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May, 2008

MOPS Cookbook

Submitted by Sarah on Mon, 05/26/2008 - 22:16
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For all of you Bethany MOPS ladies. Here is the long awaited 2007-2008 Bethany MOPS Cookbook. I hope you all enjoy the wonderful recipes found within. It was a pleasure to make and I appreciate all of your input and support as I put together this collection. I have attached a PDF version of the book that is optimized for printing to book form. I also have a word document format that is good for printing individual recipes. If you are interested in getting a copy of the MS Word version contact me via email at sarah@wserickson.com.

Enjoy

MOPS Cookbook

baby on side + fishtank = happy parents

Submitted by Sarah on Thu, 05/15/2008 - 10:07
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finally a sleepy babyWyatt hasn't been getting great sleep so I decided it is my turn to add to the blog. A few months ago Wyatt and I were trying to decide if we should get rid of the fishtank in an effort to create more space and make a second baby room. Turns out, it was fortunate that we didn't.

To preface this explanation: when Peter was born we stayed in the hospital for 5 days. For a good portion of that time he had to stay on a special bed to treat jaundice and was only allowed out for feeding and changes of diapers. As a result by the time we got home from the hospital he had learned to sleep in his own bed for two to three hours at a time. (Notably, the time in the was no cakewalk and involved a lot of fussing and fingersucking).

Because Luke only stayed in the hospital for 23 hours we needed to find a different way to help him become accustomed to his own bed. We got a bassinet from a friend, with hopes of transitioning him from our room to his own over the first week; of course...he had other plans. Unlike Peter, Luke is addicted to sucking and putting things in his mouth. Even when we swaddle him from using his hands, he wakes himself up gumming for the hem of the swaddling blanket. The only way he would sleep for long periods of time was on daddy's chest (my chest is, unfortunately, too tempting). We tried putting Wyatt's worn shirt in the bassinet to give him the comforting scent, but it was without effect. Finally, last night Wyatt took Luke into the office for a little midnight web development while I got some shut-eye between feedings. After 10 minutes, he noticed that Luke had been sleeping soundly and realized that the fishtank had been providing the perfect solution: white noise. Excited from this revelation, Wyatt quickly dragged the bassinet into the office and laid Luke down on his side (also a new thought). Viola!!! He slept for 1 hour without a peep. After the next feeding, I laid him down again in the bassinet on his side and he slept for 2 hours! Success is so sweet.

Thankfully, my mom gave us a white noise maker with timer and volume-adjustment for the crib. Hopefully the transition from fishtank to crib will be much smoother than we had anticipated.

Gallery is updated

Submitted by Wyatt on Mon, 05/12/2008 - 10:24
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I have added a bunch of pictures to our gallery. Follow the link in the next column over and just hunt around a little bit.

Much Needed Rest

Submitted by Wyatt on Mon, 05/12/2008 - 07:03
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Mom and Baby Sleeping.Wow, we are really here. And baby is actually among us. I got this picture this morning as Sarah and Luke were getting a little much need rest. Luke is eating really well and things are going very smoothly. He is a great little dude. He has just been doing all the right things and doesn't seem to have any problems. If all goes well today we should be out of the hospital sometime this afternoon. I think we are all ready to have a good nights in the comfort of our own home. Thank you all for your prayers and we look forward to sharing little Luke with you all.

 

Luke Arrives!!!

Submitted by Wyatt on Sun, 05/11/2008 - 21:02
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Well, He has arrived, about 10 days earlier than expected. Sarah is happy and healthy and everything went very smoothly. Sarah started laboring last night Saturday night around 9:00PM. She kind of slept through the night and and got remarkably good rest. This morning things hadn't calmed down and the contractions got more intense as the day went on. We just Sarah spent most of the day on the bed or couch just trying to relax as best as she could. Around 3 we started walking around our room to see if we could get things moving a little bit. (Sarah was afraid of going to the hospital and only being 5cm dialated). Her contractions got a lot closer together and more intense so we decided it was time to get to the hospital. When Sarah got out of the car she had a really strong contraction and she thought she had to push. About 5 minutes later we were in full force pushing with a whole herd of nurses trying to get things ready for this little bubba to arrive. Exactly 21 minutes after we arrive little Luke (unnamed at the time) laid on momma chest for the first time. I think both of us were a little shocked at how quickly things progressed from normal laboring to baby in hand. But, all said. things went just about as easy as they could have.

So now for the details. Luke was born at 4:31. He wieghed in the same as Peter at 8 lbs 4 oz and is slightly shorter at 20.9 inches (53cm). However, he got the nursing thing down pat right out of the gate. He ate twice in his first hour. In contrast, it took Peter about 4 days to really figure out the whole eating bit.

So, things are good. Peter came to the hospital with Mammy and Poppy. He had a great time checking out his new baby brother. He seems very excited and happy to have the baby here. We are looking forward to having Robin, Sarah's mom, arrive tomorrow.

We hope this news finds you somewhere close to as happy as us.

 

Drupal: Basic Content

Submitted by Wyatt on Thu, 05/01/2008 - 16:36

So, you have this slick Drupal website up and running but all it has is administrative stuff on the frontpage. Not really very interesting. I will be covering how to create basic Page and Story content types here and in a later section will cover Books Polls and some very basic info on Forums and Blogs. Lets dig in.

First, we need to talk a little bit about navigation. In order for people to find the things you write for you website you will need some means of directing people to said content. By default, menus in Drupal are broken into two major types Primary and Secondary. You can link to anything in your site using either menu type but a good rule is to link to your simpler less viewed static content (About, Contact, etc.) with secondary menu items and link to your regularly updated or frequently viewed content using the Primary Menu items. This is definitely not a hard and fast rule but for your basic personal site it is probably safe.

There are two content types enabled in Drupal by default stories and pages. The only real difference between these is how they are presented and managed. As the name would imply a page is a single static web page. They work great for content that does not change frequently. Stories, on the other hand, are like blog entries and are designed to be easily grouped and presented on pages with various different content. By using the Taxonomy module stories can be easily presented with other related information on a single page. You can also choose whether you want to show whole stories or just show a portion of the story (called a teaser) with a link to the rest of the story.

A Basic Story:

A story is the most fundemental unit of content in Drupal and has a lot of flexibility. However, here we will cover just the very basic usage of story; you have a simple website and you want to have a blog-like front page. You can very easily use stories to populate the contents of your front page. To create a new story go to Create Content-> Story. Fill in a title for your post. The title will appear in the space just above you actual story content. For our purposes you can ignore the menu settings area and move directly on to the content. By default, Drupal uses a resticted HTML  (called filtered HTML) markup to allow some stylizing of your content and adding links and pictures. It has some handy examples of how to link or add pictures below the text entry field. I will cover this issue and the easy alternatives including WYSIWYG elsewhere. Fill in your content and share your wisdom with the world. Move on to the publishing options and make sure that "Published" is selected as well as "Promoted to front page". When you click "save" your post will appear at the top of your front page.

A Basic Page:

No website is complete without at least a few different pages to visit, right? To create a new page go to Create Content ->  Page. First you need to give your page a title, About Us. This title will appear in the top of the content area of your site as well as on the top of the browser window in the form "Page Title | Website Title". Below the title field is a Menu Settings area that is by default collapsed. Click on menu settings to quickly create a menu item for this page. Fill in the Menu Link Title field with the words you want to appear in the menu list i.e. About Us. Next select a parent item. For a beginner's purpose choose either primary menu or secondary menu (I will discuss the menu system in more detail in another article). Because the About Us page is pretty static and probably not a central item in the website choose secondary menu. Ignore the weght selector for now, it will eventually control where in the menu this item will reside, it can be easily updated later. Next fill in your content. The last important element is the URL Path Settings field. This will allow you to assign a nice easy to use URL reference. For small sites I strongly advise giving every page node a custom URL path it makes finding information a lot easier and helps search engines find your pages. In our About Us example something like www.example.com/about would be good. A couple rules apply to URL names. Use only lowercase letters URLs are case sensitive. Also do not use spaces, if you want multiple words run them together or use underscores or hypens in place of the spaces. Lastly, review your publishing options, usually pages will not be promoted to the front page or sticky. Click preview to have a look and save to publish it. At any time you can come back and edit your work so no problem if you find an error later. If you want to save the page without publishing uncheck the published box.

Next we will learn how to use very basic taxonomy to organize posts about different topics to different pages in your site.

Drupal:Categorized Stories

Submitted by Wyatt on Thu, 05/01/2008 - 16:31

As I mentioned before a story in Drupal is very much like a blog entry on a blogging site like Blogspot, Blogger or Wordpress. The primary difference is in Drupal a story can effectively be placed anywhere in your site unlike most blog engines that post only to the front page. Stories are the bulk of content in most simple websites. They are easy to change update or remove from various pages in your site and are incredibly flexible. By using the most basic forms of taxonomy you can easily sort various different topics into easily accessible groups. Because this guide is written for setting up a basic website I will walk through the process of setting up a simple taxonomy, or organizational structure, that will allow you to categorize your story posts by preselected keywords.

A Very Basic Taxonomy:

To create a new organization structure you will use the taxonomy tools. Go to Content Management -> Taxonomy. There are two parts to taxonomy, vocabularies andterms. As you may suspect, a vocabulary is a list of terms.  For a basic site a single vocabulary with a short list of terms will give a lot of structure. To create a new vocabulary click "Add Vocabulary" at the top of the page. The new vocabulary needs a name, something simple and descriptive is good. For our example something like Post Group would be good. A description can be added along with help text. In a simple site this is probably not necessary. Next, the types of posts that are going to be categorized by this vocabulary should be selected. In our example this should be stories types only. Last for our purposes you should check the box for required. This will require that every post is put into one of the named categories.

Next you need to create the actual topics you are going to be posting about. For example if you are interested in gardening you might want to post about vegetables, roses, shade gardening, paths and general (as a catch all). Click Add Terms in the vocabulary line you just created. Type a topic into the term field, add a description if you want or if the term is not self describing and click save. It will automatically bring up the dialog for adding another term. Continue this process until all you have input all of your terms. One additional note: just below the description field in the term edit page there is a line of text something like this. "The ID for excluding or including this element is: edit-description - the path is: admin/content/taxonomy/edit/term/1" The important thing to note is the number that is associated with each term it will be very useful later. 

Now Drupal magic takes over. Drupal has now created web url where all posts assigned to a given term will be visible. Each of these terms will effectively have its own blog where you can post. Drupal places these pages at www.example.com/taxonomy/term/(the number from above). Now, assuming you have the Path module enabled you can create a pretty location like www.example.com/roses and assign it to the rose term. Go to Administer-> Site Building-> URL Aliases. Click "Add alias". You will see a field with your website URL followed by a space to type. Type in the rest of path as noted above with the appropriate number for the term. In our example, if the rose term was the first one added it will be term number 1, resulting in taxonomy/term/1 being the rest of the URL. Next you will enter the rest of the pretty address you want to be associate with this page. In our example it would be roses to create a url www.example.com/roses. Click save to make it so. Repeat this process for each term.

Now when you post a new story you will have to select an associated post topic. Your posts will be conviently sorted for easy access and search engines will see the URL and know that it is associated with the appropriate topic not "term 2".