At first I thought it had to be a joke, but they have some tier 1 actors and I’m actually looking forward to watching a Western for the first time since Wild Wild West. I hope it lives up to my expectations, unlike Wild Wild West.
I just deactivated and removed most of my plugins. After a lot of thought I narrowed all my plugins down to just 6.
- Akismet: Because I’m sick of spam comments.
- Audio Player: For my audio posts
- Genesis Featured Widget Amplified: To build my featured posts (I wrote this one)
- Google Analytics for WordPress: I might just add the code manual and drop it but it is so nice.
- Gravity Forms: To handle my contact form, but it does so much more
- WP DBManager: To handle backups and other DataBase needs
Everything else is coded into the theme, which is built on the Genesis Framework. That’s how I can avoid so many plugins.
I’m moving over to a new blog format, this is one step in my plans to post more. I can use a lot of new post options, such as this “Aside.” Being able to write short updates, drop in a video, or other such things should make blogging a more regular event for me.
Word Press Geekout
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 … [Read more...]
Feeling Generous?
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 … [Read more...]
Some new digs for Christmas and Web-fu
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. … [Read more...]
Give Away
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 20th (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 … [Read more...]
WordPress a journey
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 … [Read more...]
Geek your Tuesday with Music
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 … [Read more...]
Groove This
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 … [Read more...]