kentcowgill.org/blog

So it was a little troublesome, but I think it was worth it.

If you look carefully, you'll see (at this point) a single new post from April of 2001 in the archive section, or if you click on "Older Articles" enough times to go back that far.

Just some background for these posts, since I'll be editing them a bit to 1) format them using Text::Textile) syntax, as well as 2) capitalizing words properly⁸. I had just signed up to ride in the 2001 Canada to US AIDS Vaccine ride - 415 miles in 5 days, and was blogging about my training and fundraising. Back then...

1. My wife Lisa was only my girlfriend.
2. My road bike (Univega) was brand new.
3. I was about to be laid off from a startup internet company.
4. Most of the links I've linked to were still active.
5. I had more of my pictures on the site.

In my editing, I will clean up broken links. I'll also try to re-upload all my old pictures to my new photos directory and link to them once I do that. And lastly, I'll remove most of the references to my fundraising activities and pleas for donations, since the ride has been over for almost 6 years. In case you're interested, I raised $7,080 in donations for the cause. I only rode about 245 miles due to overuse injury (RSI) to my achilles tendons. (Note the plural).

Hope you enjoy a little blast from the past. I certainly enjoy the memories.

⁸ I used to refuse to capitalize letters. Partly due to laziness, partly due to an extreme dislike of CamelCased variables, partly due to the fact that humans tend to be able to more easily visually distinguish between different lowercase letters than capital letters (or so I think I read somewhere). Since then, I've decided to drop the convention. I'm not 100% certain why - maybe due to the rest of the world and their treatment of the capitalization of letters :)

Ok, so most of my historical (2006-2007) posts have reasonable dates and times assigned to them, but they're completely fabricated at this point.

Is that a big deal?

I don't think so. It's just a blog.

Would I approach Real Data^™ with such a blasé attitude? Not on your life.

I don't really have anything to say, but it's easier to post a test post than to read the docs for the database regarding inserting dates :)

Walking down memory lane, I found a few older posts from a different site of mine.

I figured I'd copy those old entries in this blog, just to have everything in one place. And also to help flesh out my "archives" section a little more.

Turns out I actually used a different data type to store dates.

Ugh.

So I figure, "I'll just change the column type, surely my database is smart enough to figure these things out".

It wasn't.

Needless to say, I'll be adjusting the dates of the existing posts to try to make them somewhat match what they used to look like.

Ever wonder what my earlier posts were?

Ever wish you could read more than just the last 10 entries?

Wonder and wish no more, there are now links at the bottom of each page for reading older articles.

Though I should really fix it so it doesn't use the old school ?start=blah style of navigation. But I didn't feel like reading the Catalyst documentation just right now.