On the Contacts page, I have replaced the Cell Phone tab with the Phone Now tab. Emails cannot be sent to my cell phone anymore, but this new feature allows anyone to call my voice devices (Cell, Skype, Voicemail, etc.) for free from anywhere in the US or Canada.
To use it, you simply enter your name and the phone number that you want Google to call you. When submitted, you will immeadiately get a call at that number and Google will connect you with one of my voice devices. If none of them pick up, you will be sent to my VoiceMail where you can leave a message.
There is a new menu option in the "Features" menu: "GL Products". That's right a store right here on Granite Labor where you can buy high quality low-cost Granite Labor branded products!
There are some real cool shirts in there now and more products will be added presently. So check back often. Products that you purchase from the GL Store help to support development and maintenance for the site.
These are quality products that are shipped quickly and can be purchased securely. See the "Pg Help" on the GL Store page for more information.
The DNS has been changed and granitelabor,com now points to this new server.
Everything should work as before, but if you run into a problem somewhere, let me know please.
I hope to be able to spend some time in the next couple of weeks doing some work on the site that has been put off. I will also be working on the new sister site at pjlarson.net. That's right. In case you haven't heard, I have this new domain and the site it points to is going to be a little different than the Granite Labor site.
You can check out the new site now if you like. It is powered by Joomla! and I will be doing the setup for a few days or more. But it is available to play with for those interested. You will eventually need an account for it, but don't start one yet as it will be deleted when I install a different version of Joomla. I will post on both sites when that is complete... no more than a couple of days.
The PhoneFun page now has a link to this. It is also available from my YouTube Channel and will be linked on the Video Help page soon. Learn all about finding an acronym for your phone number.
I've added a new feature on music list pages. When you roll your mouse over the picture of an album, an AJAX powered window will popup with a numbered list of all the tracks in that album or playlist.
The GL music player is real small and only shows you the song/track that is currently playing. The tracks have never been listed on the music list pages until now.
Now, when you roll over the album image, AJAX calls a php page on the server which in turn looks up the tracks for that album/playlist from the database and magically sends it to you in the form of a plesant looking window. Just mouseout to close it and look at the next album you are interested in. What innovation, eh?
The music library has a new entry in the Folk category: Five of my favorite Bob John Denver songs.
In Other News: I still have lots to do on the site. I've taken a break because I have other things to do and I don't make a penny maintaining the site. I will get back to it soon. If you think the changes on the site look good now, you will really be impressed with what is in store. Bookmark GraniteLabor and stop back often to keep up to date.
I have been doing some stuff in my free time. I am working on a new Tutorial for the PhoneFun program. It will be a video and maybe a ppt file as well. And I know, I've got to get the video pages together. Please report any problems with the site. I don't have time to run throught the whole thing right now.
I have fixed the layering problem with the Music Players. I also took two days to completely go through the whole Music Library and recompile all playlists... all 39 current albums! I have deleted a couple of albums, added others, and rearranged still others. It's the first real going through I have made in a couple of years. I corrected a few errors here and there, as well.
The Music albums, songs and players are controlled via a SQLite database. I created a new field with all track titles to each album and playlist. Right now it does nothing. :) But shortly I will implement a AJAX rollover in the Music Lists, so when you roll over a album, the list of songs in that album will popup magically! Coming soon. Stay tuned.
Every page on the site has been changed in some way. Read on for important changes that you should be aware of, and interesting details about what is new and what is coming up.
Note For IE8 Users
Do not use compatible mode if you use Internet Explorer 8, it will mess up the menus.
If you are using IE8 and the menus look weird, you are in compatibility mode. To shut it off, click on the white icon by your address bar like this - 
Everything will work fine on Granite Labor once you do that.
Or you can get a better browser. We have a link for Firefox in the Downloads library or find Chrome on Google. Browsers are free programs and most are more secure and standards-compliant than IE.
The two biggest changes
The most notable changes to the site are the styles and the underlying Javascript libraries. You will find more uniformity of style between pages and dialogs. This is due to better style sheets (CSS) and the integration of styles in the new JS jQuery libraries.
jQuery Replaces DHTMLX
Granite Labor is a dynamic site; your are able to interact with many pages and some are dynamically created on the fly based on user input. PHP is used on the server side and Javascript libraries are used on the client side. As before, the libraries control AJAX functions, dialogs, tabs, and other things on the site. For the last couple of years these things were powered by the DHTMLX javascript library. I have now switched to the popular jQuery library, and that changes a lot of functionality and how the site works.
Advantages Of Using jQuery Libraries
The benefits are many. Some things, such as the page menus, look similar to the old ones, but in fact they operate completely different. The DHTMLX libraries are very powerful, but they were kind of overkill for what I needed. They were also mind-numbing to use.
jQuery is easier and more fun to use than DHTMLX. They are smaller libraries which are really good at manipulating html selectors and css. They also have cool animation and styling themes. Since the libraries are small they load faster. Another thing is that it is very popular and many big sites use it, and it is served by Googles AJAX server. This means that when you come to Granite Labor, your browser might already have the libraries cached, if you previously visited a site which uses jQuery, and they won't have to be loaded again. This translates into even faster page load speeds.
What Has Change?
Every page has changed, but some may look similar. Here are a few major changes I can think of right now:
More To Be Done
I've been working non-stop for over a week, into the wee hours of the morning, to get the site up as soon as possible. There are still things to finish and perhaps a few bugs I don't yet know about. Visitors are encouraged to browse throughout the site and report any anomalies. I use Firefox and IE8 to test the site. Other browsers should work as well, but if you run into something odd or a broken link or whatever, please send me Feedback so I can get it fixed. I can't fix something if I don't know there is a problem.
There are some problems that I am aware of. Help Videos can be downloaded but there are no players for them because I am going to re-write that section and the videos will be hosted on YouTube. Another problem is the Mobile site. I haven't done anything with it in years and I plan to sometime soon. I was going to get rid of it, but users have convinced me to keep and eventually improve it. And there is a layering problem between the menus and dialogs with active content, such as the media players. These are easy fixes, but time consuming. I just haven't had the chance to do it yet.
I hope you like the changes so far. I would be interested in what you think of the site and any suggestions or comment that you might have. Let me know. It will give you a good excuse to use the new Contact forms.
I've added a new music player: Johnny Rivers. I have also added "The Boxer" in the Simon and Garfunkel player and a couple more songs in the Singles Playlist.
It has been a while since I have worked on the site. I keep meaning to. I actually am going to make some changes and when I start I won't stop until it is done. I will probably discontinue the mobile site and I will most likely simplify the main site a bit, in some ways. I plan on changing javascript libraries from DHTMLX to Jquery. That's what I have planned anyway... stay tuned to find out for sure.
I've made a new tutorial: File Structure For Beginners. This link will take you directly to it or it can be found in the Articles/Tutorials section under the Information menu.
In my journey helping new computer users, I have found that many don't have a clue about how their files are stored, where to save files to, where to find them, and why. This is a fundamental thing every computer owner should know. It is one of the very basics of computing. This tutorial explains these things.
The tutorial has snapshots of my desktop to help you out and I think is pretty clearly laid out, so that anyone should be able to follow it. File structure is not a complicated thing, but no one has taken the time to explain it to some folks. That is my goal. I hope it helps.
I have recompiled some of my videos to high definition and moved them to the Granite Labor Channel on YouTube. There four new videos up there now. A new one never seen before, a short 2 minute video of the Sperry/Iverson mine on the Mt Loop. The other three are in a playlist called Exploring The Mountain Loop. It is my famous movie of sites on the mountain, and is split into three parts. More will be added presently. Note: These are best viewed in full screen mode.
Some benefits of having videos served by YouTube is that they stream better, I can use High Definition, and Videos can be arranged better using playlists. Also, there is more opportunity for user feed back using ratings and comments. The only minor down-side is that video uploads are limited to 2GB and can't be longer than 10 minutes (about 10:30 actually), but that's no big deal.
I prefer you go to the Granite Labor Channel, but if you prefer you can see the video directly with this link.
As you can see, one of the changes is the new PhoneFun Logo, but there is more. The version number has been updated to 2.4.
PhoneFun allows you to output phone-pad acronym combinations in either HTML or PDF format. I have rewritten the script that outputs the PDF format from the ground up using a new PHP PDF class. It's much easier to write and maintain than the old class I used. For the user, you will notice that you have all of the detailed information that the HTML output has, and the output renders in a nice table. The pages have page numbers.
I plan to do more with PhoneFun soon. Like add support for area codes, and I am going to remake the help video and help text. I will also be using the new video format to render the streaming help video.
I've removed the AudioBooks tab from the Media Selector page. They can now be found under the Music/Audio tab.
It seems the audio books page was not working right since the transfer to the new provider. I will get the older books back up in due time. Currently, there are two new recordings in the AudioBooks section. One is the Alvin The Scrooge recording... the same one that is listed above, but this one is permanant. The other is another production I made in 1986 called Meditation/Sleep Aid. It is as the name implies, a relaxation recording.
You can use the built-in player to listen to these now. I will add download links soon.
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