Blog Redesign…. kinda….

I don’t recall how long I’ve been using my previous blog design but I think it was at least 5 or more years since I put up that design when I moved from Blogger to WordPress.   I recently went through the themes that were available on WordPress.com and decided to refresh the design a little bit.  The newer theme doesn’t deviate too much from my old one since I am kind of lazy and so few people read the blog.  What I wish I did do was at least take a screen shot of the old blog design since now I can’t go back and reload it.

I like the new design that I picked out and I do recall that instead of Ocean Drive being the featured image on my blog, I changed it to a beach theme since I do live in Florida and I am more likely to visit the beach than I would South Beach.  Every time I do a refresh I like looking at some of my oldest posts to see what it is I was writing about.  The posts were much shorter back then but I don’t think I’ve changed that much.  I suppose it will be another 5 years until I refresh the design again but I happen to like this one a lot so it might last even longer than that.  Time to get to bed early since I have a very early flight home.  I can’t wait to be back in the warmth of Florida and away from Chicago.

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Wow 10 Years of Blogging

I just realized that I have been keeping this blog active for the last 10 years.   I’m pretty sure I don’t have a lot of readers because I don’t really blog about anything substational except my travels, games, and technology but I think its significant that I’ve kept it up this long.  I’ve definitely reduced the amount of posts over the years going from about 100 posts a year to somthing closer to 20 or something.  I should probably refresh the design or something since its been this way for at least 5 years but I’m a bit lazy to do so and my coding skills are really rusty.

I started my blog in January of 2005 when I was living in Tampa FL and I was using Blogger, before it was acquired by Google I think.  Back then my blog posts were relatively short so I used it more like Twitter before Twitter was even a thing on the internet.  I slowly progressed the blog and added widget and other things since I was trying out my coding skills when I was trying to learn Flash ActionScript 1.0.  Wow that makes me seem old since no one uses Flash anymore.

I forget when I did it but I eventually moved my blog to its current platform on WordPress.  My blogging has changed as technology has changed.  I’ve been more travel and technology gear focused since I started consulting.  I’d have to go back and read what my other posts were a few years ago to see what was in my head.  It’s almost like an online journal of my life over the last 10 years but of course I don’t blog about everything that happens since this is open to the public.  One thing that has defnitely changed is what I write my posts on.  I started like everyone else and used my regular old web browser.  I’ve since progressed to using an app on my iPad to do most of my posts these days and I’m even using my new bluetooth keyboard to type up this post.

I won’t be changing platforms for my blog although I have considered moving to Tumblr once or twice but the effort of exporting and re-importing all my posts seems to be too time consuming.  Maybe in the next 10 years I’ll make a few more improvements to my blog and maybe change some of the formatting .  I have linked my Twitter feed to this thing but I haven’t found a way to link up Facebook yet.  I’m sure I’ll find something else to blog about in the next few days but for now I’ll look forwar to the next 10 years of blogging.

Post Number 1000!!

I started blogging in 2005 and after 9 years I’ve finally hit 1000 blog posts.  A lot has definitely changed in 9 years since I started my blog.  If I hit the time machine button, I can tell you that I was living in Tampa FL when I first started my blog and my posts were really short back then and was mostly rants about my commute into work.  Its morphed over time but not that much.  It definitely reflects my career and family progression over the last 9 years.  With the way I write these days, it’ll probably be another 10 or more years until I can make 2000 posts.  Oh and just for giggles, happy Chinese New Year!  It’s the year of the Horse and thats my year 🙂

Happy 2014 Interweb Denizens

As is customary during this time of year, I’ve decided to add my first post of the new year.  I’ve been doing this for almost 9 years now (since 2005 when I started on Blogger) and I’m still pretty sure no one reads anything that I post.  Thats ok, I’m mostly posting for me and not really the masses.  The picture above is what I assume happened last night in Miami during the countdown to 2014.  I do know that Pitbull was playing at the American Airlines Arena too but alas I was at home with my family.  With my daughter sound asleep, my wife and I decided to watch We’re the Millers that we borrowed from my sister-in-law.  We did stay up to watch the ball drop (to my friend Wyatt’s credit, it does look like they put a bunch of Triforce symbols all over it).  I definitely didn’t meet my goal of 100 blog posts for 2013.  I fell way short by only posting 44 times which is really low for me but I guess that goes in keeping with the time that I have to blog which isn’t a lot. So today is actually new years day, that means its time to take down all the Christmas trimmings and box them away for another 11 months.  The best part though?  I still don’t have to even think about work until Monday since I took the rest of the week off 🙂

Time to get to work on those Christmas trimmings, the daughter is asleep for her nap so I “should” be able to get a lot done but procrastinating online is one of my few vices and I’m doing it right now with this blog post.  OK seriously, I’m OUT! Until the next post that is…….

2013 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2013 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 860 times in 2013. If it were a cable car, it would take about 14 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

Almost up to 1000 posts on my blog

Wow 980 Posts

I just published another post and this is what WordPress displayed on my Dashboard after it was published.  Looks like I need to post another 19 (this post is 981) in order to hit 1000.  The year is still young and I’m sure I’ll find something to blog about sooner or later. I guess this really isn’t a bad number.  I seem to average around 140 posts a year which is a lot although I’ve slowed down quite a bit but I know I can get to 1000 before the end of 2013 🙂

Using Flickr for WordPress

I’ve been using Flickr on and off for a while.  I have yet to find a photo sharing site that I really like thats free but I think that my problem is that I’ve been trying to find a site that will do everything I want when I should be using multiple sites for different purposes.  I came to this realization just today I think and I have a way that I can utilize flickr more and more.  The problem that I had with Flickr is that it only had my last 200 photos available for me to view.  The rest are still out there but I just have to do some digging to get to my photos.  For that reason I stopped using Flickr, I wanted to have access to my photo’s all the time online.  I’ve sort of given up on that and I don’t want my stuff to all be on the cloud anyway.

What I have found is that Flickr is going to be perfect for using with WordPress.  I didn’t know they had tight integration with WordPress until I decided to try it again today.  What I noticed is that I take pics and then I want to use them but WordPress also has a limit on what I upload but in terms of storage, not the number of pictures.  Since Flickr doesn’t really have limits on storage, just what you can view I think its the perfect service for bloggers that don’t need to use pics over and over again for their posts but just kind of for single use posts.  I know that in all of my blogging I haven’t had to re-use any pictures and I’ve been doing this for almost 6 years now.

The challenge now is being able to use Flickr in conjunction with my iPad, if there was something like that it would be super powerful for people like me.  I could upload pics online to Flickr then put them in a post on WordPress.  Maybe thats something I’m going to suggest to the Flickr team for their next iOS app update.