A New Blog!

First of all, please keep voting every day for the Pepsi Refresh project. I can’t tell you how awesome it would be to be a top 2 charity that would receive money that goes right to Dr. Cheung to develop Turbo 3F8. It’s a really cool opportunity. You can vote once online and once by text every single day in September, so please keep voting DAILY. Make it a habit, set a reminder, tell your friends, whatever it takes. I found it interesting that we moved up 10 places (from 18th to 8th) after I mentioned this to Eli’s 5,700 CarePage visitors. 🙂 In all seriousness, every Neuroblastoma parent I know is really pushing this thing hard, so if we could get first or second place, it would be amazing. Thank you for your help. Here’s the info again as a reminder:

Pepsi has a ‘Refresh Everything’ campaign and the charity with the most votes receives a $250,000 grant.

You can also text your vote. To vote from your MOBILE PHONE text Pepsi at 73774 and enter 102653.

I have other very exciting news. Well, at least it’s exciting for me. You may recall my complaints about CarePages.com for all of these years. It is pretty limiting, especially for a tech guy who writes a good portion of his blog posts in HTML code just so it will show up right on CarePages. There are other things that have always bothered me as well. The inability to embed widgets or things like Animoto.com videos was one, but even something as simple as replying to a comment is another. If you leave me a comment on CarePages and ask me a question, if I don’t have your email address handy in my email account, I don’t know what your email address is and it’s a lot of hard work to go track it down to reply! The biggest problem that I didn’t like was that some people would randomly NOT get the email that I had updated the CarePage. So I had to manually email certain people whenever I posted an update. I also couldn’t search my old posts or link directly to certain updates with CarePages. Well these problems are now gone thanks to much really late night work and a few helping hands.

As most of you know, I’m an IT guy who used to do websites for businesses. When Eli was born, I registered www.elihorn.com and kept renewing the domain name every year in case Eli wanted to use it someday (I do the same thing for Isaiah as $9/year is a small price to pay to reserve their name). I never in a million years thought I’d be using it for THIS purpose, but I’m glad I registered it because several years ago a few Eli Horn’s started popping up and creating websites for their art and other ventures. If you Google Eli Horn, you’ll find them. Anyway, I used the website as a ‘summary page’ and launch pad for Eli’s CarePage, but never took the time to publish my own blog with it. Until now. I installed WordPress on my hosting server and developed my own, fully controllable, blog. We like the ability to see who is following Eli, so we kept the ‘login’ requirement (sorry, but it’s nice to have an extra hurdle for random Googlers), but there are some workarounds you might appreciate. For example, if you sign up to receive Eli’s updates by email, you’ll get a full copy of the update in your inbox (including pics if supported). No more need to visit the website unless you want to! If you want to leave a comment, you can still do that on the post, but you’ll need to visit the website and use your free login to leave it. I have posted instructions on how to do this on the Help page of his new website at www.elihorn.com. Keep in mind, if you sign up for a login to his site, you WILL NOT get an email when I update the site. You’ll only get an email if you use the box on the right hand side to subscribe to his updates. Also, you will only get one email per day, no matter how many updates I post for that day. They will come sometime between 11pm-1am Central Time each night, but if I haven’t posted an update that day you won’t receive anything.

One of the big hurdles to doing this was getting all of Eli’s old CarePage updates into the WordPress database. I didn’t have the time to copy and paste all of the old updates and CarePages would NOT give me a database dump from their database. So, I went to Elance.com and explained what I wanted on their website and let people bid for the job. A mom from Texas ended up seeing my project and won the bid. She did an AMAZING job of being really detail oriented and getting everything I wanted, including the old messages you guys left on our posts and everyone’s name and email address. I then spent hours monkeying with MySQL to get them exported from Microsoft Access and imported into the WordPress database. Sorry, I leave some of these details in here in case my geek friends are curious. Anyway, a big thanks to Kristin for working so diligently on the tedious task of copy and pasting the hundreds of old posts I had, the thousands of message board posts, and the thousands of emails. I would highly recommend her work to anyone: http://www.elance.com/s/texanwmn/

Also a big thanks to my sister-in-law Jo, or Aunt JoJo as the boys call her, for helping me test and retest the site before it went live. Jo is a webdesigner with lots of WordPress experience and she helped me figure out what worked and what didn’t with the site. I am still going through and cleaning up really old blog entries and giving them titles, but I’m halfway there. At least they have the right dates on them and are in the right order. There might be some weird bugs or quirks that Jo and I missed, so please let me know if you think something is wrong or have any questions.

So, after years of dreaming about it, I’m finally ditching CarePages for my own controllable and sustainable website! Yes, it’s about time. I realize that moving over will add a bit of inconvenience for people, but I tried to make it as painless as possible by creating a Help page that should take you through step by step on what you have to do. For the ultimate experience, it’s a two step process. 1) Sign up for a login to the site so you can read the posts online and leave comments. 2) Sign up to receive updates via email. Again, just doing step 1 won’t get you an email every time I post an update. You have to do both steps to be notified when I have updated.

So, I am going to STOP updating CarePages and will ONLY be updating the new blog at www.elihorn.com. Please go check out the new blog and get signed up for a free login and subscribe to the update emails. I will likely post another message or two on CarePages as a reminder to people to stop checking there and to check Eli’s website, but otherwise I’m officially cutting over!

Thanks to everyone who continues to follow Eli’s progress, even after all of these years. It’s really amazing to us that people keep coming back for the updates and still support us. I know many people have come and gone over the years, but we still have a huge number of people that have been with us from the beginning or joined throughout the journey and continue to keep up on Eli’s progress. THANK YOU!

Tomorrow night we will find out if Eli is HAMA positive or not. If he’s not, he will head out to NYC for one more round of 3F8, and likely his last. After this next round of 3F8, the doctors want us to try to finish out the 8H9 protocol by doing several more rounds of low dose chemo (Temodar). If he is HAMA positive, we’ll save the trip to NYC and just try Temodar again and see if it bottoms out his counts. Obviously we hope that it doesn’t and he can continue going to school with at least a shred of an immune system! I ended up having to FedEx his HAMA blood TWICE because we didn’t use the tube they provided us the first time and they didn’t like the tubes we used from our Pediatrician’s office, so we had to do ANOTHER draw this morning and overnight them so they were ready for the HAMA testing that begins at 10:30am for ALL the kids hoping to do 3F8 at MSKCC in NYC.

Thanks again for your continued support and prayers!