Transition to SquareSpace & Giant DYI Growth Chart Ruler

2 minute read

A photo of my finished giant growth chart DIY project complete with some photos of Mateo pasted on it.

Change in Website

I figured that I would start off by saying that I’m not a professional web designer, although I have done it and graphic design on occasions professionally. For the past couple of years I have been using a CMS called Drupal. There was a time when I was really enjoying learning some PHP and coding techniques. As my life has gotten busier and now more family oriented… I haven’t had as much time to keep updating it.

Many of the Podcasts that I like listening too, kept advertising SquareSpace. It’s has been pretty easy to set up and is fairly flexible. I am missing how my site previously looked, and I still haven’t been able to add all of my previous content in yet… so it is still a work in progress. I still have my previous website running http://jacobrcampbell.com/ and this post will even in the future likely be placed there, but for now I’m using http://jacob-campbell.squarespace.com. I’ve decided that updating and keeping up the Drupal version of my website is too much work. The last couple of months, I haven’t even been able to log into my site. I think there is some sort of problem with the tables, that i just don’t have the expertise to fix. I’ve been trying to find a programmer who is familiar with Drupal site development, and have been unable to.

I’ve decided that my primary purpose for having a website is to be able to write, especially here on my blog. Maybe some day I will want to go back to something more like Drupal, but for the now the overhead is just too much (not to mention that I still can’t log in and update my website currently…). I’ve been spending some time transferring old articles and blog posts to my new site, but I decided that I do want to continue to post some new content even as I am going through this traditional phase.

Giant Growth Chart

One thing that I have been wanting to post about for a while was a DYI project that I after moving into our new house. I created a giant growth chart to be able to track Mateo’s growth. It was a pretty fun project. I went to Lowes and bought a 12’ by 8” board. I sanded it down (60, 80, 120 grits) and stained it to match our hard wood floors. After attaching it to the wall, we have been attaching photos of Mateo as he has been getting taller. I had decided that I wanted to do it with pictures and I thought about a lot of different ways to attach pictures. The following is what I did.

I bought a bunch of metal refrigerator magnets. I removed the magnet part along with the casing for it. I screwed in at the height that Mateo was when the photo was taken the clip to the wood. We took a bunch of pictures and posted the best ones to Instagram with information about the date, and age of Mateo. I printed them for 36 cents at Walgreens through their iPhone app and picked them up. I think it’s been turing out pretty great. I figured that Minnie and I had to be on the chart too… even though we won’t be growing any more.