Ben Strawbridge

DOT COM CONSULTING

Latest stuff

Ballona Wetlands

Ecological Preserve

Latitude
33° 57' 56.16"
Longitude
-119° 33' 38.52"

Ballona contains a complex mosaic of habitats defined mainly by hydrology, including wetland habitats, such as brackish and freshwater marshes, seasonally flooded freshwater wetlands, salt pans, riparian and upland habitats, like coastal sage scrub and sand dunes. Many wildlife species, especially birds, utilize more than one habitat type – thus the juxtaposition of these habitats next to one another, also known as heterogeneity, which is important for biodiversity.

Ballona Creek Bike Path

Part of Park to Playa Trail

Latitude
33° 57' 56.02"
Longitude
0° 00' 00.00"

The Ballona Creek Bike Path parallels Ballona Creek while connecting the Pacific Ocean at Marina Del Rey with Culver City. The trail connects with a beach path that continues south to Redondo Beach while at the north, Dusquesne Avenue connects the bike path with the eastern portions of the Park to Playa Trail.

Jet Pets

Private dog friendly open space

Latitude
33° 57' 27.00"
Longitude
-119° 33' 57.60"

Jet Pets is an animal transportation company located in Playa Del Rey very close to LAX. They have a large field on their property that is fenced in and they keep it open most days and allow you to walk your dog there.

Bluff Trail

The western extension of the Bluff Creek trail

Latitude
33° 57' 53.28"
Longitude
-119° 34' 21.76"

A short 1.5 mile trail located just west of LMU along the bluff beside the One Westbluff neighborhood. This trail has views of the ocean, the marina and the Ballonas Ecological Preserve.

Westchester, Playa Del Rey, and Playa Vista Hiking Guide

Great hiking near LAX

This part of Los Angeles has a lot of surprisingly remote feeling hikes. Located just north of LAX these three neighborhoods have a beach, the second largest open space in Los Angeles (ballona wetlands), and a bluff side hiking trail with expansive city, mountain and ocean views.

Join alltrails using this link and they will plant 2 trees after you join.

Nitecore Headlamp

Keter Kentwood 50 Gallon Resin Deck Box

Deco Gear 39 Curved Ultrawide Gaming Monitor

Buy Deco Gear Ultrawide Gaming Monitor on Amazon.com

Deco Gear Curved Ultrawide Gaming Monitor

BLUESTORM Cirrus 26 Inflatable Life Jacket PFD for Adults

All Purpose Epoxy Putty Stick

Pines Image Gallery With Hugo

A super simple alpinjs image gallery

The first place I used this is on the recipe page about my mom’s family recipe cookbook

Hiking

Ben and Rhys on Bishop Peak
Ben and Rhys on Bishop Peak

Maps, Guides and Logs

One of my greatest joys is being outdoors in a wide open space with nothing made by man in sight. At times, I do have to come back to reality, and occasionally when I do, I will share routes, guides, maps, and from time to time, gear recommendations.

Join alltrails using this link and they will plant 2 trees after you join.

Ironcove Solutions Orchestration Engine

Workforce Onboarding: A Case Study of Ironcove Solutions’ Orchestration Engine

I was hired by Ironcove Solutions to lead product development for a new application they were developing called the Orchestration Engine, an application designed to streamline workforce onboarding processes. We collaborated closely with the team from Ironcove Solutions to bring their vision to life.

Mom's Family Recipes Cookbook

Be Inspired
Be Inspired

Photos of all the pages

The Ryder Theme for Hugo

In honor of this old guy
In honor of this old guy

Introducing the Ryder theme, a theme for the hugo static website generator. This is an open-source Hugo theme boasting Tailwind CSS, FontAwesome integration, and customizable features. Perfect for beginners and seasoned developers alike, kickstart your website with this versatile theme.

Styling a RSS feed With XSL

A styled RSS feed makes your site more usable

When you put a link to your rss / atom feed on your website it is a link to a raw xml file designed for feed readers such as feedly to import them and provide the reader with all their internet in one place.

Tunnel Localhost Server Through Cloudflare

A tunnel to your desktop

This is something I have done in the past and it usually involved pretty in-depth knowledge of the shell and networking, but now there is a free service that makes it oh-so-easy to spin up a tunnel with a public human readable domain name for temporary viewing of your local network development environment on the internet.

Pick a Squares Game

I created a pick-a-squares game template, aka the Super Bowl squares. It is still a work in progress, but I hope to have it snazzy in time for next year. Take a look at the template.

Project Goals

  • Ability to enter people into squares
  • Generate random score rows with animated flourish
  • Presentation mode for big screen action with controller to enter periodic scores
  • Calculate payouts based on price of a square

Project Timeline

  • Launch in time for SB LIX

Pick a Square Game

Pick a Square, any Square! Only $n a square! Step right up folks and get your lucky square.

This was kind of a challenge from a friend of mine. He wanted squares for an event that was a website - html, not an image, that could be used on a big screen at a venue AND printed out on a poster OR standard paper all in one url, just works for all of those.

Projects

The projects section is a mix of case studies of professional projects I have worked on, that I have permission to write about, and personal areas of exploration on-line and otherwise. Some of these projects may be monetized in some way at some time, others are entirely open source.

Hugo Snippets

Get the first of something in a collection

For example the first jpg image in the current directory starting with the word feature.

Arts-Link.com

https://www.arts-link.com is the first domain I ever purchased. I believe it was around 2001. It has been various different websites throughout the years, including not a web-site at all. In this rendition it is an organization which is set up to support artists in their technical needs, to free them from the discratction of such things as self-promotion and websites.

Github Action to Create New Content in Hugo

This is what it looks like
This is what it looks like

I use Hugo a lot for my web development work, and I think it is pretty great. The one problem with it for many non-technical people I work with is that there is no CMS feature, they want a website administration page where they can do the usual.

Hugo Helpers

Here are some useful partials I use in this theme.

layouts/_default/_markup/render-image.html

This replaces the default markup template for rendering an image when the markdown code ![Alt Text](/path/to/img.jpg) is used. It calls another partial you have to add to your theme or layout directory in your site called ImageConverter.