Sites and Sights

I'm still working a lot implementing new content on a website. It's not bad, but I realize I like making interactive content much more than web pages. One cool thing I stumbled upon was Google Co-op and Statistics. Google Co-op is a service that let's you and up to 99 of your closest friends create a search engine customized to fit your needs. I've been using it to make a search engine that return results only from our affiliated sites. It works pretty well, though if you add content to your site you need to get Google to update their database before it will show up in your engine. One thing I had to do was to make a hack so the results would show up integrated properly in our web page. Since we use PHP to generate or webpages, it was a little trick. The hack was to send the results to a content page and then call that page from a .php page that was identical to our index.php except the default content loaded was the page containing the search results. Kind of tricky but it looks like it works.

On the less technical side, I took a long walk to the beach on the weekend. The walk takes about an hour and a half. Going there is fine but, coming back is harder because it's all uphill. The beach was breathtaking! It looks like something out of a movie. Other people must think that too because when I went there, everyone on the beach had expensive looking cameras. I thought perhaps it was a photography club out on a picture taking excursion. When I got to the beach my legs were tired and since the water is really cold I decided to wade in it. I learned a while ago on a trip that if you are hiking and then wade in really cold water, it stimulates your circulation and makes your aching legs feel much better. It worked pretty well though I think other people on the beach thought I was crazy to get in the water. I walked around the beach for a while taking pictures, then I climbed up the cliff to take some more. I still wasn't wearing shoes when I climbed the cliff and when I got to the top I found out there were a lot of thorny shrubs. There was a path though, so I stuck to it and tried to minimize my stepping on spiny plants. The view from the cliff was spectacular. When I walked down the cliff I realized there was a path to go up it, and I didn't need to climb like I did coming up. There's always a lot of big bits of seaweed on the beach in this area. I remember coming here years ago and enjoying the sound of hitting the hollow tube seaweed against rocks. The beach was fun and I found two seashells which is a feat considering most west coast beaches I go to don't have any seashells.

The walk back was slow and by the time I got home I had eaten most of my king sized bag of trail mix. The next day I was also surprised that I was not as sore as I thought I would be.