Super Ginormous

Category: Personal

Posts of a more personal nature.

  • Thoughts Before Leaving

    I’m a few minutes shy of leaving on my 900+ mile trek to Dallas TX for the Webmaster Jam Session. I opted to drive the 12+ hours for a couple of reasons: 1) I’ve made the trip before and it wasn’t that bad. 2) I get to see more of the countryside. 3) I’m meeting Ben Gray for coffee/breakfast in the Atlanta area. 4) I hate the thought of having to fly again.

    Avis gave me a “free upgrade” from the large car I had reserved. I’ll be riding in style with a Chevy Uplander instead. I don’t relish the thought of driving 900+ miles in a minivan, but at least it as a jack to plug my iPod in.

    This is the first extended stay I’ll have away from my family. I’ve never been without my son for more than a night. My wife went to Disney before we were married, and there was about 3-4 days where we didn’t see each other. It’s going to be weird being on my own, without them. If my wife reads this: I love you, Kim.

    I’m hoping to hit Dallas around 8pm tonight. Wish me luck. I’m hoping to document some of the trip as I go along. So stay tuned!

  • Changes to RSS Feed

    I’ve made a change to the RSS feed on my site that should reduce some of the noise you get from my site in your feed reader. Rather than bore you with Asides, Quotes of the Day and Thoughts of the Day, I’m now excluding them from my regular feed. If, for some reason you’d like to keep receiving this sort of stuff along with regular entries, I’ve set up an alternate feed for your enjoyment. Sorry for any inconvenience this might cause you. I’m instituting this change for your benefit, not mine!

  • Space is Limited

    Register for the Webmaster Jam Session by September 13th and you could win a stay in one of two Presidential Suites at the Adam’s Mark Hotel in Dallas, TX. Space is getting very limited (less than 17 seats remain as of today!) so if you’re planning to go, what’re you waiting for?

    I’m planning to leave for Dallas on Thursday, September 20th with at least a brief stop planned for Birmingham – where I hope to drop in to see Jeremy Flint at Kinetic Communications. If you’re planning on going and want to meet up in Dallas, drop me an email or follow me via twitter.

  • Nike+: 3rd Week

    Nike+ Goal: Burn 5000 calories in 4 weeks.

    Today marks the start of my fourth week of walking with Nike+. Here are some stats so far:

    • Number of Workouts: 11
    • Total Time: 5.8 hours
    • Total Calories: 5845
    • Total Distance: 15.35 mi
    • Average Pace: 23’06″/mi
    • Farthest Workout: 2.56 mi
    • Fastest 1-Mile: 20’51″/mi

    I have not been tracking weight loss, though I should. (I’m hoping to buy a scale here in the next month or so.) So far though, I am really pleased with my progress. I feel better. My pace is quickening with each walk. I’ve logged some fairly long walks, and each is helping to build my stamina more and more.

    I set several goals for myself after my first walk with Nike+. This morning I accomplished one of my goals: burning 5000 calories in four weeks. I succeeded with 8 days to spare. My next caloric goal is to burn 6000 calories in four weeks. It’s a little more aggressive, but not impossible. As far as my other two goals are concerned:

    • Walk 50 times in 16 weeks: I have walked 10 times. I am current 1 walk ahead of my target.
    • Walk 100 miles in 16 weeks: I have logged a total of 13.3 miles towards this goal. I am 5.1 miles behind my target, but I’m confident that I’ll be able to regain momentum in this area by walking more frequently. I’ve been averaging around 3 walks a week. This week I’ve walked four times, and plan on walking at least two additional times this week. If I can bump my average to around 6 walks a week, logging at least 1.1 miles per walk, I should be able to reach this goal without a problem.

    Walking has become a game of sorts for me. Yes, there are obvious health benefits that come with exercise, but right now I am enjoying the improved walk times, pace, distance, etc. AND getting exercise. It doesn’t feel like work or a chore, because I am having fun with it.

    RunnerPlus has been invaluable with keeping track of my daily progress. Look for another update in the coming weeks.

  • Making WordPress work for me

    WordpressThe wide variety of plugins available for WordPress is what sold me on the application. If WordPress doesn’t do something you’d expect it to do, there’s probably a plugin available to fill the void. On my site, I use several plugins to keep things running smoothly or to add functionality not present in a core-install of WordPress.

    (I’m hoping that all of the links below work. If you happen to come across one that doesn’t resolve, please let me know!)

    • Akismet 2.0.2 – This plugin checks comments against the Akismet web service to see whether it’s spam or not. This plugin alone has stopped over 24,000 spam comments from appearing on my site. It’s worth it’s weight in gold. If not for Akismet, I probably would have turned comments off a long time ago.
    • Bannage 0.2 – This plugin lets me ban commenters by IP address, username, email address or by the URI they use in comments. I don’t use it often, but it’s come in handy a couple of times.
    • Download Counter 1.2 – I recently added this plugin to keep track of how many folks were downloading the WordPress theme I posted. You can use it to keep track of any file on your site that you’re offering for download.
    • Google Sitemaps 2.7.1 – This plugin automatically generates a Google-compliant sitemap of your site. You can even specify pages that exist outside of your WordPress install. (The sitemap.xml file it generates is also compatible with MSN Search and Yahoo, but doesn’t currently notify either of those services when the sitemap file is updated.)
    • Gravatar 1.1 – If commenters have a Gravatar account, their globally-recognized avatar is displayed next to comments they make here on my site (and on others that support gravatar).
    • HP Blog Printing 1.0.8 – This plugin gives users the option to print multiple posts into a convenient, easy-to-read PDF. (To be honest, I don’t know if it’s used much on the site but I’ve kept it activated regardless.)
    • Live Comment Preview 1.7 – This plugin lets commenters see what their comment will look like as they are typing. I’ve found this feature useful on other sites, and thought it would make commenting more user-friendly.
    • Ma.gnolia 1.0 – This plugin outputs a list of my most recent Ma.gnolia bookmarks. You can view these on my links page.
    • Official Comments 1.1 – This plugin let’s me stylize comments that I make differently than regular comments posted on the site.
    • Related Posts 2.04 – Returns a list of posts and pages relevant to the current post you’re on. I’ve found this plugin works great and directing traffic to other articles on my site that are similar to posts people have found via search engines.
    • Spam Karma 2.3 rc1-2 – Coupled with Akismet, spam is a thing of the past for me. I’ve only had a few problems with false positives, but it otherwise works great!
    • Subscribe to Comments 2.1.1 – Lets commenters subscribe to a discussion thread, so that if new comments are made, they have a visual cue (email) that invites them back into the discussion. If you want return visitors, I think this plugin is a quick and easy way to ensure people come back to your site.
    • WordPress Database Backup 1.8 – Invaluable plugin. I use it before I upgrade to the latest and greatest version of WordPress.
    • WP Audioscrobbler 0.35 Beta – This plugin lists my most recently scrobbled tracks from Last.fm.
    • WP Movie Ratings 1.4 – Powers my movie page, where I keep track of movies I’ve watched recently. (The list is far from complete.)

    Other plugins that I have used in the past (or an ad hoc basis) include:

    • Admin Theme Preview 2.0 – This allows administrators to test out new themes without effecting what front-end users see in their browser. I usually leave this disabled unless I am testing out a new design.
    • Anti-Leech 1.6 – This plugin helps prevent scrapers from stealing content and bandwidth. I’ve used this plugin off and for a while now. It works well, but I tend to deal with scraping on an individual basis. Many of the other plugins I use on a day-to-day basis make using this one redundant.
    • Bad Behavior 2.0.10 – Denies spambot attempts at accessing your site. I love this plugin, but currently have it disabled, because it causes connection problems with the new Windows Live Writer beta.
    • Tiger Style Administration 3.0 – Steve Smith’s Tiger Style Admin puts a beautiful, app-like face on the WordPress backend. The only reason I don’t use it is because it’s not fully compatible with WordPress 2.2+, and Steve has no plans to updated the plugin any longer.

    If you’re looking to add additional functionality to your WordPress site, definitely check out the WordPress Plugin Directory. The plugins I use only scratch the surface of what’s currently available. Because of the extensibility of WordPress, developers are creating new ways to use this powerful blogging platform in different and creative ways.

    But enough about my plugins. What sort of plugins are you using on your site?

  • Nanideska

    This coming weekend I’ll be releasing my second WordPress theme: Nanideska. Nanideska is a two-column theme based on the design I previously had here at cdharrison.com. I was thinking I had a screen capture of it somewhere, but searches through my archives on flickr didn’t yield any results. The following capture/Photoshop image should give you a general idea as to what to expect:

    nanideska

    Look for Nanideska to drop sometime soon.

  • Effercio Blue

    Information on this theme can now be found on this dedicated page: Themes > Effercio. This post will no longer be updated.

    Well, the time is here. As promised yesterday, I’m releasing Effercio Blue into the wild. You can snag it here:

    A demo of the site can be found here.

    Obviously, I’m expecting there to be issues. If you happen to find any that make the theme unusable for you, please let me know.

    The theme includes:

    • Support for WordPress Tags (a new feature in WordPress 2.3)
    • Support for Dynamic Sidebar and Widgets
    • Custom Link and Archive Page Styles
    • Inline Asides*

    If you’re wondering what the rationale behind the name is… effercio is Latin for “stuff”, and that’s what my site’s all about… Anyway, I hope you enjoy the theme! Let me know what you think!

    Addendum

    • (10.05.07) – Added Effercio Blue to FreeWordpressThemes.com
    • (10.03.07) – Released 1.0.1. Fixed issue in header.php where Home link was not working properly.
    • (10.02.07) – Effercio Blue was featured on Weblog Tools Collection.
    • (09.05.07) – Inline Asides can be enabled by creating a category called ‘Asides’. The logic’s already in place on index.php to handle the special formatting for it. If you do add it, you’ll simply need to make one (OPTIONAL) modification to your sidebar.php file. (It hides Asides from the category list.) I use Asides to post links that I wouldn’t normally do a full post on.

      <?php wp_list_categories('title_li=&show_count=0&exclude=ASIDECATEGORYID'); ?>

    Enjoy!

  • A Minor Announcement

    I’ve decided to turn my current design into a distributable theme for WordPress. It’ll be available over the weekend after I clean up some of the rough edges. Here are some of the things you can look forward to in the release of Effercio Blue 1.0:

    • Support for WordPress Tags (a new feature in WordPress 2.3)
    • Support for Dynamic Sidebar and Widgets
    • Custom Link and Archive Page Styles
    • and more?

    If there’s interest in it, I might make some colored variations of it… Leave a comment if you’d like to be notified of it’s release.

  • An alternative to Nike+

    Since this post gets a good bit of traffic, I think it’s worth noting that you ought to check out RunKeeper if you happen to own an iPhone 3G/3GS. Not only does it not require a dongle, it’s more accurate and doesn’t require the latest hardware (3GS) to run.

    Well, I am nearly two weeks into my walking challenge and so far so good. I’ve walked a total of 7 times since August 17th, for a total of 8.59 miles and 3,291 calories burned. Considering my lack of activity prior to the 17th, I’d say I’m off to a pretty good start. Walking with the Nike+ sensor and being able to track my progress has made walking fun for me. It’s exercise meets video game in a way…

    My only beef with Nike+ so far is the website. The all-Flash interface is certainly nice on the eyes, but it doesn’t offer the functionality I’ve come to expect from sites that offer “social” features. It should be easy to direct people to your profile page, but it isn’t. You should be able to see how your friends are doing, but you can’t.

    1. If you want to share your progress, you have to do it via Nike-provided Flash widgets. You cannot link directly to your profile on the Nike+ website.
    2. The only way you can keep track of friends is through challenges (or via widgets – IF they happen to display them somewhere). Then and only then can you click on your friends’ name … and see their last run, and total run time and distance.

    Neither of these are deal-breakers for me, but they’re annoying. That’s why I am excited about RunnerPlus.com. It’s everything that Nike+ isn’t. It has profile pages. It has friends. It has better visualizations of run/walk data. And it works with or with Nike+. (You can set up your profile to sync up with your Nike+ account if you like. Otherwise, they offer a software solution that allows you to sync your runs/walks without having to bother with iTunes or NikePlus.com.)

    RunnerPlus has:

    • Better, more accurate visualizations.
    • Calendar-view … so you can see which days you walked and how far.
    • Profile pages with easy to remember URLs! Here’s mine: http://cdharrison.runnerplus.com/
    • Friends! You can see how they are doing and they can see how you’re doing.

    In short, it has more to offer than the official NikePlus website, and that’s a good thing. If you’re using Nike+, do yourself a favor and check our RunnerPlus.com. You’ll be glad you did.

    Thanks for sharing this site with me, Patrick!

  • I’ve created a monster.

    I've created a monster.

    My son is going to be a geek. All the signs are there. He loves playing on the computer. He loves stealing my iPod video to listen to music and watch cartoons… The boy loves gadgets. What can I say? I’m a proud papa.