Nick Padley

November 01, 2013

At my day job, I’ve been doing some website building. We’ve launched two new sites, CD2 Learning and CD2 Leadership. These two sites were my first introduction into responsive design and some higher-level web development.

I first started learning Bootstrap. However, I quickly needed the ability to customize the framework for another site that I’m currently building. As a result, I’ve been learning to work with Less.

Continue reading

October 30, 2013

In my last post, I mentioned that I was in the market for a new hosting service. Over the past week or so, I’ve been moving domains to a new virtual private server from Digital Ocean. I’ve been consistently impressed with how well their system performs and the nice tutorials that they feature. It has made things much easier to set up and configure.

One thing that I’ve been wanting to do for a while is take some time to see how a web server is set up and have a place to experiment. The Digital Ocean site makes this extremely easy. I have the option of taking a snapshot of the current server and can use that to activate a new system whenever I want. This way, I can try any sort of crazy idea without affecting my existing production server.

Continue reading

October 22, 2013

The recent news that Media Temple was acquired by GoDaddy means that I need to start putting together a backup plan for my sites. Not that I have a lot of sites or that I have a great need for hosting at the moment, this is more on principle. I ended up moving all my services away from GoDaddy a long time ago due to their over-the-top marketing.

Unfortunately, with the new announcement, I’m questioning again whether my current host will stay as it is or whether things will change with new management. From everything that I have been reading online, it’s time to start thinking about moving hosts.

Continue reading

August 24, 2013

I recently set up a family wiki to keep all our things organized at home. I'm using it to store information so I don't forget things when I'm cleaning up the house. It's been a great resource.

When choosing a wiki, I tried out a whole bunch and eventually whittled the list down to two: Mediawiki and Dokuwiki.

Continue reading

August 15, 2013

In a previous post, I mentioned how exciting it is to play board games these days. I’m not talking about the type of stuff you are probably thinking about. The board games I own and play go above and beyond a standard night of Trivial Pursuit or Scrabble.

What I’m talking about are board games that have some depth to them. These games are a lot of fun to play and can really challenge you to think and strategize. One of the neat things about them is that they are not based upon luck. Instead of relying on dice to dictate what you do in a game, you get the opportunity to put real thought behind your actions.

Continue reading