About
Neohawk.Org as you guess from the top page is the website for the Northeast Ohio Hawkins Family. We are not the *only* Hawkins family in Northeast Ohio, but I did get the domain first. ;-) Actually, my original domain was okihawk.org, for the Okinawa Hawkins family. I lost that domain in our move from Okinawa back to my hometown of Cleveland. I wanted to keep the same concept for a domain name and neohawk was open so I grabbed it.
The Neohawk.Org family consists of Rob, Arisa and their three children Elly, Ken and George. All three kids were born in Tokyo, Japan and currently have dual citizenship. They currently (12/08) attend the Mayfield City Schools, with Ken and Elly in High School, and George in the Middle School.
A Little History
The original site, both okihawk.org and neohawk.org, had the same look and feel since 2001 or so, when the picture on the right above was taken. The site was powered by Plone, for which I provided some of the original Japanese translations. In 2008, however, I realized that 1) plone was overkill for what I wanted to do with the site, and 2) I was really interested in Django. I started off using Feedjack to rebuild my rss aggregators,Planet NEO and Neohawk IT (both now deceased). After deploying a couple of django sites commercially, I decided that Neohawk.Org finally needed a new facelift and in the process to move away from Plone. The previous Neohawk site was the result.
About The Previous Neohawk Site
This site is django-powered, of course, but uses Byteflow in particular. Byteflow is a nifty little blog application built on django, and the best I have found so far. Not to suggest there aren't other good ones, but this is the one I settled on when I started to rebuild. Generally speaking, I wanted to make this site a lot easier, so it basically consists of a blog for Arisa and myself, links and news items.
The code that powers the "News" and "Links" section is my own code. I'm willing to share it but the reality is you could probably build better easily with Django. But if you're interested feel free to contact me.
For the most part, the photos you see on this site are hosted on Google's picassa and embedded into posts and/or pages. There are exceptions, but I'd rather do it that way since then I can keep the pictures off my server.
About This Site
This site is powered by Google Sites. I decided to make the transition to Google sites in November, 2010. I made this for several reasons. One of the reasons I was using a hosting provider and Django was because I liked to develop my own sites both as practice and for fun. With my new job i just don't have the time to spend on figuring out how to makes thing work. I want something at this point that just works and is easy to use. Google sites is certainly easy to use.
Additionally, by transitioning to Google sites I reduce family expenditures. While the amount I paid for my virtual machine that hosted the previous Django-based Neohawk.org site was minimal it's still an expense. While I was actively playing and developing with Django, I figured that was a legitimate cost. It is no longer.
I'd also say that with the expansion of Google services that are available to Google Apps users, I can now consolidate my various web assets (?!) on to the Neohawk.org domain.
About the Logo
Some of you whom have visited the previous neohawk.org site may have noticed I have a new logo. The logo is actually a mon tsuki(紋付）, or a Japanese style family crest. The family crest was designed by Arisa's father for use on my Hakama or Japanese men's kimono that I wore instead of a Tux at our wedding. It is based off the Hawkins Family Crest for Sir John Hawkins. While the reality is that the chances of our being related to Sir John are close to nil as to make it a silly concept. But it was the basis for creating our own Family Crest. Now that I think about it, it's hard for me to imagine why it took me so long to remember we had it.
