The Blog of Adam Patten

I run the website thelivefeed.net for a few of my friends who are writers, and it looks like Andy might being having a change of heart on his NCAA football playoff stance tomorrow depending if his Georgia Bulldogs are in the national champion ship game or not. All I know is that this season is crazy and I’m just hoping that Clemson, my school, some how sneaks into a BSC bowl. Lets go UW!

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Currently there are huge wildfires burning where I live, San Diego County, but I am one of the lucky ones and live out of harms way. Right now reports are that an estimated 245,000 acres have burned and 1,200 homes destroyed. Previously small wildfires have popped up since I’ve lived in San Diego, but this one is HUGE! The last big fire was the Cedar Fire back in 2003 and these fires have already matched the damage from that one, without signs of letting up.

Staying Up to Date Online

With everyone in San Diego looking for information on these fires the local news outlets have had their websites slammed with traffic. CBS and KPBS had to offer up stripped down versions of there homepages to handle all the traffic(KPBS has recovered and is back to normal). KPBS has done a great job providing the public with up to date information. They have used Google maps to keep track of burn areas, evacuation areas, evacuation centers, and road closings. They have used twitter to post updates which you can get via text message, instant message or in your rss feed reader. Also, their transmitter on Mt. Miguel is having problems due to the fire but they got help from FM 94.9 and are now broadcasting there. Cheers to KPBS for providing great up to date information for the public during this tough time. Jeers to sdcountyemergency.com and 211sandiego.org for either being down or not providing useful information when they are up.

San Diego, Staying Classy

Reports are that the local support for those who have been displaced from or lost their homes has been tremendous. People and businesses have been dropping off supplies and lending a hand at all the evacuation centers and have definitely helped to easy the burden of the people who are in need. Glad to hear of all the goodwill.
Update: There is a group on flickr for photos of the October 2007 San Diego Wildfires so if you have any photos of your own join the group and submit them or just see the photos that others have posted already.

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So I don’t know what took me so long to sign up with flickr, but I finally did today. At first glance I’m pretty happy. All the controls are intuative and its really easy to figure everthing out so I’m enjoying it. I’ve uploaded one set of photos and set them as private, I’m not sure how I feel about sharing them with everyone just yet, and shared them with a few friends. The only draw back to this is that they have to create an account to view them. It might be nice to send them to a URL that you could set to expire in a certain period of time. I don’t really need high level security on my photos, but I just don’t like them out there for Google and Yahoo! to find and show to everyone. So far flickr gets two thumbs up!

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Recently I have been playing around with MediaWiki, and I must say the whole idea of a wiki is really exciting to me. Obviously Wikis are nothing new, millions of people use Wikipedia everyday including myself. I never contributed to Wikipedia so I was never a part of the community and did not have a full understanding of how powerful a wiki can be. I must say at the early stages of using MediaWiki I’m really excited to be working with a wiki on a regular basis. Stripping away all the bells and whistles of tradition website and delivering quality content for everyone by everyone is really what the web is all about, and wikis do a great job at that. It is exciting to see non web geeks contributing and sharing information that would never make its way out in the open if it weren’t for software like wikis. Part of the whole reason I enjoy working on the web is the community of people who openly share information and are willing to help people they have never met and it’s nice to see non geeks around me entering the community as well. Just wanted to share what is exciting me lately and if you haven’t contributed to a wiki yet I suggest you go out and do it. There are plenty to choose from include the ever popular, Wikipedia.

While doing some hunting around for information on wikis I came across these funny pictures from Flickr that you may enjoy.

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Today I noticed a nice feature of having a URL structure for your site based on the date (adampatten.com/2007/06/08/). When I’m looking for something on a particular site I typically use Google’s site search, its usually better than most built in searches and it I don’t have to hunt around on the site for the search form. Well today I wanted to find something on Matt Mullenweg’s site, but he has been blogging for so long that it returned lots of results and I wanted results from recent posts so I just narrowed my search using his URL structure. So not only does the URL date structure allow users to instantly know when the post was made by the URL, go directly to an archive for the day, month, or year based on the URL, it also allows users easy ways to search your site using external search engines. Too bad I lacked this knowledge when I created the URL structure for this site. But I went ahead and corrected this mistake and updated the URL structure for this site. Since there aren’t any inbound links and virtual no PR I’m not really worried about the SEO/usability issues. So learn from my mistake and use those dates in your URL structure.

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