Ryan Christensen — Your friendly neighborhood web specialist

Those of you that have known me for a long time know that I’ve been planning to launch a Pacific Northwest oriented local news/event/resource site (called Start Northwest) for a long, long time.

It’s almost become an inside joke. Once you consider that the website has been in the planning (and development) stage since September 2003 — almost five years — you start to see the absurdity. The project has seen redesign after redesign, and I’ve started the back-end from scratch no less than 5 times.

The most interesting thing about all this is that almost five years later the project is still just as necessary as it was when first conceived. In the last five years the local alternatives in our launch areas (the Olympic Peninsula and Snoqualmie Valley, both in Washington) have not improved at all. This is why the project can’t die, and it’s why I’ve been tucking in extra hours where possible to give the push the final site needs to go live.

To ensure a quicker launch, things will be coming online in stages. Stage one will include local business and organization listings, events/activities tracking, and possibly local news. I’m not talking months to launch, or even weeks — much less. I can’t name an exact day other than “when it’s done”, but I can assure you that things are very close.

In the mean time, check out the shiny new splash page »

The first step in the Glacier Media redesign is up in the form of a tiny (but information) one-page placeholder. More to come soon…

Here’s to taking advantage of every opportunity presented in 2008 and making the best of every day. To creating your own luck, taking chances, and opening yourself to the unknown.

It appears that the “svn” binary (Subversion client v1.2.3) that comes with OS X 10.5 Leopard doesn’t support https for accessing repositories. Is there a method behind this madness that I’m missing?

In a relatively unexpected move Google has released an API for their internal chart-generation library.

The entire chart is drawn and described using the image tag’s URL. An array of (well styled) chart types are avilable, including: line charts, bar charts, pie charts, venn diagrams, and scatter plots. Their introduction explains the system best:

The Google Chart API returns a PNG-format image in response to a URL. Several types of image can be generated: line, bar, and pie charts for example. For each image type you can specify attributes such as size, colors, and labels.

You can include a Chart API image in a webpage by embedding a URL within an <img> tag. When the webpage is displayed in a browser the Chart API renders the image within the page.

Use of the Google Chart API is subject to a query limit of 50,000 queries per user per day. If you go over this 24-hour limit, the Chart API may stop working for you temporarily. If you continue to exceed this limit, your access to the Chart API may be blocked.

I’m not sure exactly how I could/would use this on any current projects, but it’s definitely something to tuck into ones bag of tricks. (Via Tobias. Google’s official announcement here.)