Look!

I made a web site.

Yes indeed, with the help of the peerless Tim Malabuyo, I have brought online The King’s Business, Biola’s old monthly periodical.

I really like the feeling of working with a designer. I’m a programmer, and I’ve really only done a couple sites that I feel good about the design. So having a designer working with me lets me focus on the fun stuff. Plus, he’s really good. (Of course, he also thinks that he gets to focus on the fun stuff and leave the hard stuff to me. Ha. I’m not the one that has to deal with IE bugs!)

The other different thing about this project is that I hardly spent any time on the coding. (136 LOC, for what it’s worth.) The difficult thing was dealing with the gigabytes of image files that had to be converted and organized. I wrote some Ruby scripts to handle the conversion (in retrospect, Bash would have been more appropriate, but it was a good learning experience.) The image conversion was a huge task; the first time I ran it, it took 9 hours to complete. I think the CPU of my desktop running that program raised the temperature in the apartment noticeably that day.

Anyway, feel free to take a look and tell me what you think. There’s some good stuff in there. Biola had some pretty sharp people in those early “what can we do to take the world for Christ” days, back before it became “a safe place to send your kids.” One of my favorite parts is the ads for the Bible Institute: “Tuition Free!”