The other day I finished tweaking m2f (mail two forum) phpBB for Akron Sports Car Club. They have an email list managed by mailman. A large number of the members enjoy the features of the mailing list. But a number of the members prefer a web based forum. So, m2f links the two together. When an email is sent to the list, it automatically gets posted to the forum. Post a message to the forum and it automatically gets sent to the list. Nifty!

I’ve updated the web dev section. It now has the C/C++ code used for MySQL/PostgreSQL to calculate zip code distances. The zip code tool has also been tweaked a bit and you can actually test out the C function versus the SQL approach. Nifty!

I’ve been wondering about the importance of meta tags on this site. How do I do keywords if they’re supposed to be on the site and the site is mostly a blog? Dynamic key word generation to the rescue! Since the blog is template driven, I can actually scope out all the words I’ve used in the stories (and do it dynamically). I then take a count of the words (ignoring the popular English ones) and sort them by the number of times they were found. Then I grab the top 25. To see it in action, do a “view source” on this page. Then look for the keywords metatag. Then go to another blog page (scroll to the bottom to select a page number) and then view its source. The keyword list should be different. Nifty!

I’m thinking of keeping track of my calculus grades online. Haven’t figured out how I’ll organize them though. Hmm. It could be “nifty” though…
Continue reading “Working on nifty web stuff”

I’ve continued playing with my collection of zip data files. I’ve now merged some 1999 data with 2000 data and I think I have a nice mix now. The 2000 data has (in my opinion) more realistic location data. While the 1999 data links up the zip code to the city, county, and state.

The kicker? Now you can look up zips and get population, housing, land area, and water area included in the results.

You can find it all here: http://www.rsbauer.com/zip/
Continue reading “Zip Codes with a Kick”

Four years ago, I registered rsbauer.com and staked out my corner on the web. I would have gotten it MUCH sooner, but back then a domain had costed about $80 for 2 years and a crazy amount of money for monthly hosting.

Back then I could have been found on junior.apk.net/~rsbauer and gozips.uakron.edu/~rsbauer. With rsbauer.com, I’ve been able to play with all sorts of nifty technology as well as providing a means of accessing my home computers.

I just noticed: It was one year ago today I tossed this
“blog” (if you want to call it that) code together and started posting. Its worked out really well.

For those who are wondering, this is what happened last year.
Continue reading “4 Years Ago”