An Evening with the Neal Girls
Kelley, Melissa and Jennifer were in the Bay Area this weekend. Their parents, Tim and Jean, were sometimes surrogate parents for me when I lived in Germany. Even though I have lost contact with them all over the years, I still think of them with incredible fondness. Amy, the boys and I drove down on Saturday afternoon for a really nice evening in Palo Alto. They were all willing to meet us somewhere between Roseville and San Francisco, but unfortunately Fairfield and Cordelia just aren’t too exciting as destinations. We figured that Palo Alto would be the perfect place to meet them as there are plenty of neat restaurants and University Ave. is a beautiful place to walk. It was really great seeing all of them again and I hope that I do a better job of maintaining contact with them in the future. Yes, ladies, you were indeed worth the trip!
“Integrating” Wordpress and Zen Cart (and PHPList and Sphider)
I’d been toying around with the idea of re-doing An Afternoon to Remember’s web site with a real shopping cart instead of the PayPal freebie one that I had been using. Since the main site’s content was already built using Wordpress I checked on some shopping carts that were Wordpress plugins. Unfortunately, none of them really met my needs. I eventually settled on Zen Cart as it did everything I needed and a whole lot more.
There is a project to integrate Wordpress and Zen Cart but that puts Wordpress inside the Zen Cart and not the other way around. Initially I was hoping for a plugin along the lines of WPG2 that allowed for a simple <zc> tag and I would be off and going. No such thing exists and it doesn’t look like it ever will. Given that Amy (my wife) knew the Wordpress admin interface and Zen Cart’s admin interface can be overwhelming, I figured it was best to not try and integrate the two. That left me with the choice of making a common theme so that they would appear to be the same …
