error after running /tmp# ./scorpio_B1_lin.bin

Preparing to install...

Extracting the JRE from the installer archive...

Unpacking the JRE...

Extracting the installation resources from the installer archive...

Configuring the installer for this system's environment...

./scorpio_B1_lin.bin: 2135: strings: not found

Launching installer...

/tmp/install.dir.6449/Linux/resource/jre/bin/java: 1: Syntax error: "(" unexpected

So I jumped over to google and searched for install coldfusion scorpio on ubuntu 6.10 and found a handy article by demirkapi about a year ago talking about how to install Coldfusion MX 7.0.1 on debian. And since Ubuntu is kind of built on debian, I figured it wouldn't hurt to check it out. It started off by saying to install a whole lot of extra packages so i installed those:

/tmp# apt-get install php5-gd gcc libc6-dev libcrypt-blowfish-perl libcarp-clan-perl libbit-vector-perl libio-stringy-perl libmail-sendmail-perl libmailtools-perl libnet-dns-perl libperl5.8 libsnmp-session-perl make php-pear postfix procmail tar nmap

and tried running the Scorpio installer and I got a little further, but still no luck. Errors this time said:

:/tmp# ./scorpio_B1_lin.bin 
Preparing to install...

Extracting the JRE from the installer archive...

Unpacking the JRE...

Extracting the installation resources from the installer archive...

Configuring the installer for this system's environment...

nawk: error while loading shared libraries: libm.so.6: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

dirname: error while loading shared libraries: libc.so.6: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

/bin/ls: error while loading shared libraries: librt.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

basename: error while loading shared libraries: libc.so.6: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

dirname: error while loading shared libraries: libc.so.6: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

basename: error while loading shared libraries: libc.so.6: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Launching installer...

grep: error while loading shared libraries: libc.so.6: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

/bin/sh: error while loading shared libraries: libc.so.6: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

So reading further, it said to install libstdc++ and i did and tried the installer again only to find the same errors!

Eventually, I simply gave up and went back to Fedora Core 6 and got everything running quite happily. If anyone's been successful with installing Scorpio on Ubuntu, I'd be happy to hear about it!

Installing Ubuntu on a Sun Ultra10

2006-11-02T02:30:00Z

While trying to kill some time at work the other day, I was looking around the internet at my new favorite site, The Museum of Modern Betas, and I just started clicking on links. Eventually I came across a linux called Ubuntu that I thought might be cool to test out. But my real excitement came when I went to download it and saw there were two versions - a live CD that was also for installing the desktop version as well as a Server only install. What really caught my eye was the Ubuntu Server version for the sparc processor. I've had this Sun Ultra10 lying around for a year or two now with nothing to do since I could never quite get Solaris 9 to run apache, mysql and php.

]]> So i downloaded this linux Distro for Sparc, burned it, and stuck it into my Ultra10. Too bad for me that I didn't get lucky. The installer just hung while saying Booting Linux.... I jumped on the trusty google and came across the article I needed at the Helmets on ! weblog. Surprising, it told me exactly what i needed to do. I had to upgrade/flash the OpenBoot Prom (OBP) which i guess is the sun/sparc version of a BIOS. To do that I had to find sun's flash utility, set a jumper to allow writing to the OBP and then run a little flash utility that told me I wasn't really updating from 3.12 to 3.31 even though after I ran the update I was running 3.31. So it all worked out for the best, I guess.

After flashing, I did a full power-off reboot and booted the install CD. I followed all the prompts on the installer and then booted into my successful install of Ubuntu Server 6.06.1 Sparc -- or so I thought. Never during the installer was i asked to supply a root password as I have been on ther other linux installs, Fedora and Mandriva. Luckily I had set up a user and could log on. Following the Helmets on ! tutorial, I tried installing openssh server so that I could do things while not at the console. Supposedly I just had to run sudo apt-get install openssh-server and life would be good. However, sudo asked me for a password and the one I used to log in with didn't work. So that made that install completely useless since I couldn't get root privileges so I couldn't install anything. Instead of trying to figure out how to set the root's password, I reinstalled Ubuntu hoping it would ask me for a root password this time. Yeah, it didn't.

I finally found an article on Cape Linux User Group (CLUG) that gave me some ideas to try. One was to boot into single user mode from LILO, but Ubuntu used SILO as its boot loader. So that didn't work. Then I saw at the bottom of the page a simple command much like one that I had tried before. sudo passwd root instead of sudo passwd. Pretty much I didn't quite understand how sudo worked, as I figured sudo passwd meant that I was becoming root and running passwd. It didn't work, so I was wrong. Putting the username behind it worked and it asked me for a password. For some reason this time it took my password I logged in with and then I was able to set the root password. All is good. Now it's off to get apache, PHP, and MySQL.

Once I got everything set up, I decided that 20gig hard drive was a bit small, so I went to the box of computer pieces and pulled out a 120gig. Sadly, after installing, I kept getting the error message, The file just loaded does not appear to be bootable. So maybe, back when this Sparc Ultra10 was made, it didn't support 120gig harddrives. So i put the 20gig back in and it booted just fine. The next step is to see if I can automount the 120gig.

The I.E. (win) Peek-a-Boo Bug

2006-09-21T14:46:32Z

For work, yesterday and today, I was given a new photoshop image to chop up and make interactive for the web. Since it's been a bit slow here recently, I thought I'd challenge myself a bit and make this layout completely table free. Why make it table-free when our product currently is built wholly on tables? Well, the main reason is to make one of the co-workers here mad. He has an issue, no matter how many times we explain the benefits, with using CSS on any site. So not only was I having a little fun with challenging a fully CSS layout, but I'm making life harder for him if he feels he needs to change something later on down the line. And to make things even better, I've got the navigation showing up from right to left instead of left to right, just for fun.

]]> So the main thing I wanted to discuss here is the Peek-a-Boo Bug that I encountered today for the first time ever. I've copied the issue and you can see it here. You'll notice, if using a more standards compliant browser like firefox, a nice clean, 100% standards compliant (if you don't count the warnings from other's code) version of a custom IDX website for Barbara Blue. But if you switch rendering engines to IE (you could use something like the IE Tab extension for firefox), you'll notice that all the text on the left-hand side by the quick search (form) elements is missing! Refresh the page, and the text is there. But then if you hover over any of the links, BAM! the text disappears again. I did a quick google for dissappearing text in IE and jumped on a link to thescripts.com and then flew over to Position is Everything where I read about the Peek-a-Boo bug. I was like, yup, that's what's happening to me. But they didn't go into any suggestions as to how to fix it.

So off I went searching through the links on that page until I came to another article on Position is Everything. This time, it told me a bit about what I wanted to know.

This article explains and demonstrates using floated div elements that are hidden when the page loads and appear when you mouse-over a link that is actually showing inside a floated element. Now my issue wasn't quite like that -- pretty much the exact opposite though. All my text showed up to begin with, then when mouse-overing a link the text in the first floated element disappeared. It seemed close enough to the same thing, so I kept reading and came up with two options according to this article at CommunityMX:

add position: relative; to all floated elements and child elements of the floats.
add a height to the container element of the floated div in which the text disappears.

So when I looked back through my CSS, I realized that I had already set the elements to position: relative; so that shot that idea down. Then, I simply added an guestimated (with the help of the MeasureIt firefox plugin by Kevin A. Freitas) height to my float: left; div element. Turns out I guessed the incorrect height, but at least my text didn't disappear when mouse-overing the links anymore!

I have not yet tried this with a percentage height -- or anything that's not a pixel height. So I'm not sure if anything over than a pixel-sized height will work yet.

So lesson learned, you must add a height to your floated element if, in IE, the text starts playing peek-a-boo with you.

Online Design Portfolio

2006-09-15T17:40:57Z

With the launch of theCircumlocution.com, I've decided that I no longer want to use Movable Type as the backend for displaying my online portfolio. To make things short, it just didn't have the capabilites that I wanted such as being able to highlight a current project or a best project or even finished projects. I do suppose it would be possible to add fields to the database to do this, but then I'd have to do custom programming to show the results. I'm sure there'd be a way to write a plugin for MT as well, but I don't really think I'll be suggesting MT as a blogging/CMS solution to anyone anymore because wordpress is free and fast (PHP), not expensive and slow (perl). So why learn how to program plugins for a, in my mind, slowly dying blogging system software?

]]> I've started looking at other online portfolio software -- stuff that's not just a blog or wiki backend -- like Open Source Portfolio. Turns out that this program is more of a collaborative suite between students and teachers that a way to create and manage an online design portfolio.

I then came across the "pay us to build/host your portfolio" sites like FolioLink. FolioLink was more aimed at the artistic designer where they'd show a simple image per page. That doesn't help me as much of what I do is behind the scenes -- not graphically beautiful and on the front page of all the sites. So I couldn't really use one of those types of sites either -- not that I would want to as I would have had to pay for it.

So I've definitely got to set out and start writing some code to take care of displaying my portfolio in a way that can only help me get a new job -- if that ever comes around.