Josh Finnie • com

I have lived in Hartford almost seven months now and every once and a while I get an itching to go out and try public transportation. I see them everywhere, Connecticut’s DOT buses and all their blueness. But their usefulness escapes me. Granted I live in the major city and work in a suburb, but one would think that I would be able to get a bus from relatively close to my apartment complex and be able to have it drop me off at work. (And of course the reason why I think this is because I have a bus stop at the front door of my place of employement.) However, this is not the case. For some reason when Connecticut was determining the bus routes, they felt it was common knowledge that only people north of the city center would want to work in the northern part of the state; being closer to West Hartford than Bloomfield, I need not apply.

This is silly. Why can’t I catch one bus from my neighborhood of Parkville and get to Windsor? Why do I have to take a bus to the city center, and then get on another bus meant for people who live north of the center? To add insult to injury, I have to make my way down to CCSU every once and a while and forget trying to get from Windsor to New Britain in any reasonable timeframe.

I have to say that with the cold weather around us, my car coming to its 60,000 mile checkup, and the plethora of buses I pass on my commute to and from work, I should be able to take said buses! I don’t know what can be done about the current bus routes in Connecticut. I once tried to solve this issue at UConn as an undergraduate, but fell short. I think trying to take on a system as big as the one in Connecticut might be a lost cause.

And there is some good news on the public transportation front. There is a proposal for a light rail line to be installed from New Haven to Springfield (which will include a stop in both Hartford and New Britain. And there is a bus line that is being built especially for the New Britain to Hartford commute. Obviously these two projects haven’t even started yet, so it might be a loss cause on my part, but I am happy to see Connecticut thinking about commuters who want to use the public transportation that is offered. I just wish I could…

So it is official. I have finally moved all my domains away from my old webhosting provider to GoDaddy. I am not sure why I kept all my domains with my webhosting company, but it made a terror when I started this process of switching to WebFaction.

If anyone is starting a web development company or even just has a few websites, I highly recommend keeping your domains and hosting seperate! When you make the switch, like I did, from one hosting company to another it will make the whole process much easier.

As of right now, I still don’t have all my sites up-and-running, but slowly and surely they are coming back online on WebFaction. Good thing I didn’t have any real important websites that this downtime would effect. I am looking at major redesigns of the two sites I care about: 140Plus and GeoHackr.

If and when I switch next time all I have to do is change the DNS and poof!

Oh well…

For the past couple of months I have been working on a Geography based blog called GeoHackr. This blog is currently run off a WordPress blog hosted at Bluehost, and, now that I have found this wonderful blogging program Jekyll, I am wondering if a full-blown Wordpress implementation is actually worth it.

There are a lot of things to consider. Fortunately enough, GeoHackr only has 20+ posts currently writte; if there were more than this I am not sure it would be worth the time it will take to transfer GeoHackr to Jekyll. Other things that I have to take into consideration is the plug-ins that I will be loosing in this transfer. Love it or hate it, WordPress is an amazing blogging platform.

Luckily, there are ways around the WordPress plug-in problem. Most of the plug-ins actually have websites that will give you the code needed to install the plug-in on any platform. And in other areas, there are somethings that you can find that work better than what is given through plug-ins. For example, on this blog; I started using Disqus for comments and I have fallen in love with this new system.

You can see what the blog posts look like by going to the test site: GeoHackr Test

Hello and welcome to Josh Finnie.com. I am very excited that I got Jekyll up and running on my new server at Webfaction. I appologize in advance for the look and feel of this website as I am trying to get the technology down before I work on its looks.