I’m so glad that I’ve found Wordpress; not only for my hobby of blogging but it really has been such an educational experience over the last few years for my development.
As far as personal web development; I’m not even close to what I want to know about web development or web programming, I’ll probably never get there, but developing for Wordpress or around Wordpress has led my progression of web development. Only 5 years ago I was using using Dreamweaver for everything, now it’s TextMate. That’s not a measurement of know-how, to me it shows that I’m comfortable.
For project development it’s what I use to development almost any site. It’s just too good of a platform not to develop around. The plugin system allows for such great extensibility and the community of great developers gives you almost everything you’ll need a a project or allow for you to extend another’s work.
The 2-3 plugins I use for the majority of freelance projects are to manage what the client sees on the backend or what s/he can do. I advise anyone using Wordpress to develop websites for clients for it hide the fact Wordpress was built initially for blogging. There are ways to get around with some of the terminology with plugins or localization, never ever edit the core system unless you don’t care about upgrades and eventually security. My favorite plugins and strategy will have to wait for another post, maybe part 2.
Current development: A few weeks ago I took took the task of getting Ventura DUI site online with the goal of it being at the top of Google for the search term “Ventura DUI” or “Ventura DUI Lawyer“. The development was easy, the design took a while and is still not complete but easy to implement because of Wordpress themes system. As expected getting the site to the top of Google will be tough but with plugins like WPSEO and WPsitemaps made/make the standard SEO tasks easy. It’s now just a waiting game for Google to rank the site above the others who have PRs of 0.
My other projects waiting in the wings will also get the Wordpress makeover and I can’t see myself ever using anything else for a client, even basic splash pages.
We’ve had the Tivo HD for a few weeks now and this post has waited just as long. I initially wanted to post about the unpacking, setup and all it’s features; like a real review. Instead I’m going to make this short since the Tivo HD has been exhaustively reviewed around the web already.
Setup:
In order to get HD you’ll either need an OTA HD tuner or HD cable cards from your cable provider. I called our cable provider shortly after the online order and they stated all I needed to do was pick the two cards up from the local store, and as expected that was completely wrong. TW requires that someone to come out and spend about 1.5 hours sitting there waiting for the cards to activate after spending the first five minutes inserting the cards into the TivoHD and calling “home base”.
The experience of the cable card install wasn’t the best through Time Warner, especially since I had to call twice for them to reset the cards which resolved one card from not picking up our premium channels but we then had to have another tech come out in between sunrise and sunset to do nothing but call and get the second card to reset so the channels would show.
It also turns out that the techs for TW in our area do not work for TW directly, they’re just on contract with the company. I found this out because initially they said they don’t install cable cards on anything but TV sets. The guys were nice so they went ahead but I could see this being a huge problem since TW is required to provide cable cards but the contracted companies have policies of their own.
Luckily our cards are not Scientific America cable cards since a lot of people are having issues with artifacts and blocking. Time Warner gave us motorolla cards.
Use:
It’s a Tivo and that’s why I bought it. It’s very easy to use and very responsive. The only thing I wish they would add is PIP for the Tivo menu, that’s something I miss on the old TW moxi box and it’s just annoying to leave a show in order to get a season pass setup. With that aside it’s wonderful, did I mention it’s easy to use. The ease of use can be contributed not only by it’s navigation or season passes but it’s other features, e.g. suggestions.
I’m very surprised with the capacity the 160GB drive can hold, we have 98 suggested shows that Tivo has recorded for us and another 4 hours of HD content. It’s not like we’ll ever watch that much but the wonderful thing is if we sat down to watch TV and we had nothing pre-recorded the chances are we’re going to find something we like. Even a show we’ve never heard of could be suggested and it would turn out great.
Tivo Tranfers:
One of the best features, that we’re using a lot of since we have our Apple TV, is the ability to transfer the recordings to a computer and then export them for “archival” or playback on other devices, like an iPod. We use this a lot for Avery’s shows, this way she’s able to watch he show while I’m on the computer with her. It works on the mac BTW.
Conclusion:
If you want a PVR and you have HD I would strongly recommend a Tivo HD. The cable boxes I’ve dealt with in the past are slow and very clunky. The cost is of the box is $299 msrp but just a few days after the release I was able to purchase mine through Circuit city at $260 so I’m sure they’ll be lower this holiday. The one thing you need to expect is the subscription cost, it’s about the price of the HD box rental from your cable company (about $13). For us since we already have a Tivo the second is discounted to $7 a month (our first was already specially discounted so we’re not paying more then $15 a month).
Tivo is also actively developing new features through it’s beta programs, which I may or may not be a part of.
Tumbleblogs are all the craze right now and I’ve heard a lot of people trying to figure out new ways to get one other than simply signing up and tumblr.com. For those who do not know what a Tumble blog are,
A tumblelog is a variation of a blog, that favors short-form, mixed-media posts over the longer editorial posts frequently associated with blogging. Common post formats found on tumblelogs include links, photos, quotes, dialogues, and video. Unlike blogs, this format is frequently used to share the author’s creations, discoveries, or experiences without providing a commentary. – Wikipedia
So a tumbleblog or tumblog can be easily described as just an aggregator for all of your online identities and interests.
While I had a Tumblr blog I never really saw the benefit of having just another site act like a blog and without comments but now I see their purpose; to aggregate and share of your online identity. And I noticed that I’m already doing it through Google Reader.
 How I created my Tumbleblog:
First off you have to use Google Reader
Second you have to start “sharing” your items
If you find an article you want to share, simply press the share button at the bottom of the item or press shift-s and the item will now be marked ’shared’ and will be added to the site Google will create for you.
To get to your new tumblog:Â
Click on “Shared Items”
and your url is here
Google provides many other options to broadcast your shared items for you including RSS and an option to add it to your existing site.
What about other items? Specifically your own or items that aren’t in RSS.
To handle all of my own items, I subscribe to my own feeds (it’s a good idea just to make sure your feed is working properly) and then mark them for sharing.
For all the items that aren’t already in RSS, I use del.icio.us to bookmark those pages and mark them with a tumblog tag which I subscribe to through RSS and mark them the same as the rest through GR.
Pretty basic I know but know you have a simple tumbleblog and just because you don’t think it’s appropriate for yourself others might. I love subscribing to people’s shared items, I just wish people would make them more available.
I’m purging my online identity to just a few locations that I actually use since it was getting out of control. The major account escape that led to the purge was myspace, as you might have noticed if I’m a friend of yours. The others include:
On the chopping block
The ones I’ll keep:
There are more but as you can tell there are way to many listed already.
Avery and I went to go see Surfs up tonight and it’s definitely in my top 5 of CG/cartoon movies. I never thought a non-pixar movie would be in there so soon but it was a pretty stellar movie. Not to go deep: it’s story is average but the effects and shrek style humor are fun.
The special effects are awesome, someone that has lived in a California beach town throughout his life and grew up surfing (body boarding) I really appreciated the accuracy of how well the waves looked and behaved. Like Big Z I was all about the big wave tubes and watching a penguin and a chicken surf was surprisingly pleasing.
I definitely need to get some of my video online. In order to reminise my teen years that were so long ago.
All we need is better integration for GMail and Notebook like adding e-mail functionality to your Notebook and my personal GTD process will be complete through the help of this article. An online notebook is something I really lack, even though I’ve tried many times with basecamp and the old Notebook; my current process of sorting bookmarks in my toolbar with no notes is easy but not effeciant. Especially since I do not have any archiving for past reference.
Maybe I’ll just try again and instead use the firefox extension to add emails to Notebook. I’ll still hav ethe problem of personal vs. work though.
It’s been a long time since I used FeedLounge and I’m sad to see the doors closing. It was truely a great app, maybe not the best service but the functionality was everything you’d need out of an online RSS reader.
After hearing I commented on Alex’s site:
Sadly I think the only logical option would be to opensource the project. For everyone to use on their own server and help contribute to fix the bugs and increase the overall functionality. Then if Scott wants to host feedlounge it could be ad supported or a paid hosted service.
I remember the days when fl had so much of my attention. Like Chris after you left it lost it’s appeal and GR launched it’s new UI.
I’m sure he’s not only spent a lot of time but a fair share of money so the open source solution while attractive for us may not be an option for the committed. However, I’m interested to see how much Scott gets or even wants.
I’ve been a loyal shopper of Amazon for years and I just noticed this last Friday that the problem to my unsaid grief for the last year or two have been the result of two accounts. It was a real pain to not have any order history online except my email archive. And I don’t know how it happened either because the puzzling thing, both accounts had the same email address and password. So there was no way to tell, except when I went to change my e-mail Friday I noticed my history showed up and I could log in with my other email perfectly fine.
Other then having a limited experience with amazon everything is fine now. Even my Prime memberships have been straightened out. And yes I actually had two paid for memberships; one I bought 6 months before the second without realizing it had only been 6 months. What a strange incident.
Looking at ReviewMe this morning I noticed Best UK Casinos wants me to review their site.
The Gaming Directory offers reviews of UK online casinos, poker rooms and land based casinos located in The United Kingdom. An indepth resource for UK casino gambling.
Well, the site will never come in handy for me since I live in the states and if … Read More »
March 10
For the past couple months I’ve been having some real problems with my Macbook Pro just shutting down when it goes to reserve power rather then gracefully shutting down and going into an automatic suspend where it restarts loading the cached memory like it never shut down at all. A huge feature I’ve been missing and had been too lazy to figure out. Then in the last few weeks it’s been just shutting down anywhere from 45 minutes to a full hour before the battery was supposed to run out. Extremely annoying when you are writing something and your work is completely lost. I was prepared to send the entire macbook pro back to Apple but instead I checked out if I was eligible for the battery recall that I remembered was such a edia blitz a while back and I then noticed the battery had swelled up. So I filled out the online form for a replacement.
The great news is, I finally have a fully working macbook pro thanks to Apple shipping the replacement overnight for free. I’m clocking about 3 hours of battery life compared to the 1.5-2 spontaneous hours I had just a few days ago. I also ordered another battery which I’ve heard good things about.
This is a prime example of participating in battery recalls instead of just ignoring them. It could have been a lot worse and my lap could have been destroyed or our house burnt down.
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