Last night, I did the final tweaks to a new web site I built for my friend Larry Gaian, the master BBQ’r. You can see his delicious efforts at TheBBQGrail web site (which I also do the programming for) at http://www.thebbqgrail.com . It’s a great site for all things BBQ.

The new site is a place to find all things BBQ, from rubs and sauces to blogs and message forums. It’s called “BBQ Grails List”, and can be found at http://www.grailslist.com .

I kind of like the design of the place. The letters in the logo are built to evoke the burning coals of a BBQ. The boxes for each category are built with a “masonry” add-in I found. I like how the boxes flow together like a rock fireplace automatically. If you refresh the page, the category boxes are displayed in a different order each time, but the masonry effect keeps them together.

The site has some advertising, using scripts from Amazon and Google Adsense. The ad content is supposed to be mostly BBQ-related items. So the site is ‘live’ and you will find some good items in most of the categories, along with links to the item’s web sites.

There’s been a bit of tweaking to some of the other sites, including putting some historical family pictures on the family web site. I found a great PHP-based program that automatically displays pictures in a folder. The style of the gallery pages is somewhat customizable, but the code is nice because it is all one file, so easy to implement in a web site. If you are interested, you will find the web site for that code here Single File PHP Gallery 4.1.1 .

I’ve also been working on the new version of CellarWeb Ads , which is a program I built to easily display ads on a web site. It’s been around for over a year, and I have had almost-daily downloads of the code, but nobody has bothered to use the “Donate” button. That’s OK, I suppose, since I learned a lot about PHP programming as I wrote it.

In fact, most of my web sites are learning experiences. There is very minimal revenue received as a result of my efforts, but they are interesting to create.

As for the weekend, the weather is starting to get nice here in the high desert of Utah. So some lawnmowing, and perhaps a bit of vegetable planting in my small garden. The grandkids like to pick peas, so those are on the list. And the strawberry plants are starting to blossom.