Gary Hesse Personal Web Site

As Web Designer at The Wenatchee World, I’ve been scrambling to redesign the entire website over the past two months. The powers-that-be have determined that Monday (two days from now), we’ll be pulling back the curtains so the public can take a look at where we are so far.
That means that I’m working overtime this weekend to make sure any major problems are addressed before then. Just found one, for example, that breaks the site for users using Internet Explorer - which is about 70% of our users.
Could be a stressful 48 hours. Check how I’m doing come Monday night.

Social historians will be able to look to today as the day the popular social networking site Facebook began its inexorable slide to its doom: I just joined.

No longer the purview of college students, the openness of Facebook to men in their 50s means there’s pretty much nowhere else the site can go, so it’s all downhill from here.

Until the folks at Facebook realize their folly and pull the plug, you can Facebook me here.

I’m home from the 2008  SAXOTECH Users Conference in Tampa, Florida. (SAXOTECH provides the platform we use for both print and online at The Wenatchee World.)

Picked up a few tips for optimizing our sites for Google. Saw a few different vendors for building community/social networking sites that purport to integrate with SAXO. Got to be in on the ground floor of the new user group, which may be the most valuable thing that comes out of this week in Tampa.

And, got really, really sore after competing in their “team-building” exercise: dragon boat races.

Dragon boats are essentially flat-bottom boats seating 20, all wielding oars in sync with one another. We were on the water for about 3 hours, and my arms have been ready to drop off for about 3 days now.

Tampa is a beautiful city; here’s the view from the site of the conference.

At the good ol’ Wenatchee World, we haven’t yet finished the new sites for the Quincy Valley Post-Register and Informe Hispano, but looks like we’re going to jettison the platform we used to build them in favor of Django.

Although it means another steep learning curve looms ahead, it’s probably for the best. Programmer Nathan Florea was able to essentially rebuild the Quincy site in Django over the course of a long weekend, which is a pretty remarkable achievement. Looks to me like we’ll get more flexibility with the new platform.

Check out the North Country Riders site when it’s done; it will be our first Django-built site.