Awhile back I uploaded a family tree to Geni.com.  At some point in grade school I created an electronic version of my family tree by copying a paper copy along with some help of my parents.  The file that I created is eventually what I uploaded to Geni.com, which is partially visible here.  The cool thing is that this site can automatically find matches between your tree and other trees, and if both parties approve the trees can be merged.  Over the weekend I was constantly merging trees and have emailed back and forth with a couple of distant relatives.  It’s especially cool to find out that you have things in common with some of these people, like occupations and interests.  I even found out that the Naked Cowboy is a distant relative, my third cousin once removed.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but I had one of those moments where my online life mixed into my real-world life. I mentioned livingcraigslist.com a few weeks ago, and since then I have continued to follow the website. I later learned that the author had moved to the Denver area and figured that he was living somewhere in the downtown area of town, just like yours truly. On Saturday night, a group of us decided to head to an old favorite bar of ours, Ogden Street South.

It was karaoke night at the bar, and not long after entering the bar we were entertained by a rather good performance of “That Thing You Do.”  It wasn’t until I read livingcraigslist.com the other day, that I realized the singer was none other than the author of the site.  I wish I would have realized it at the time, as I’d love to chat with him about his experiences thus far.  Perhaps our paths will cross again.  A video of his performance can be viewed on his site.  Unfortunately, there is no video of my show closing performance of George Michael’s “Faith.”

If you’ve read my blog for years, you may recall a friend’s photo project called A Minute In The Life: The Simultaneous Photography Project, which I mentioned a bunch of times.  He later turned it into a book that I still have on our coffee table.  Well he is organizing the project again, this time with each person taking two photos at 2pm eastern on March 20, 2010.  I’m not sure what I’ll be doing on that day, but it may be another day on the slopes, just like the last time.  I urge anyone who reads this to visit his website and to take part in this fun project.

I stumbled upon livingcraigslist.com yesterday and have been reading through the entries over the last day.  It’s a really interesting idea and I thought I should spread the word even though I haven’t finished reading through it myself.  Here is a description of the site from the author:

Jason Paul, a recent graduate from American University attempted, like many from the 2009 class, to secure a job. After applying for over 180 journalism jobs in over 35 states, Jason decided to pursue a blog/book idea of his own.

Right now, unless he is sleeping, Jason is doing something related to Craigslist.org. For those of you who do not know what Craigslist is, it is basically a classifieds page from the newspaper. The site is in 570 cities in 50 countries and allows users to post ads, with the exception of a few categories, for free.

Essentially, Jason is living off Craigslist.

This means food, housing, jobs, entertainment, friends and anything else you can possibly imagine.

So far he has traveled from Washington, D.C. to San Francisco, found housing, found a job and his beginning to make friends. And you guessed it, he has done all of this using Craigslist.

So why is he doing this. Firstly, necessity breeds innovation, and he needed a job. But for the most part, Jason wanted to see if it was possible.

He is living in three cities, for three months each, attempting to prove that anyone, anywhere can do this.

With all the hustle and bustle of the holidays, I forgot to mention yet another website that I am currently putting the finishing touches on. Greater Cincinnati Housing Evaluation Service’s website is now live at www.gchomeinspector.com. This is the website that I created a flash graphic for a couple of months ago.  The layout and content is pretty much finished, though I may try to get some additional images added. Recently I’ve just been spending time getting the sitemap submitted to Google, along with Analytics setup, and other things to make sure that the site ends up getting some traffic from search engines.  I’m pretty much caught up on web projects, so feel free to spread my name around to anyone looking.

I think I’m many years behind in saying this, but I’ve created my first flash animation.  I’ve had Adobe ImageReady installed on my computer for a while, since it is installed with Photoshop, but I’ve never really used it.  I’ll be honest and admit that I’m not that big of a fan of flash-based websites, especially with the increased use of mobile browsers and their lack of flash support, but I feel that it can be useful in moderation on websites.  Anyway, to create a simple flash animation, I created individual slides in Photoshop and then transferred them into ImageReady and used the built-in Tween command to automatically transition between slides.  The result is pretty smooth, and I was able to save the animation directly into flash from inside of ImageReady.

Today I official launched a website for my father-in-law’s business, Queen City Financial Advisors. I’ve been working hard on the site for the past few months and I think the results turned out great! Kim’s uncle, Mike, also helped with some of the logo design and site layout. It was fun to work with such a creative mind. We still have a few more pages to add, but the bulk of the content is all there. I’ve been busy getting the domain names pointing over to my server, and also getting the website submitted to Google for indexing. Let me know what you think…

I’ve discovered a new website that I’m in love with. I probably shouldn’t get this excited over ordering household essentials, but the experience was awesome. I hate buying this stuff from the grocery as I always feel like I’m getting ripped off. And I don’t like making a special trip to Walgreens either. Enter Alice.com, a new website that allows you to order these essential goods at manufacturers’ prices. And to top it all off, shipping is included for free!

You can tell the website how many people are in your household, and reminders can automatically be sent to you when typically it would be time to order more goods. Also, coupons are automatically found and applied to your order so you don’t have to hunt down any codes. Kim and I placed our first order a couple of weekends ago, and our package was delivered just five days later. We noticed that one of our items was missing, and contacted their support team. They immediately offered to ship the missing item, or offered a $10 credit to be used in the future. Since the item wasn’t even work $2 we decided to take the credit since we will definitely be ordering again in the future. It was simply too easy not to.

I received an email stating that Yahoo! will be shutting down GeoCities on October 26, 2009. That will be one sad day. I used GeoCities for years, starting sometime in high school, to host all sorts of various websites. So I need to start downloading all of my old websites from their servers so they aren’t lost forever.

First was my personal page, geocities.com/edpaff_jr. I’m pretty sure what is currently there was the very first layout of this page. Archive.org also has another version of the site from 2002, but I’m afraid that design may already be lost forever.

Then there was geocities.com/ed_paff, which I setup as I graduated high school. I set it up to try to keep our friends in touch as we all headed off to different colleges and jobs. This site hasn’t been updated since July 12, 2000, making it fairly short lived.

The Pig-Fest website was also hosted on GeoCities at one time, but the files must have already been deleted awhile back. Some various designs from the past can be seen via archive.org, so I guess it’s not permanently gone. This is how the website looked originally. Notice the constant use of frames early on in my design.

There was also a website that my brother and I made back in high school for the Moeller ice hockey team. I don’t recall the actual URL though, and I’m having a hard time finding any traces of the site. I really wish I could find that one.

For those who have a list of sites that read each day (or nearly every day) I have one for you to add to that list, or to subscribe to via RSS. The Big Picture is a photo blog from the Boston Globe, which documents news events using amazing quality photos. I probably should have mentioned this site long ago, and it’s possible that I’m spreading old news to many of you. Entries are posted Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. I found today’s entry for Holy Week especially interesting. It is very enlightening to see the way that these religious holidays are celebrated throughout the world.