Mr. Holidailies

The gentleman in the above photo is Chip. I am not using any abbreviations or nicknames because you should know that this is Chip. The photo was taken on the day before Thanksgiving, while I was merrily snapping photos of turkeys about to be fried, and my parents' cat, and other family stuff. Chip is not admiring the fried turkeys, watching TV, scheming to get some pie, or playing with the adorable niece and nephew. What Chip is doing in this photo is coding the Holidailies site.

What I want you to know is that we talked a bit in early November about doing Holidailies this year, and Chip pointed out that the code we used in the past few years was old and disorganized and had other problems. Well, he said it wasn't much good -- the details are a little vague in my mind because I am not a programmer. He told me that this year, we needed to have a PHP framework, and some other technical terms were used, and I said that was fine. The improvements sounded wonderful.

What I want you to know is the entire Holidailies site as you see it now was built from scratch starting in mid-November. He built a Web portal site with logins and URL verification and several types of users and a database and a bunch of other stuff in about two weeks. I created the graphics, tested anything he asked, and rewrote some of the text as necessary. I had the cushy job. He did the work.

Admittedly I was a little bit jealous because on that Wednesday night before Thanksgiving, Chip had the excuse of working on Holidailies -- some especially frustrating bit, as I recall -- instead of entertaining visiting relatives who wanted to talk about football and shopping. But that's my side of the family, not his, and it's not like he was sitting in front of the TV eating bonbons. He kept working to get the site just right.

He even worked on Holidailies a bit during the "vacation" part of our trip where we stayed in the Quarter for a couple of days. We got back into town and he dove into it full-speed. I spent the week watching end-of-year movies for various freelance assignments; he spent it trying to figure out how to make the Best of Holidailies readers panel interface work. (We took a break on Sunday for Milk, which is quite good, go see it.)

Holidailies is awesome this year. No, wait -- to quote the guys sitting next to me after I saw Iron Man the first time, it is fucking awesome. If you forget your password, you no longer email me and ask me to look it up in the database for you, which is terrible security. Instead, you can go into your profile and retrieve it yourself, and change it if you like. The readers panel interface is a thing of beauty. I have adminstrative screens on the site, instead of having to delve into the PHP database. If your site is picked for Best of Holidailies, a little graphic appears next to the entry listing on the portal page. At the bottom of the portal, you can see page numbers -- the entries don't fall off the portal as more are posted, they just go to the next page.

Fucking awesome, man. And all in two weeks. Last night he said he was done working on it, although I think there are still a few smaller tweaks and improvements planned.

For Holidailies, I run around and tell people to sign up, and read entries, and sift through prompt ideas, and answer email queries. But Chip? Chip is Mr. Holidailies. Without him, the whole thing would run on a Nibelung ring and be limited to 100 participants, or maybe we'd be on fancier ring or community applications like Ning ... but we wouldn't have the full-featured, aesthetically pleasing, happy Holidailies that you see now. My holiday icon isn't Santa or the Baby Jesus or a Yule log, it's the man behind the website. I am extremely proud of the work he's done on the Holidailies site this year. Hugs, kisses, and manymany thanks to Mr. Holidailies today.