Paul Mayne blogs here since 2003.

We recently finished our basement and since we have more space, I set up one of my older computers for my two boys to play on. Up until now they would use Jana’s Macbook. They absolutely love it. Jackson has always been enamored by computers and the Internet but now Eli is really getting the hang of things. I’m amazed by how quickly they pick up things and instinctively learn how to use different navigation systems without even being able to read.

Currently they play on three websites: Playhouse Disney, PBS Kids, and Starfall.com.

We’ve purchased a few CD-rom based educational games which had decent reviews on Amazon, but I found them to be worthless compared to the current free stuff you can find online, like Starfall. It seems like there could be a nice market for more kid based educational and entertainment web sites, specifically for kids 2-5 years old.

I see that Playhouse Disney has a subscription based site for even more educational games called “Preschool Time Online“. It’s $49.95 annually, but has a free 7-day trial, I need to check out.

Does anyone have any other sites they recommend for kids, specifically under the age of 6?

— January 25th, 2009

The Good:

• Finished the basement. FTW!
• Made new friends and became reaquanted with old friends (thanks Facebook).
• Attended some Killer shows (Wilco, Fleet Foxes, Bishop Allen, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Vampire Weekend, Ray Lamontagne, Great Lake Swimmers, Andrew Bird… to name a few)
• Continued to be amazed and entertained by my two, sweet little boys.
• Voted for and watched Barack Obama become President.
• Managed to love my wifey even more.

The Bad:

• Lost my Grandpa, whom I adored.
• Missing my Dad, obviously.

Overall a very great year for me and my family. I’m excited for 2009 and very thankful for the many blessings and friendships I enjoy.

Paul

— December 31st, 2008

*geek alert*

I spent a long time trying to figure out this solution, so I wanted to share it here to possibly help someone else. If you are looking to redirect an existing path on your site, like:

www.mysite.com/old/folders/content
to something like:
www.mysite.com/new/directory/content

Add this (and tweek to your needs) to your .htaccess file on the root of your website.

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^old/folders(.*)$ http://www.mysite.com/new/directory$1 [L,R=301]

— December 30th, 2008

I used to create Christmas mixes and burn CD’s for my family and friends. Consider yourself lucky if you are the proud owner of the famous “Pete’s Christmas Mix 2002″. It’s been a while since I put one together, I mean who listens to CD’s anyway?

This year I’m posting my mix on my site for your streaming enjoyment. Bonus: I threw in my favorite line from my favorite Christmas movie, Christmas Vacation.

http://www.paulmayne.org/music/christmas2008/

— December 18th, 2008

I’ve had a some requests for the code that I use to populate my sidebar with my Twitter status in HTML. Twitter’s default badge offerings are mostly worthless and at this point very ugly. I basically stripped out some JavaScript to parse and display your Twitter JSON file using JavaScript.

If you view source on this page (twitter.html), you can copy and paste the needed parts into your own page.

1. CSS Style (could be in an external CSS file or in the html head), customize to your liking.
2. Two JavaScript functions (in the html head).
3. HTML code – using span id’s to place the parsed data into.
4. JavaScript command to initiate the functions – I recommend putting this as the last thing on your page before the </body> tag. Sometimes it may take a few seconds to get the data back from Twitter and you don’t want your page waiting on Twitter to finish loading.

Now you need to customize it for your own Twitter account:

1. Change the “via Twitter” link to point to your Twitter page.
2. Change the “51373.json” in the last javaScript call to your Twitter ID. To find your Twitter ID, clicking on the RSS link on your Twitter page and look at the number in the URL.

Use and customize as you wish, Enjoy.

UPDATE:

Thanks to Tuamo for pointing out a solution to a JavaScript bug in Internet Explorer. I have updated the sample code linked above. Cheers!

— December 3rd, 2008