From what I can tell, it’s common practice among bloggers to apologize when their entries get less frequent. But an apology seems a little presumptuous to me. Do people really feel dejected or neglected when the blogging gets thin? Doubtful. So, excuse me while I skip the remorse and instead mention a couple things that have been occupying the time that I otherwise would have spent writing here.

In the last few months a few friends have enlisted me to work on their websites. One of those friends is David LaGrand, an attorney, bakery owner, landlord, real estate broker, and karate instructor who also happens to be running for Michigan State Senate. Maybe he was getting bored or something. Anyway, since he is one of my dearest friends and one of the smartest and most ethical people I know, I offered to help him out with his website, davidlagrand.com.

David’s brother Paul (owner of Solidus Design) got the site running on his server with a few pages and a photo gallery, as well as a color scheme and logo. Then I tweaked the design some, added a generic contact form and an events calendar, and wrote a simple script to toggle translated pages between the English and Spanish versions.

It’s been a lot of fun to work on these little side projects, because they allow me to be creative and experiment with new (for me) ideas that I might then be able to apply to projects at my work. For example, I just added a cutesy feature to David’s homepage that lets visitors add their names to the growing list of people who are endorsing David’s candidacy. The cool thing about it is that I was able to apply what I learned in the DOM Scripting book that I’ve been reading.

Oh, I am using all of the willpower I have to refrain from launching into a techie explanation of the JavaScript, PHP, and PostgreSQL that I used to generate the list, hide and show the form, and change the appearance of certain elemetns based on user input, but I know that my readership consists of mostly family and friends who couldn’t care less about such topics, so I will end this entry by encouraging everyone to visit the David LaGrand for Michigan State Senate web site and click the link in the right column that says “Add your name!” to see my work in action while at the same time endorsing David, because he deserves your support.