Well I am happy to say that I have gotten over all that.  I have gotten back into the swing of things and I have gotten a lot of things done in the past couple of weeks.

I am in the middle of a complete code rewrite for Podcasting Paradise.  I have come to appreciate the virtues of MVC frameworks and I decided that in order for that website to move forward, I needed to start over.  I pushed over a lot of the core changes to the code this weekend so that Google can process all of the different URLs (luckily I was able to implement a lot of 301’s and canonical URL’s so that it hopefully will not lose its page rank).  There is still a lot of work that needs to be done but now that I have a good base, I can implement the new features much faster than before.

Another thing I have started getting to know is Magento.  Professionally, my job has shifted to working with that platform and seeing what I can do with it.  Personally, I am fascinated with it and how much functionality Varien is giving away for free (and how much more they offer for around $10,000).  I am amazed by how different their code is than anything else I have dealt with before.  At this point I can say that I am familiar with using their code, however I am not quite comfortable with extending their code yet.  Within the next few weeks however, I am confident that I will be able to accomplish all of that.  One thing I am pretty sure about is that being familiar with Magento will probably be a very important part of my skill set and I am glad to be able to do that while I am being paid to do so.

One thing I was frustrated about with Magento was the apparent lack of documentation.  Having to dig through Google for what I thought would be basic answers was frustrating.  I also noticed that there was not one real good community that could support one another.  Magento Connect is alright, but I felt that it was not very accessible.  You could not search the website very well to figure out what you were doing.

So taking that knowledge with me I decided to create my own community.  The Magento Users Group.  There I will be hosting a phpBB forum as well as what I am calling the Magento Cookbook.  Like other tech cookbooks out there, it operates based on a very simple question and answer format.  Something I think will be incredibly helpful to other people.  Right now the only things inside of there are the questions I had and the answers I have found.

Then there are my other blogs, Learn jQuery Now and Learn PHP Now.  Both of which I am going to work on posting regularly again.  However, instead of 5 days a week, I will be be posting once a week.

On the less techie side of things, I am going to be going to Mexico in a couple of weeks.  I am very excited to get away from things for a week so I can really relax.  I always seem to do pretty well when I am forced to be away from my email for about a week at a time.  It’s actually pretty refreshing.

For now development has stopped in Podcasting Paradise. I sorta hit a wall on where I want to take it and I do not have the funds or resources to get it to the place I want at the moment. I am starting up another project that will hopefully turn out really cool. Not quite ready to show my hand on this quite yet, but it should be really cool.

Professionally, work is insane. We are working as hard as we can to get things done on time and I think that if we keep up the pace we will be able to get caught up. That is if we survive the time until we get there. Right now I am concentrating on the eBay integration for one of our clients. I have been on this for a few weeks and today we really made a breakthrough. Needless to say we have an incredibly brilliant strategy for working with eBay. Maybe after the eBay work is done for work I will work on my own eBay library in PHP as working with their API is very easy to do (even though the API is so intimidating).

Now that we have the work and personal project stuff out of the way, time to talk about new things in my personal life.

Shadow, our cat has decided he has a new favorite toy. It is not the $40 in toys we have bought him. No, it is Q-Tips. He LOVES them. He sits and plays with them forever. It got so bad that he started knocking over the trash cans in the bathroom just to get to them. Since it is really sick that he plays with my ear wax we started giving him clean Q-Tips. I think he was hiding them and waiting for him to have a ton of them because lately he is leaving 15-20 Q-Tips on our bathroom floor. At least he isn’t eating my earwax though.

More has happened, but I have lost motivation for now.

I took this passion and decided to create a podcast directory.  I wanted it to be more than just a regular directory though.  I wanted there to be a community aspect to the site.  So Podcasting Paradise was born.

From where I last left off, I was really not happy with the site.  Not because of I thought the site was bad, but I lacked the design skills necessary to really make a site that was functional and pleasing to the eye.

So last night I decided I was going to jump right back into this site and improve the entire site.  I am adding a nice menu system so that navigation on the site is much improved.  I also am going to be redoing the entire layout of the site so that it has a more functional and visually appealing.

The raw code of the site is also going to be getting a major overhaul.  I made a lot of poor design decisions with the site and those issues just need to be rectified.  Specifically I made the entire site in a top down code design with no objects at all.  The code is simply a mess.  So that is on the list as well.

Overall it is a pretty major overhaul to the site and I think the improvements will greatly enhance the success of the site.  What I really need is a way to get information about every podcast on the internet.  That is a whole other beast all together.

http://feeds2.feedburner.com/JoshPennington

I would really appreciate it! The more people I can track the better I feel. The better I feel the more I post. So really, it benefits you, if you think about it.

I have always heard that you should blog about what you know.  About what you are thinking, etc etc etc.  Well I do know how to program and I feel that I have a wealth of knowledge that I could share with the world, so I figured I would start posting about certain programming or computer things.  So I wrote a couple posts about that.

Then I realized I could go out and learn how to do something and then blog about that.  That turned out to be even better!  I got to expand my skill set a little as well as talk about it with the world.  What could be better?

Now I will admit that I was not an A student when it came to writing and there are parts on this blog where it shows.  I have learned that I need to try and put a little more thought into what I write so it does not appear like a mess of words on the screen.  That does nobody any good.

Also, I have notice that I have basically no readers.  So I am talking to myself for now.  I hope that will change.  I will keep checking my Analytics to see.  If you are a reader shoot me a comment so I know I am not alone out here.

In the spirit of continuing my attempt to become a more active internet citizen, I am trying to be better about using Twitter.  It is hard to remember to do right now, but the iPhone is making it so much easier.  That little device is so awesome!

Life is good right now.  Work is work, but it is a check.  Someday we will be caught up.  That will be a glorious day indeed.  When I can go into work and know that I have less than a million things to do.   Jessica has a wedding expo tomorrow that she is really looking forward to.  She has been working so hard on it for the last month so I hope she gets lots of people to sign up wedding planning or just to talk to her.  She definatly will have the best looking booth there.

That is all for now.

I got an iPhone.  It is so much more cool than I thought it would be.  You really can do just about anything with it (provided that it is jail broken).  There is a lot of exciting things that you can do with it that I had no idea.  The fact that it runs a Unix like OS opens up a lot of possibilites.  The only drawback is the keyboard, but I am quickly getting over that.

Work is insane.  I am doing an integration that is a lot harder than any of us originally anticipated.  We are just about through it but it has been a long two weeks for this one.  Plus since I have to start doing an eBay integration soon, I definatly have a full plate in front of me.

Jessica’s business is doing very well.  Well enough that she left Whirlpool to do it full time.  Which is nice for her since it snows a ton around here and she gets to stay in the nice warm house most days.  Right now she is busy planning her booth in a local wedding expo.  Based on the amount of time she is putting into the booth, it should be the nicest looking on there.

Currently I am working on learning Ruby on Rails.  It is an excellent language for extremly fast development.  Right now I am working on porting one of my current website over to Rails.  Podcasting Paradise should hopefully be complete in the coming weeks, but like most things, delays happen.

As you can see my blog looks different.  I wanted to give it a nice new look so that I am motivated to actually blog.  I am going to try and blog more often.