Despite feeling adequately prepared for the trip itself, the pace of things needing to get done beforehand has quickened of late. This is my last week of work, so naturally there is a rush to polish off every to do list item. I am moving this weekend, so naturally things need to be sold, organized, and/or boxed up. The start date for the Pacific Crest Trail adventure is less than two weeks away, so naturally my training hikes have increased in distance and time. Also, my EMT recertification just finished up last week and taxes got sent off. So. Busy.

But, we carry on. While I am on the subject of things getting done, by vocal demand there are now comments on the blog. I am using the all new and cutting edge Craft CMS, but there is no native comment plugin yet. So, I went with a hosted solution called Disqus, which allows registering through Facebook, Twitter, and Google. I am not a huge fan of anonymous comments or spam and this allows me to do a certain level of moderation, so hopefully it will be agreeable to the commenters-that-may-be.

There is also an RSS feed link in the upper right corner. There is some auto-discover magic in the HTML, but it seems for some people that was not enough. They wanted the link to be explicit. Obviously I have incredibly strong opinions on this as I am using emphasis everywhere. Not really. This textarea just happens to have a What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG) editor natively and I am easily amused. Moving on...

I built the design of this blog myself and based the CSS off the work of someone far more clever than I. It should collapse down nicely for mobile browsers while still looking reasonably shiny for everyone else. As I am a programmer by trade and not a clever HTML5/CSS3 loving designer, there might be a few hiccups. This should but add to the charm of the blog. Revel in the charm.

Finally, thanks to my most excellent friends at EngineHosting, I have a really spiffy and fast server for the site. Virtual Server Cluster, Ubuntu 10.04.4 LTS, SSH, SSD local storage, and something described as "VMware replication services". Sounds really impressive, no? No, no, don't glaze over, I actually know what all that means and how to use it! Why it all began back in the winter of 2003 when I was just teaching myself PHP...

...ok, you don't care about the history of how I gained my technical knowledge or how it all works. The takeaway: Great server, solid CMS, responsive design, and a few cool features. We will now return you to your regularly scheduled Pacific Crest Trail entries.