These are our eight most recent photos. If you're lucky one of them is something other than Simon or Casey. See our Flickr Calendar for more.

So Long Music-Slave

This is the final post on Music-Slave.com. I've moved all the posts since April 2005(including this one) to PatCampbell.net. I'm debating whether or not I want to move the REALLY old items (dating back to December 2002) or not. The older items are before I moved away from the "Rants". I might relegate those semi politically-minded bits to the insidious Internet Archivers (as Philadelphia Bunnyface pointed out, nothing is ever really deleted).

I still have a laundry list of mostly minor items that I need to polish, but they will get done in time. I want to get people reading and commenting on the new site so I can work out any kinks that I come across there. I also want to be able to archive everything on Music Slave and stop paying the hosting fee.

Some of you have already sneakily found your way to the new site and started posting comments there. Good on you! So this is the end of the line for the Music-Slave. Without further ado, I present to you PatCampbell.net. Enjoy. :)

Double the Trouble

In an attempt to further combat our increasing tolerance to the cuteness levels in our lives, we decided to up the ante. So on or around July 4th 2008, we're upgrading to toddler, dog, and INFANT. Simon says that he wants a sister, and he wants her to be named "Pretty Girl". We'll take whatever God provides and be ridiculously happy, boy or girl.

I'm so glad that I'm finally able to share this news, as sitting on it was killing me. We're really, really happy, of course. Although Kate's happiness is somewhat tempered by the crippling "morning" sickness that has accompanied this pregnancy. Let's go with All Day and All Night Sickness (ADANS) from now on, shall we? Because that's what it is. It's been a bit better the last week or so, but Kate basically had to write off December and half of November to being crippled by nausea.

And in an only slightly related observation, compare the sonogram above to Simon's 8-week sonogram here. Either technology has come a long way in the last 2 years, or our OB got some nice new equipment.

Labels: Campbell Baby 2

Greetings from Sunny FL

Kate, being the gracious and loving wife that she is, let me fly down to Ft. Lauderdale for the Orange Bowl and a couple of days of fun with the old roommate. VT plays Kansas, and it should be a fun game. I come down here for sun and warmth and it ends up being freaking 50 degrees. I guess good company and a good smack-down on Thursday will have to suffice. And no, that is NOT a guarantee.

I have lots of pictures from Christmas in NY to post, but just haven't gotten to it. The new site is almost ready as well, I just need to migrate all the old posts. But alas, time has been short and life has been busy (two common threads, I'm finding).

Everybody watch the Orange Bowl on Thursday. Go Hokies!

Labels: VT

A Charitable Tradition

During the holidays, there is naturally a lot of talk of gifts and giving in our household. Kate and I also talk a good deal about the traditions we grew up with as kids and which ones we want our family to continue. We also talk about creating new traditions that are unique to our growing family. Well, unique in the sense that neither Kate or I grew up with them.

Last year we decided that it was important to include charitable giving into our holiday rituals. There are so many good charitable organizations out there, and we just can't afford to give all the money that we would like to all of them (no, becoming a platinum member of the Hokie Club does not qualify as "charity"). So we decided to do a charitable lottery, of sorts.

Before Christmas day, each person in our family gives some thought to the charities to which they would like to donate. On Christmas morning, before any gifts are opened, we write down the names of the charities, put them in a hat, and each person gets to pull out one charity. We then send a donation to each charity that gets pulled. Once a charity has been selected, they are omitted from the drawing the next year.

In addition to being a fun tradition (everybody gets to kind of "root" for their charities to get picked), it's also an attempt to mitigate the three ring circus that Christmas has become. I won't be so hypocritical as to say we don't enjoy giving and receiving gifts, but I want to try to help my kids understand that there are folks who need gifts that are so much more important than a Wii. Or a bicycle. Or a book.

I don't mean this to be a "look at us we're so great" post. Please don't, because we certainly aren't. I mainly wanted to ask for additional ideas for charitable giving. Anything is up for grabs. Get creative. List your favorite charity in the comments, and they just might make it into this year's hat. I'll get the ball rolling with our three charities from last year, and those that are in the hat so far this year.

2006 Winners:

• Little Flower Children and Family Services of New York - Located in Kate's home town.
  
• Ronald McDonald House
  
• WETA (2007 Winner)

2007 "Nominees" so far:

• Children's National Medical Center
• Christ House (medical, nutritional, and social services for the homeless in DC)
  
• David A. Goy Fund (Haitian Charity)
• Divine Mercy Care (sponsors non-profit, pro-life health care centers)
• Front Royal Humane Society (we got Casey from them)
• Nazareth Farm (my sister volunteered here the last 2 years)
• St. Jude's Children's Research Hospital

Labels: christmas

An Early Merry Christmas!

I posted something similar last year, but this one is so much better, it deserves to get posted again. Merry Christmas!

Labels: misc

Is it wrong that I find this exciting?

Need charts for your website? Google makes it easy!

And the sad part is, my answer to that question is: "No, I don't need charts for my website." And I STILL think it's cool. Ooooo. . . pretty pictures!

Labels: tech tools

Website Redesign - Part 4: Mocking up the Archives and Contact Pages


Designing the Archive and Contact pages was challenging because of the limited content those pages will hold. Normally the challenge is to take a bunch of information and cram it into a limited amount of space in a way that it is usable and easily accessible. In this case, my challenge was to take a small amount of information and present it in a manner that was attractive without looking stark, while retaining the aforementioned usability and accessibility.

Let's start with the archives. When I had initially thought about this page, I wanted to provide a calendar-like interface that the user could use to select posts from individual days. Then I thought about how I use blog archives. How often do I look at a specific day to find a post? Never. Chronologically, do I post
often enough to justify having archives go down to a daily level? Not really. Would a monthly archive be sufficient? Absolutely.

I have seen some effectively implemented monthly archives, and I particularly liked the way that the archives are laid out on Veerle's site. I decided to use a form of that, although without the "show all content" and with the more recent dates on the right, as if to emulate a time line. While this navigation will work fine for a little while, I will need to find a way to let users browse posts further back than 4 years ago. As it stands, that's not currently an issue. Talk to me at this time next year. While it was easy to generate this mockup, dynamically generating this content through WordPress may be a challenge.

In addition to accessing archives chronologically, I also want to be able to access posts grouped by tags. Right now, this is a simple list on the right hand side of the page, but eventually may become the "tag cloud" that has become popular. We'll see.

Finally, there is the contact page. I want to provide a way for users to contact me via my Web site. I'll provide my email address (taking care to hide it from spammers), as well as a form that users can use that will drop a note in my inbox. I may eventually need to put a CAPTCHA on the page to prevent spammers from using the form. I also felt that it was important to have a photo of me on this page, so people could actually see who they were contacting. I feel like it helps people connect a little better. I'm not a fan of posting my picture, so it took me a while to find one that was acceptable. I picked one that had a nice distraction in it, too. So hopefully people will look more at Simon than they do at me.

I've got all the mockups for the new site complete and have started work on the HTML/CSS templates. I've also secured the domain name and hosting through DreamHost.com. I hope to have the new site ready and running by the new year, but with the holidays and all the traveling that I have planned, I think that may be overly ambitious. Look for the new site sometime in January.

Labels: design (web)

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