Hi everyone! We have been back in the USA for under 24 hours and Eric is already on another plane back to NC for an interview. He will be checking in on our house and yard and I am praying that at least one of my tomatoes has survived the 100-degree-plus heat that Durham had last week. He’ll be back tomorrow evening and then we’ll head to upstate NY for two weeks for a workshop he’ll be teaching at Hamilton College for the last two weeks of June.

I am (hopefully) on the upswing from a sinus infection (makes flying for eight hours even more fun!), so I will be resting up and posting copious amounts of photos to Flickr from our wonderful stays in both Paris and Barcelona. I will also be posting at least once a day for the next several days while I make sense of all the great experiences we had on this adventure, so stay tuned!

Over the last few months I’ve been working on a new way to update our collection of waterfall photos. Previously, we would add new waterfalls by hand into the respective state and county indices. While this worked for a few waterfalls, now that we have well ~140 falls it had become hard to manage. Instead, I decided to build a small database that would hold the important info (state, directions, photo, etc.) and write some PHP code to build the pages for us. I’ve been wanting to learn a bit more PHP code and this seemed like a good excuse reason.

As you might have guessed, I’ve finished the first version and our redesigned waterfall site is now automatically generated. Anytime we have an update we only need to add the data to the database and let the scripts do the rest of the work. Sweet.