Posts Tagged ‘blog’

new addictions

Wednesday, July 17th, 2013

So it’s been a minute. Actually, it’s been a lot of minutes, and days — and it turns out the last time I posted anything here was 4 months ago. I promise there’s a good reason: I’ve been a busy bee.

There was a time when that really meant I was playing a lot of video games and sleeping in late and generally getting nothing useful done, but not anymore! Old addictions fell to new ones, and here I am getting my crap together like a real grown-up.

Old Addictions

Old Addictions

New Addictions

New Addictions

No one wants to read the boring details, so I’ll share what’s up and speculate about future time of which I’ve no guarantee.

the things:
  • Japanese: As you may know, my brother and his family live just outside of Tokyo now. Long story short, I’ve finally gotten serious about picking up the language. Estimated time to functional fluency is January 2015.
  • Fitness: Circa 2007, my brother got married. Pictures were taken, and holy mess, I was chubby! A great many wild goose chases, fallings-off-the-wagon, self-esteem battles, and reboots later, I finally have a handle on how nutrition works. Much progress has been made around the mid-section and in the weight room. Shreddedness, here I come.
  • Church: I hate to use a phrase with so much baggage as “church”, but I’m in a community where that is happening. My closest friends are from the singles group of the congregation I attend. We screw it up just like anyone else, except a lot is totally not-screwed-up. We are climbing rocks, and studying, and playing soccer, and cleaning messes, and singing… and generally living life together. There is a level of intimacy and shared experience that is sorely lacking. I’m not just talking about churches, either. It’s nice when someone knows what’s up because they saw my face and not my facebook.
  • Work: I have a real job now, and I love it. I do not dread going in the morning, like, ever. The days of my vagabonding are behind me (at least in remission) and I’m content with that. Programming and problem-solving and being let loose on whatever projects I want — it’s nice. Beyond that, the company treats me better than I could possibly have hoped.

So there’s the biggest chunks of my time in a nutshell. I’m migrating the blog to a personal journal of the non-emotional-vomit variety. Should be a little less talk and a lot more action. Wait… maybe the opposite? More posts.

The Best of the Internet

Friday, May 11th, 2012

These are my favorite links. Enjoy.

Fitness/Health
  • Mark’s Daily Apple – This is all about living/eating Primal.
  • MuscleHack – How to get ripped, including building that six-pack.
  • LeanGains – Intermittent Fasting, nutrition, and training. High quality material.
Spirituality
  • Stormented – My buddy Jonathan Stormant’s Christian perspectives.
  • Nerdlets – Where the Bible and technology meet.
Technology
Entertainment
  • PluggedIn – Content reviews on upcoming films from a Christian perspective.
  • LambdaGeneration – All things Valve and Half-Life.
  • Phoronix – The best Linux gaming site around.
Politics
Random
  • Yanghaiying – The cure for insomnia.
  • Ghostery – Everyone who uses the internet should have this.

wordpress plugins

Monday, March 21st, 2011

For those interested, here is a list of WordPress plugins I use for the site (listed alphabetically).

  • WordPress Audio Player: Provides a sleek flash player for all my mp3 links. (example)
  • Fallen Media Filter: Lets me embed pretty much any type of video or audio I would like with shortcodes. Old, but effective. (example)
  • Google Analytics for WordPress: Posts my Analytics code properly so I don’t have to edit every time I change themes.
  • Header and Footer: Allows me to place custom code in my header and footer so I don’t have to edit every time I change themes. Right now I use it to link my Pavatar on the off chance I visit a site that actually incorporates it.
  • OpenID: Incorporates an OpenID provider and consumer into my blog. I can sign in/comment on other websites using my blog as an OpenID, and you can leave comments with yours. This requires XRDS-Simple, so I have that installed too. I used phpMyID at one time, but it did not allow my blog to be a consumer.
  • Simple Facebook Connect: Allows you to leave comments via your Facebook profile. This plugin contains many modules for additional functionality.
  • Simple Twitter Connect: Allows you to leave comments via your Twitter account. This plugin also contains modules for additional functionality.
  • Spam Karma 2: This plugin hasn’t been in development for over two years, yet it still dominates at separating the wheat from the chaff.
  • Subscribe to Comments: Allows users to receive e-mail updates to comment replies.
  • WP Social Blogroll: This is a great feed-reading blogroll for WordPress. It duplicates the functionality found in Blogger’s sidebar.

facebook connect testing

Wednesday, November 4th, 2009

For some while now, my blog has been able to accept comments via OpenID. That means, if you have an account with Blogger, WordPress.com, LiveJournal, Yahoo, Flickr, MySpace, or any other OpenID provider, you can use that website address to leave comments without providing your Name or e-mail to the blog.

Most of my readers come from Facebook, though, and leave comments on the imported notes there. Now, they can leave comments straight on the blog via Facebook Connect (thanks to Otto‘s amazing Simple Facebook Connect plugins). Just by using the “connect with Facebook” button, you can log in via facebook to leave comments. This will also allow you to publish your comments to your feed, if you choose.

If anyone is willing to test this comment system for me, feel free to give it a go on this post.

Thanks!

-Lloyd

blog list for WordPress

Thursday, October 22nd, 2009

Since I’ve been blogging over the past 3-4 years, I’ve looked at several different software solutions. I’ve stayed with WordPress because it is simple and intuitive, but also allows me to maintain whatever level of control I desire through plugins and access to the code itself.

Nonetheless, Google’s Blogger offers a lot of nifty features, and sometimes I get jealous when WordPress can’t match up. One such feature is the blog list. Essentially, it is a feed aggregator that takes the form of a dynamic link list. My suspicion is that Google runs a specialized version of Reader to accomplish this. At the time of this writing, WordPress does not have this functionality included in the core version.

After much searching, I found Jan Weinschenker‘s Feed Reading Blogroll plugin. It does require some setup, but if you are savvy enough to host your own blog, you can probably handle it. (I am not sure if you can do this with a wordpress.com blog, as you need to be able to install the plugin.)

First, it requires that you obtain a key for Google’s AJAX Feed API. This is easily done and only requires a Google account.

There is an option to enable feed discovery through the Google API, and that works very well. It appears that the favicon image can be automatically discovered too, but for some reason the widget would not display it. I had to define each link’s favicon url in the link editor to get it to work; that can be tedious. My only other complaint is that some of the plugin’s setup options are redundant, and it’s hard to tell at first which takes precedent.

Overall, I’m very pleased that a plugin exists to match Blogger’s blog list. Hopefully this will keep someone else from having to search as long as I did.