I suppose it has been a long time since I have done anything with this website.  I sorta had to take a break from all of the extra curricular activities I had going on.  I have found that I push myself too hard on my non work time and I just need to take a break from it all.

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.