Our current list of BMI Blogs:

World of Rubix
Mikey Dislikes It

Over the past several months I have spent more and more time working on integrating, rather than programming. It is an interesting change in mindset and an acceptance that I don't always get things my way ;-)

In the land of programming I can pretty much make anything work in the manner in which I want it to. For example if I am building a database driven web site for plants then I know I can create whatever system I want to add, change, delete, and display items. I can place the lookup boxes where I want and I can create any needed functionality.

In the land of integration many more things can be completed in shorter times. This is because integration for me is assembling things that are already completed. Sure, there is a learning curve on integrating certain objects but nothing like taking 20 to 40 hours to build a single item from scratch.

I also made a great new graphics designer contact in London, England today. He was able to assist with an ongoing CSS issue that had been bugging me for over 2 weeks. And he did for just $6. ;-)

I have been building web sites since 1995 and I have worked on all of the web sites that BMI has. The first web sites that I designed for BMI were created in the ever powerful notepad editor. That was back in 1996 and I remember how challenging it was to create a visual site in a non-visual editor.

Our newest web site is looking to re-invent our web site with a strong community theme. This new web site I am creating using Joomla as a content management platform. This is a bit different than using Frontpage or Dreamweaver, which I am more familiar with.  The new CMS system is extremely powerful and I have enjoyed the learning curve as I get fully up to speed on all of it's complexities.

BMI has had a web site online since 1995. There have been many versions of our web site over the years.  Some were geared more towards being informational, some geared towards orders, while others were created as a custom portal for customers to use as a starting point for there online web endeavors.

Below is the oldest BMI web site we have in our archive, it was created back in 1997.

I hope to continue contributing to this blog as I update and build our new community driven web site. I welcome comments.

That is all for now. I have to get back to work.. ;-)

Recently I have put a new found emphasis on decluttering (not a word but I like it) my life. This started out as a small cleaning project in the bedroom but has evolved to touch everything I do. 

Clutter is so easy to ignore, so easy to put in another drawer, or better yet put it in the closet and close the closet door. I have a large closet and it holds several feet worth of clutter very nicely. ;-)

In the digital world I have endless seas of folders and sub-folders. I group up my desktop icons and objects  about twice a year and carefully put them all in a folder with a date and move them into an archive.

My new plan involves spending more time organizing things into permanent locations. In my house I am working to get my new office in order and get all my things into one space. It is amazing how much space little piles of stuff add up to.  I am combining the stuff I had at the main BMI office with the stuff at my other office and slowly forming a new and more tidy identity. Trying to shed the chaos.

So far it is working pretty good, things take a little more time to do but I get a nice feeling of accomplishment when completed. In the real world I hope to continue through the drawers in my house and within the computer world I am aiming to conquer the dreaded murky waters of my documents.

Often times I run across 404 errors while surfing the Internet

I have been spending a great deal of time recently parsing and analyzing the web site access logs. This is useful to help figure out where the BMI traffic is going too. It is also helpful in analyzing the error log which tells me what pages are being accessed that are missing.

It is quite amazing the number of 404's that I see in the logs. Our 2nd most popular web page is our 404 page and this is after I have spent two weeks creating 301 redirects to the most popular 404 errors. I create the redirects so that people who were trying to reach a specific destination are still able to get there without going to the 404 error page. An example is redirecting the magazine link from the old location to the new one.

I just had to get this blog post out, it has been churning in my head for over a week ;-)

After months of working with the new content management system, BMI rolls out a new community web site at http://www.bmi.net. A number of new technologies are incorporated into the new web site including streaming video from You Tube, a new integrated support system, the ability to comment on almost any page, and much much more.

The idea was to create a web site that was fresh and changing that offered valuable Internet content that people would want.

Technically this web site brings together a number of domains and other stray addresses into a single location. This will help in more streamline indexing with Google and the other search engines.