Stephen Mizell

Have you seen the movie "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory?" I have at least a million times. In the movie, Willy Wonka had shut down his factory due to corruption within the ranks (a prevalent issue in our times as well). People walked by the factory for years and years waiting for its return, until one day, the lights on the smokestack came alive, signifying a rebirth of the factory. The world went nuts because of the reopening and the fact that Wonka was letting five people into the factory who found golden tickets in their Wonka Bars (candy bars, not pubs). It's a delightful story if you get a chance.

This post feels like the lights on the smokestack turning on. I'm sure there have been people sitting on my site, hitting refresh over and over, looking for a new post and coming up wanting. I apologize to you, and regret to inform you there are no golden tickets, only a new post. To those who have never seen "Willy Wonka and Chocolate Factory," disregard these first two paragraphs.

A good deal of things have changed since the last time I wrote here, one change being the cosmetics of this site. To keep the streak alive of updating the look of the site more times than the content, I scrapped the previous version and started from scratch using Blueprint CSS. It turned out to be a great choice and made building a grid layout easy and fun! If you are in RSS land, head on over and look at the simpleness.

There have also been quite a few other changes outside the world of binary. On the intellectual side of things, I have tried to make myself a reader. I have never been a reader, so this was a big step. I did so by making myself sit down for a certain amount of time each day and read. When I began, I would read 20 pages and not be able to tell you one word from it. As time progressed, I began to be more focused while reading and able to read larger sections of books and actually tell you what it was about. I've probably ready 10 or so books in the past few months, which is probably more I had read (for leisure) in my entire life. Reading and learning are gifts from God, and I really took them for granted.

In the physical arena, I've been working out five days a week. Each day I hit the weights, run, and swim. It is amazing how much it helps me throughout the day and keeps my neck from feeling broke from staring at a monitor for eight hours straight. I've gotten to where I can work out on the bench with over 175lbs and swim over a half mile without stopping. I neglected my body for my entire college career and I've decided it's time to try and change that.

So that's the skinny. See you in another three months.

Things are really different around here now, let me tell you. If you're in the land of RSS readers right now, you might not notice a difference, but if you come on over, you'll see there is a completely new website. I started from scratch once again and built an entire website with my own two hands. When smizell.com first came into existence, it was a train wreck of badly coded Ruby on Rails apps. I then decided to be really cool and make my own framework in PHP, which turned out to be a mess in itself. I finally went back to Ruby on Rails and actually built a CMS so I didn't have to write SQL queries to make a post. That went out the window and in came SimpleLog, which I highly recommend to anyone wanting a great application to run your site. I liked SimpleLog, but it wasn't my own, it was someone else's and that just didn't feel right.

That brings us to this day and this update. The update came a little early because there are many things on the site that aren't finished (e.g. archives and markup). I went with something a little different this time and built this site with Django instead of the normal Ruby on Rails or PHP. It was fun, easy, and it should allow me to add some more apps very quickly in the future (hint hint Kyser if you're reading this).

Since I started my new job at MSU, I've been developing strictly in Django, and I've gotten very comfortable coding it. The code is intuitive, the admin pages are pristine, and the speed is quite impressive. I built this entire website in my free time in a little over a week with probably less than 300 lines of code. That includes features like RSS (which takes about 7 lines per feed), spam blocking for comments using Akismet, and all-out tagging. It really makes for some rapid development.

That's it for now. I'll try to do a better writeup on Django when I have a little free time and my mind isn't like mush.

As a side note, I'm probably going to make the code available in the future, but if you'd like to poke around at it before then, send me an email.

So it's been a long time since I've posted on here. I know that, and I also know you should never start sentences with the word "so". The lack of posting can really be attributed to a lot of things. First off, I've been the busiest I've ever been in my entire life. Secondly, posting on this website in the past was always a hastle because of the way I had it set up. I had hand built everything on this website and had a pretty crummy way of making posts. On the outside, everything was fine, but on the inside this website was having serious issues.

So what's different? Well, with this website, I completely removed everything I had previously done and installed SimpleLog. SimpleLog was exactly what I wanted and very "simple" to install and use. Everything about it I love, and SimpleLog and I are very happy together, thanks for asking.

So what's going on in my life? Well, since I wrote my last post about getting a new job, I got another new job. I now work for Murray State University doing web development for the KATE department and the Murray State University College of Education. After leaving my previous job, my previous employer decided to kept me around to build them a cool little web application to improve their legal department and make them super efficient. I've built it and am still building, using Django. So that means I have two full time jobs, which also means I'm very tired.

Could there be any more? Yes there can. I'm also taking two courses at MSU in hopes of getting an MBA in the next couple of years. Two jobs, two classes, too much. And I know what you are thinking about it all, "Too bad." Thanks.

Dear CIS425 Class,

It has been brought to my attention that I'm been selected by my dear friend Adam Hedges as the Personal Web Model for his presentation in CIS 425, which is Programming for E-Commerce. I know there were other awards given such as Brochure, E-Commerce, and Informative, but this is a surprise. I've never thought of myself as the model type, but as you can see from my snapshot, I have quite the stunning appearance. If there are any ladies in the room watching this presentation, I apologize for taking your breath away.

I don't want to distract you any more, but thank you Adam for this prestigious award as the Personal Web Model. I graciously accept and will live up to its name in the following year.

Thanks,
Stephen Mizell

I was about two clicks away from scrapping this whole website and going up with a prebuilt package called Typo. I was doing all of my editing in phpMyAdmin before and hating every minute of it, and it made me never want to post. I had Typo set up and everything, and even had the configuration file ready for it to go live on the site here, but something inside stopped me. I can't figure out if it was the fact that I would be giving up on something I believe in so much or the spicy chicken sandwich from Wendy's, but I couldn't do. Too make a long story short, about 8 hours and 15 commits to subversion later, things were the way I wanted them to be with a full, integrated CMS (I didn't work on it for 8 hours, that would be mad, it was just the time span).

Now that we have that out of the way, on to what's new. I've added tagging into this thing, so now I can keep a little better track of the topics of posts. I'm going to have to go back and add tags for posts of the past, but that should take every bit of five minutes. I've also added a cool tool called Lightbox, which you can test out by clicking here and crossing your fingers. Like I said before, I've added a full CMS, where I can manage everything on this site rather than using yucky phpMyAdmin. Lastly, I added a nice little effect to the "cool" link at the top of the page.

The end.

There comes in a time in the development process when you just have to throw your hands up and launch the stinking project, so that's what I did. What you are staring at is Version 2 (sorta) of Smizell.com with a brand new underbelly and a monotonous, single-column layout for all the minimalist folks (which will hopefully change one day very soon). Ruby on Rails powers this ship and MySQL stores all of the content. Let the games begin.

Ok, here are some funny things some friends have done. These will be in bulleted-list format just in case you were wondering.

• Rotten Eggs + Golf Club = Egg Golf. I'll be sure to put it on a page here for historical reasons.
• My roommate came up with the idea to sell a song by yours truly on Ebay. It was his idea, and I said I would honor it if someone made the purchase. I can't even begin to guess what is going to come from this.

Also, I added a link to my new del.icio.us RSS feed. I started from scratch for reasons unknown, but I plan on using it soon (like, tomorrow).

It's been some time since I've touched this website, so I thought I better blow the dust off the thing and see if she still works. The reason it's been quiet is because I'm working on a new backend and frontend for this baby. I'm pretty sure I'll be adding a nice MIDI song for background music to calm down future guests.

Randmon facts coming at ya.

• I'm turning 23 next Monday. I wear an XL in shirts and like the color blue if you want to give me gifts.
• I'm going to Las Vegas next week. I lost $1.25 last time I went and don't plan on losing any more this time.
• I am now a Microsoft Certified Desktop Support Technician (MCDST). I had to take two Microsoft tests to get it. To keep the tradition alive, my roommate and I didn't study until the day of the tests (I skimmed the book for a bit the night before, but he didn't study).
• A friend from work is filming me hitting eggs with a golf club tomorrow. I'll add a link here if it's good.
• I thought this post on hacking Windows Pinball was awesome. I have a Mac though.

So here I am, back on the internets in full force. I've hung out on the chat clients for years now, but it's really time I settled down with a place to call my own and maintain a website. I've paid for web space since late 2004 and this is the first time I'm going to be putting it to good use... yeah, I've tried before, but this time it's an all-out effort.

On with the technology stuff. Here's some stuff you either don't know or don't want to know.

• This site is built on the ruby on rails framework, which I really enjoy.
• The weblog software for this site is handmade and homegrown just for the fun of it.
• All of my data is stored in a Mysql database, and that's all I can tell you about that one.
• All of the pages on this site are served to you via a Lighttpd server that is running through Apache. Lighttpd is what makes this site so snappy fast.
• Finally, this site is hosted by Textdrive, who are some cool cats that run a great business. I am provided with everything I could ask for, and for that I thank them.

So that's it.

Stevo out.