I have been blogging for … well to be honest about 10 years. It was a long time ago that I started my first blog. I maintained it until my second child was born and then my updates got fewer and fewer until I stopped updating all together about 2 years ago when I first started youth pastoring. Several months later I felt the need to start blogging again, but I was so over the previous blog. It really wasn’t who I was anymore. I started a blog on blogger and built up a small following. I was learning a lot about writing web pages again at this same time. I started designing webpages before I started blogging and then got away from the whole thing because of college and a family. Then I became a pastor at a smallish church. We have enough money to pay the staff, the bills, and for ministry but not for design work. I started refreshing myself on building webpages so I could create one for the church. I learned that the internet is a very different place after a 10+ year hiatus. The most basic concepts apply but the details are incredibly different.

I began applying my skills to blogger but felt really limited by the environment. Eventually I made the transition to WordPress and became mildly addicted to doing design work for this platform. It creates a great framework so I don’t have to worry about talking to a database and can focus on making the pages look right. I got my site done first and learned a lot. I did a few other sites for friends and a couple of nonprofits I work with. Earlier this week I was contacted to create a blog theme for income. This is something I’ve never done before so I began rushing to put together pricing information. I researched a lot of people who do this kind of work and found that a lot of them charge sky high prices. Since I am just starting off I put my fee structure about half what the “more reasonable” people were charging and embarked on a new phase of my net life.

The site was built on the Genesis theme framework. This framework is like icing on a great cake. It has “hooks” built into it so a designer can add features to a template almost anywhere. It is the equivalent of a peg board. Want to hand a tool in a particular spot? Put a small piece of code in that tells the theme what you want to attach and where. It’s pretty much that easy. Of course you still have to either find or create the tool you want to add, but the theme removes a lot of work. The reason it is amazing is, once you’ve built some specific kind of tool, you can keep that code and insert it elsewhere under different circumstances. Plus it has features on the back end that allow the site admin to change the locations of certain features without having to know the coding. Once it is setup correctly a person with no knowledge of php, css, or html could make significant changes to the website.

I really enjoyed working on this website and I’m really proud of what I was able to do on the front end and the back. Check it out. marty duane

Also, I’ll be making some changes around here soon. I’ll be keeping this blog but I’m setting up a business site and portfolio.

Related posts:

1. Some new digs for Christmas and Web-fu Merry Christmas to me, I got a new theme. This...
2. WordPress a journey About two months ago I began investigating using Wordpress as...
3. Call to arms … pens … well keys I am a pretty busy person. Most of my regular...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

I haven’t done a geek post in a while and there is a law in which I will lose my geek card if I don’t write about the latest Apple product. Now I am not an apple fanboi, but they do make some great products. More than that they have an incredible PR department. We want to love the look and style because they convince us we want to. Look back at the first iPod or iMac. By today’s standards it looks clunky, but when it came out we believed it looked like a curvy sexy future. Each iteration of their product convinces us we need that new sleek look.

Still, the product behind the design is pretty solid. Macs aren’t the perfect and never fail hardware we are led to believe, but since everything is proprietary things tend to work together. The user interface is the first thought, not the after though. Everything is built around the experience, and that is good planning for most people.

This brings up the latest product. The iPad. Now I get the play on the name. They have iMac, iPod, and now iPad. Each has 3 letters following “i.” I don’t know that “Pad” was the best choice though. Still the product looks amazing. It is like a giant version of the iPod touch. Slightly smaller than a sheet of paper and about half an inch thick. It weighs a mere 1.5 lbs (1.6 with 3G support). The price point feels a smidge high but I expect that will drop quick enough. I also expect a few other issues to be dealt with in the next year.

Right now it appears that you have to stand the screen vertically to use to optional keyboard accessory. I would prefer to lay it horizontally like a normal wide-screen monitor. It also seems to use the same 2-in-1 charger/proprietary connector that the iPods use. While this does mean that the iPod accessories you have might work with this unit it also means that it will be subject to cord snags and damage. I’d like to see a magnetic inductive charger. Then if the cord gets snagged it will fall off without damaging anything.

This means I likely won’t adopt for a generation or two because I know if I’ve thought of it, then Apple is probably working on it. Of course, if someone were feeling really generous and bought one for me I wouldn’t return it … hint hint.

Related posts:

1. Some new digs for Christmas and Web-fu Merry Christmas to me, I got a new theme. This...
2. Geek your cook on Hey, if I’m going to be talking about all things...
3. Geek your Tuesday with Music A couple weeks ago I bore witness to a dream...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Merry Christmas to me, I got a new theme. This blog theme is a modified version of “Meta-Morphosis” from Woo Themes. They make some wicked themes and most will cost you, but they are worth it. They also make a few for free. The great part is the free ones are very feature rich. In fact, there are several options with this theme that I’m not using just yet, but will be.

You can see the finished product, but what did I have to work with? Well here is a screen shot from the theme demo over at Woo Themes.

As you can see I made several small changes to the overall look. As part of my Christmas present for you I want to tell you about how to make this easy.

First, a theme like this is pretty customizable out of the box, but it needs a few tweaks to make it mine. Graphics can be done in a few different programs. If you have the money and want to learn how to use them properly, get Adobe products like Photoshop. If you are flat broke, like me, then try out some open source stuff like “Gimp” for free. This is a great program that only gets more powerful with additional free plug-ins. If you are going to get serious about modifying themes to fit your site you have to have some kind of real graphic program.

Now either you have made some graphic changes, or had someone do it for you but now you need to edit the CSS to make things look right after all, not everything is done with graphics, much of the website is code. The absolute must have tool for this is FireBug for FireFox. Seriously, if you work on webpages and don’t use this then you are making life so much harder than it needs to be. Firebug not only shows the code each element of a page uses, it also shows layouts, css, and dependencies so complex pages will make sense. Code is “nested” so you can quickly scan through containers, and best of all you can edit the page live so you will know exactly how those changes affect the end product. The changes aren’t saved to the server though so make sure you keep notes on what you are doing so the changes can be made permanent. My only complaint is that the program isn’t on other browser platforms so you still have to open them up after you make changes to make sure things look good across the board.

Anyways, I just let everyone in on the secret to my web-fu. Now that the mystery is gone why don’t you tell me what you think about the site. Is there anything I need to fix still?

Related posts:

1. Sex is amazing So I was going to write about this shirt that...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

OK so I’ve been wanting to do a giveaway for a while, but I can’t really think of anything. I put it out on twitter last night and got a couple of good suggestions, but I’m interested in more ideas so here’s the deal, I have 20 invites for Google Wave. I am happy to give those away to people who comment about what I should give away.

This giveaway is open until 20 people have won or December 20^th (this Sunday) which ever comes second. If I have more than 20 people entered by Sunday then I will randomly select 20 winners after the contest ends on Sunday. If not then I will send out invites to everyone that entered and keep sending them until I have distributed all 20.

To recap, if you want a Google Wave invite please comment with a suggestion on what else I should give away.

Related posts:

1. My not too twisted giveaway I have read the first few chapters so far and...
2. And the winner is… I had 5 people enter my book give away. I’ll...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

About two months ago I began investigating using WordPress as a blog platform over blogger. I had installed it on my local machine and experimented with it occasionally in my free time, of which I have little. Two weeks ago I began the process of moving my blog over to WordPress and one week ago I went live. Peter of Rediscovering the Church helped my quite a bit as I began this journey. I have reached a few conclusions.

Blogger is a simpler platform for basic blogging needs. It is easy to setup and takes little knowledge to make a nice, clean blog. Of course it also takes little knowledge to make a cluttered, useless blog. Blogger has a lot of useful features for being found and followed right out of the gate, but then you begin to reach the limits of the platform. There are many ways to add functionality to blogger but I’ve found that these tend to be clunky and limited. My best example is Intense Debate. It is possible to install this into blogger but it is missing many features. You cannot import your old comments into the ID system and it does not sync your comments so if you choose to leave the system then any ID comments will not roll back into blogger. More over it seems to be slower and more glitch prone in the blogger environment.

WordPress is a different beast all together. It is not quite as user friendly. Well, that isn’t entirely true. It is certainly easy to use in its most basic form, but the generic options are limited and need upgrading to be useful. For example, the basic settings show your webpages at .php?query pages, which are the way the server sees the page. This is not very useful for human interaction or web search algorithms. These settings can be changed but this involves some exploration of the WordPress consol and possibly making some changes to the file permissions on your hosting server. In my case I had to make some changes before I could show my pages in a more search engine and user friendly way.

Of course this is offset by the number of plugins available. The difficulty is picking the right plugins since most functions can be done by many different scripts. That is where Peter also helped me. Being a geek I am not satisfied to leave well enough alone and so I’ve already begun modifying my plugins so they are more unique to my site. Peter uses the “cute profiles” plugin, which displays my various social interaction platforms on the left in nice little icons. I made some small changes that allow mine to change size and go full color on hover not just go full color. It is more like that quick silver dock in the Mac OS that way.

WordPress also gives me more direct control over the layout of my site. In blogger you can directly edit the CSS and make some major changes to the template but the level of customization is limited to positions. With WordPress I can change the function of my website. I can make it a blog, a Content Management Service, or even an online shop.

I have a lot of learning to do and I’m working on building my own templates, but I’m really enjoying the journey. I’m looking forward to helping a friend with her transition into WordPress soon.

What are your experiences with blogger, WordPress, or other blogging platforms? What is your favorite WordPress plugin?

Related posts:

1. Word Press Geekout I have been blogging for … well to be honest...
2. Call to arms … pens … well keys I am a pretty busy person. Most of my regular...
3. Blog Carnival: Remember If you don’t know about the blog carnival then check...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

A couple weeks ago I bore witness to a dream of geek culture in a merger of science and art in one t-shirt.

A couple years back the guys at Think Geek created a prank product for April Fool’s day (a day I truly love) called the “Personal Sound Track” shirt. This prank gained a huge fan base and so they made this shirt a reality. Thus the interactive sound shirts were born. From this came the “Electronic Drum Kit” shirt. Certainly everyone who has ever sat in church beating out mad drum rolls on the seat in front of them would desire this shirt, but some of us need more. Fortunately Think Geek has come through. Witness the guitar shirt.

Related posts:

1. Geek up At some point in the past I was posting 6...
2. Geek your cook on Hey, if I’m going to be talking about all things...
3. My Big Fat Geek Wedding So this week I am officiating my first wedding. I...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Yeah so I am just all over the place right now. Fridays I was trying to bring a little more geek, but sadly I started a new series last week instead of the geek because I’m feeling lazy. So now I bring you the geek update on Tuesday. Getchergeekon. (seems like there is probably a convention out there with this name. If not I call dibs because there needs to be one)

I recently, as in last night, found out about a really frigintacular music resource called Groove Shark. Basically it is a music database much like what you might have in the form of your personal music collection. The difference is this system has way more songs than I do and can find new music based on what I am listening to. I’ve used a few other resources like this but generally they start making recommendations that are nothing like what I want to listen to.

So far this has been a much better engine for finding new songs than other resources I’ve used in the past. As you add more songs to your listening queue and rate them gets smarter with the “you might like” songs it plays.

It also has some other nice features. There is an online community where you can find and follow other users and shape your listening based on their choices too. It also integrates with various other social networks. You can share what you are listening to via twitter, for example.

The best thing is it is free. They have a small ad banner but whatever. You can also pay $3/month or $30/year for VIP status which gets some extra benefits and removes the ads. This is a really good price if you can’t stand even a small add banner and want some of the extra features like first selection of new songs and extra themes.

I’d like to see a few other options, but right now it is clean and works well so I’m not sure if it is a good idea to try and make many changes. One of the things I really think that someone needs to figure out is a mood based play list. I can do it manually but I want to have something a little more intuitive. Basically a way of saying what kind of mood I’m in and then the system noting what songs I start selecting and then making recommends based on that. Next time I select the same mood it should know what I’m interested in listening too and make it happen.

I’d also like a preview of some of the VIP features to see if it is worth my money, but over all I’m really happy with the service, so check it out.

Related posts:

1. Geek your cook on Hey, if I’m going to be talking about all things...
2. Geek up At some point in the past I was posting 6...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Hey, if I’m going to be talking about all things geek then I need to make a few things clear right up front. Geek culture is vast. I am generally a techno-geek but I’m also a language geek, a comic geek, a film geek, and several other categories of geek. Generally you can be a geek in almost every niche of culture by fully investing in that niche. However, for the purpose of this blog I will be using a more mainstream version of the term, so geekiness is measured by the technology invested or referenced as well as the potential for science. Science Fiction would fit in this category as well even if there is no basis in real science because I am not so concerned about real science, just potential for science.

Now that we are all on the same page, how does a geek cook? There are the old standby geek meals, which include pizza (frozen or delivered), microwave burritos, ramen noodles, and energy drinks, but many geeks want more. I, for one, believe that geek food can be good food. To that end I am gracious for Good Eats with Alton Brown. He brings geek chique to the Food Network. You can tell the difference between standard cooking and geek cooking because of the science and the tools used. In most episodes processes are described in science terms as well as anthropology and other useless information for actually making the meal. Useless to any non-geek but for the geek elite it is as precious as the food that nourishes us. Beyond that the tools used are impressive and diverse. It is nice enough that there are plenty of standard tools, but the geek code holds that if you can make something better to do a job then don’t buy something to do the job. Alton often builds pretty amazing devices to do his cooking and also finds ways to incorporate power tools, which is a win.

Of course, geek cooking doesn’t end with a single show. There are a multitude of gadgets out there for the geek in us all. There are fridges with tvs in the door and amazing new technology like the anti-griddle. These might be a bit out of the budget for your average geek, but that doesn’t mean we have to go without. The nice thing about being a geek is the sheer volume of useful but no longer used gadgetry in the world. For example, I have a dead laptop with a perfectly good LCD screen. A little bit of dremel work, soldering, and hacking can result in a refrigerator with a TV in the door. If I have a serious need for an anti-griddle I could rig of something pretty quickly with an aluminum plate, and a modified window air conditioner.

Geek cooking is about the technology but also about making things happen and that is why I’m proud to be a geek. I’m feeling inspired to turn my fridge into a tv right now, I wonder if my wife will let me?

Related posts:

1. Geek up At some point in the past I was posting 6...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

At some point in the past I was posting 6 days a week and had a nice theme going for each day. Then the summer happened. Now I’m trying to recover a bit and start my regular posting again. I could go back and see what Friday is all about but I decided that I’d rather start something new. I have claimed to be a geek, even using it in my name, but I spend so little time showing off my geek. Ok sure the Fellowship of the Travelling Smarty Pants crew knows of my geek-fu as I have handled many fixes for them, but it is time to let the geek make regular appearances. In that vein I will be trying to highlight some specific piece of geekdom each and every Friday.

Instead of picking a specific gadget or software today I think it would be great to point to one of the best sources of geekitude on the internet, Think Geek. This website has some of the best geek apparel and gadgets. I have a few items and a wish list a mile long. Some of the offerings can be enjoyed by anyone regardless of their geek-belt degree, but many of the items couldn’t be understood without fairly advanced geek-fu. A great example is a shirt I love which reads “There are 10 kinds of people in the world, those that understand binary and those that don’t.” Now if you have a sufficient geekabulary then you will get the shirt. If you are my mother-in-law you will laugh because you think you get it, but the joke is not, “only 10 people in the world understand binary.” Since I am in the category that understands binary I get the shirt and I also get the binary clock that is sitting on my entertainment center.

I hope you will find this merchant of geekery as enjoyable as I do.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

1. 1. He is a bigger geek than me

Seriously guys, this guy is like the geek extreme. I have seen him in concert a few times, I have read one of his books and let me just say the guy make me look normal in his geekitude. I don’t know if I could ever attain that level of geek. He is the 9^th dan geek master and I am a lowly white belt. The guy won’t use public bathrooms with electronic eyes because they cause him existential crisis. Now that is geek there.

2. He has more energy than me

I have a significant amount of energy. My youth regularly ask how much coffee or how many Monsters I have had. They think I must be bouncing off the walls hyper because of something I have ingested. The truth is it has been nearly 2 months since my last monster. I have more energy than pretty much the entire youth group. At King’s Fest I was the last to go to bed and the first to wake up and I was pushing hard the entire time, but then I watch David Crowder on stage and can’t help but think that the world is standing still while he bounces through it.

3. He is beast on the guitar

Have you heard him? I can’t imagine there is a style of music he can’t play. I love how each song he is bringing out a new guitar. One day I hope to be able to play about 1/10^th as good.

4. He has a Guitar Hero controller that plays music

Did I mention he plays a different guitar with every song? Yeah one song got the Guitar Hero guitar. Now I know he didn’t make it but he pays it and that if frigintastical in geekdom so far as I am concerned. On a side note I am now making plans on how to one up him. I think I can make something pretty easy using the wii version and connecting via blue tooth to the computer. Then I can not only get the sounds like his but I can use the accelerometer in the wii-mote for distortion effects.

5. He plays a lime green keytar

One of the other guitars was a keytar. Not just any keytar but a lime green one. It is amazing. I want it.

6. He can rock the Super Mario Theme

Yeah I am a child of the 80s and hearing the Super Mario Theme triggers a deep part of my brain that makes me desire to jump on people’s heads. If I were David Crowder I would end up jump into the crowd after playing that. He apparently has more restraint than I.

7. He is a bigger twitter ho than me

I have only started following @crowderband. Sure there may not be as many updates but they did make a video called “Twitter will kill you” that is unreal. Seriously you won’t believe how amazing it is until you see it.

8. He has a wicked goatee

I could grow a goatee like his, but it would take ages and I’m just not that dedicated.

9. He has an über cool fro.

Ok, I’ll admit I have amazing hair but that fro is unreal. I could do mine up like that but it wouldn’t be as awesome.

Now for one reason why David Crowder is less frigintastical than me.

1. He is from Waco, TX

This isn’t just Texas. That is bad enough. He is from Waco. That is the same place as David Koresh. David Crowder … David Koresh. I’m just saying they have the same first name and share the same city. Plus Texas heat must boil people’s brains every summer. No wonder so many crazy people live there right @katdish?

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.