Author: Davin Granroth

  • Design connections

    A couple days ago I stopped into the Com Arts building at Michigan State University to meet a new professor in the journalism program named Karl Gude. [Karl’s blog] I heard about Karl from my friend and colleague Liz Weber who handed me a clipping from the MSU News Bulletin which explained that Karl had…

  • Performing music

    Back in mid-December, I played a fun little coffee-house type gig over near Detroit (Southfield maybe?) with my friend Paul Tiseo and a small crew of other musicians. It was for a group of young adult Catholics to socialize after what I interpret as a prayer meeting. I was a little nervous going into it,…

  • Ye Olde Man

    On the same night as the Eastman Party Store commentary, Lila, Eva and I were at a restaurant. I have Lila bring her homework in to work on after dinner. She had some books to read, so she read to us. The story was a fairy tale and there was an inn and an innkeeper…

  • What do you look for at a party store?

    My daughter Lila has learned to read, and so when we’re driving, she comments on signs she reads. Yesterday evening I was driving Lila and Eva by the Eastman Party Store, and Lila asks, “Daddy, you see the Eastman Party Store?” “Yes,” I replied. “So, what do you think you’d see in there?” she asked.…

  • I’m a student again, and tardy already!

    After a nine-year break, I’ve enrolled again at Michigan State University! Back in 1998 or 99 I took a full-time job offer producing websites, and never finished my degree in English. So, finally, I’ll finish it off this semester. If everything goes as planned, I should graduate this May. I’m taking one class: REL 350–Buddhism…

  • Can robots.txt prevent a dead page from being removed from a search engine’s index?

    Problem: Pages taken offline 4 months ago are still indexed by Google and Yahoo! In the course of work this week, we discovered that Yahoo! and Google still have record of a section of a website we removed nearly 4 months ago. Surely the search engine robots had revisited the pages, repeatedly received 404-File Not…

  • Restricting search indexing to sections of a web page

    If you think about websites as having different page types, with each page type having different sections within it, such as content sections, navigation sections, and footer sections, it becomes apparent that the value of a particular page is defined by the content on the page that is unique to that page. Sections like footers…

  • XML file of shooting ranges in Michigan

    As another small step in this process of manipulating a data set to upload to Google Maps, I took the cleaned XHTML I had from a few days ago, and used TextWrangler to do some quick search and replaces on the source code in order to produce this XML file. ranges-data.xml Next, I think, I’ll…

  • Sample KML structure for the shooting ranges data

    And here is a sample of what the intended shooting ranges KML feed will look like.

  • Clean XHTML of shooting ranges data

    My goal is to upload a comprehensive list of shooting ranges to Google Maps (see prior posting). So, to accomplish this, here are the steps I’ve thought of.