avanderzwan

Grand Rapids had Art Prize this week and so I ran around town with my camera. There was really low light with the night shots. I think the shutter was open for a full second for most of the portraits.

(click on the photos to view larger)

Self Portrait

The Station

David Schultz

Jason Murray

Central Station

Joel Stob

Touring around Grand Rapids and shooting with a 35mm camera brings me back to my days as a college student. Here are some of the black and white shots that I took this past weekend. I love photography and will be shooting a lot more in the near future, I am certain.

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The 6th Street Bridge

The 6th Street Bridge Webs

The 6th Street Bridge Side

Kids Playing with Art

Highway (131 & 196)

This is a blog post about Movable Type development. If you are uninterested in Movable Type development, then you don’t need to read this. I have been working on building a pretty substantial website with Movable Type for the last couple of months and have learned a few things along the way. This is one of those things that I learned that isn’t really documented anywhere. I thought I would try.

The website that I am building allows for users to signup/create usernames/login/post entries/etc. The goal was to require a user, when signing up, to add what company they worked for. This is not one of the standard fields that come with Movable Type’s sign up form (we purchased the Community Solution). What is baked in to Movable Type is the ability to create custom fields on the user object. This is good. It means that we can add as many fields as we want, and associate the data to a specific user, (i.e. Company, Job Title, Birthday, etc.). MT has some documentation on allowing a user to update this custom information on their profile page (http://www.movabletype.org/documentation/community/user-profiles.html). Here is the code they suggest:

<mt:loop name="field_loop">
<mt:if name="__first__">
<input type="hidden" name="customfield_beacon" value="1" id="customfield_beacon" />
</mt:if>

<mtapp:setting
id="$field_id"
label="$name"
hint="$description"
shown="$show_field"
show_hint="$show_hint"
required="$required">
<mt:var name="field_html">
</mtapp:setting>

</mt:loop><br />

This is great if you want a user to be able to enter all of the created custom field data at once because it just loops through all of your custom fields and creates input fields for each of them. We had about 10 custom fields on the user object and only wanted the person signing up to enter the ‘Company’ information on signup (as to not make them feel overwhelmed with so much information to input).

How I accomplished only writing one field is to throw an MT if statement in there based on what the $field_id is. In other words what your custom field’s basename is preceded by “customfield_”.

<mt:if name="field_id" eq="customfield_company">
</mt:if>

With “company” my field’s basename, that made the field_id I was looking for, customfield_company.

My final code to display only the company custom field on the user signup form (with MT4.2):

<mt:loop name="field_loop">
<mt:if name="__first__">
<input type="hidden" name="customfield_beacon" value="1" id="customfield_beacon" />
</mt:if>

<mt:if name="field_id" eq="customfield_company">
<mtapp:setting
id="$field_id"
label="$name"
hint="$description"
shown="$show_field"
show_hint="$show_hint"
required="$required">
<mt:var name="field_html">
</mtapp:setting>
</mt:if>

</mt:loop><br />

Note: This is only possible on the user registration page after the release of MovableType 4.2. Before that, I think this could only be done on the profile page.

I will update this if I learn any discrepancies in what I said. If you find any, please let me know.

I have always been looking for a WordPress gallery plugin that I can easily throw together and manage some images, galleries and albums on this blog. Well I found the perfect tool. It is called NEXTGen, and for anyone who is as geeky as me, it is sweet and lives here.

I uploaded some pictures from the Winter Wonderland trip that I took this past winter. We took a weekend and went up past Northport, to the tip of the pinky of Michigan. We stayed in a wonderful cabin called “Whispering Pines”. It was a small cabin that had 3 rooms (one of them a loft) a really cozy living room with a wood burning fireplace, and a hot tub on the back porch. It was located in the middle of a pine forest right outside of Leelanau State Park.

I should have uploaded these a while ago but I didn’t. I will upload some more pictures of other events soon. You can get there by clicking on the ‘Gallery’ link under ‘Pages’ in the navigation to the right. I will give a link in this post as well for anyone who gets these in their emails or RSS feeds.

Aaron’s New Gallery