Blogging | Vegas Geek

Return of the Mobile Micro Blog

August 14, 2010 4 Comments

After 5 years of trying, I was finally able to get my hands on the domain name VegasGeek.com. Best Buy owned it at one point, then it changed hands a couple times between people who would never respond to my offers to purchase it. That changed recently and I’m a pretty happy camper.

Now that I have it, what the heck should I do with it was the next question that went through my mind. It sat dormant for a couple months until I saw this theme from WooThemes called Object. Bingo!

I’m a big fan of my friend Todd’s photo blog, 606diaries.com. He takes photos with his camera ~~every day~~ frequently at 6:06 pm. He’ll post the photo and will go back later to write a quick post about what he was doing. I’ve wanted to do something similar for quite a while. Finally, it’s ready to go.

A quick install of WordPress and the Postie plugin and the site was basically ready for blogging on the go. I take the pics with the iPhone and email them to a secret address. Postie checks the mail once an hour and if it finds an email from me it cranks out a new post. Super simple!

~~I do have one gripe about the new site. If you subscribe to the RSS, the photo doesn’t get sent. Just the content of the post. I’m going to see if I can get that fixed pretty quick though.~~ – FIXED!!

My goal is to try and post at least once a day. We’ll have to see how that goes.

Do you have a similar project? Leave a link in the comments. I’d love to check it out!

Filed Under: Blogging Tagged With: iPhone, micro-blog, mobile

From Shoe to WordPress Theme

July 25, 2010 4 Comments

You know how easy it is to switch themes in WordPress, right? Click Appearance > Themes and then activate the new one you want. Simple. Give me something that easy to switch around and I’m going to use it. A lot.

I’ve been wanting to mess with creating a child-theme using the new WordPress default theme, twentyten for a while now. I didn’t really have anything specific in mind, but wanted to go through the process to get myself familiar with it.

For those who may not know what a child-theme is, it’s a way to use an existing theme as a base while overriding the pieces that you want to change with your own elements. The great part is, you can change as much or as little as you want. Making your edits in your own child theme makes it simple to upgrade the parent theme down the line.

So how does a shoe become a theme?

Last week I bought a pair of old-school Vans that have this cool white stitching. I liked the look and that was enough to kick start the idea for my theme. There’s no better way to learn something than by diving in and trying it out and now that I had an idea in mind, it was time to dig in.

There are already a bunch of theme frameworks available specifically designed for using as a base for child themes. I made the decision to use the new twentyten theme as my base as I knew it already had many of the basic design elements I wanted. Personally, if I was going to use a theme framework, I’d likely go with the Genesis Framework from Studiopress.

What I learned during the process

Creating a child theme is ridiculously simple.
I won’t bother you with a tutorial here, but if you want to learn more about how-to, the tutorial at op111.net is pretty solid.
Me and CSS are not friends.
If you want to develop themes these days, you need to know CSS. But seriously, the stuff just pisses me off at every turn. If it was up to me, I’d just use tables to lay out the theme. But that didn’t go over well.
I really enjoy the development process.
I have been building websites for over 15 years and one thing that never gets old is the feeling I get when hit save on a file, open a browser and first see my work come to life. I’m not even talking about the whole site all at once. I’m talking about the detail work. Tweak this or that, hit save, refresh the page and Bang, there is your little slice of success.

I don’t think I’m 100% finished with the theme. I think there are still some things I’d like to tweak. It’s not winning any awards, but I’m really liking the new theme.

Credit where due

I owe a ton of thanks to Shayne for his help with the new theme. Every time I ran in to a CSS issue I wasn’t able to solve, Shayne was there to get me back on track. Have you ever heard the phrase “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know”? I proved that over and over again this weekend. Thanks, Shayne.

Filed Under: Blogging, WordPress Tagged With: child-theme, vans, WordPress

Blog World Expo 09 wrapup

October 18, 2009

Blog World Expo 2009 is in the books. The parties have all ended and most people in attendance are either home already or heading in that direction. I’m one of the lucky ones who lives right here in Las Vegas, so my trip home is quite a bit shorter (20 minutes) than most. I do not envy those that have to spend today or tomorrow traveling back to your families. While it great to be at events like Blog World, no matter how you slice it, traveling sucks. I wish you all a quick & safe trip home with no delayed flights!

As for the show itself, I’m going to need to write two different posts to cover it all. This one will focus more on Blog World as a whole. I’ll write a follow-up chronicling my experience as the organizer and track leader for WordCamp Las Vegas.

I have now been to all 3 of the Blog World events, and I had attended one of the New Media Expo event a while back. I seem to remember there being at least one or two more aisles of vendor booths at last year’s event. This is not really a surprise as all conventions in Las Vegas have seen a drastic reduction in vendors and attendees as the economy has been in the crapper. Even still, there was a decent collection of booths and I enjoyed walking the aisles and checking out their wares.

Since I started recording the Weekly WordPress Podcast a couple months back, I was really looking forward to checking out some of the hardware and software vendors in that space. I was really hoping to find a company that had mixing boards on hand that I could get an idea how they may solve some of my technical issues I’m having. Unfortunately, there wasn’t one to be had. I think the podcasting community has such great potential and I would like to see more involvement in that community at Blog World.

If you know me at all, you know that I’m a WordPress junkie. So it should be no surprise that I was quite bummed to hear that the Automattic team, as a whole, would not be on hand for the event. I understand that they have a yearly retreat where the entire company works together from one location for a week, but, the timing of it is pretty darn incredible. I can’t help but feel that there is some sort of “office politics” that kept them from being on hand this weekend. The biggest problem I have with them not being there is that it robs the Blog World attendees of the opportunity to walk up and say hello to Matt and thank him for the amazing contributions they have made to the blogging world. I know it means a lot to Matt to hear a heart-felt story of appreciation for the product that he loves and I also know, from experience, how nice it is to say thanks, in person, to one of the people who makes it all possible.

OK, that’s enough complaining. With those two negatives aside, I really did have a great time at the event. A huge part of that is getting to speak face-to-face with people that I’ve met over the past 3 years of Blog World and all the WordCamp events I’ve been to this year. The networking opportunities this weekend were abundant! Before the start of the day, between sessions and at the after parties on Thursday, Friday and Saturday… Although it makes for a very tired set of feet and vocal cords when it’s all over, it is absolutely 100% worth it and I’d do it again next weekend if I could!

Since I was running the WordCamp event, most of the show content that I was able to hear was from those presentations. I think I can safely say that I took more notes and got more actionable items out of this weekend than I did at last year’s Blog World or any of the WordCamps I’ve been to this year. Not taking ANYTHING away from those other events, it’s more a function of being able to actually sit and listen! Since the Blog World team was in charge of all stage, lighting, projector, etc…, it meant I could introduce the speakers and, for the most part, have a seat and listen. It was a great experience!

It has been an extremely fun and informative weekend (can you call Wednesday afternoon through Sunday at 1am a ‘weekend’) and I am already looking forward to next year’s event. Big thanks to the organizers who spent countless hours putting this together! Rest up. You get to start planning again in a few weeks.

Filed Under: Blogging Tagged With: #bwe09, Blog World Expo

Get rid of what's stopping you

August 18, 2009

Hey don’t look now, but this is my 3rd blog post in 3 days. No, I didn’t crawl out from under a rock. No, I wasn’t in a coma. What was stopping me from blogging, you ask? Well, it was my blog.

At the beginning of August we had a group of friends over, including Mr 4th Place himself, Craig. Craig and Ashley were in town from North Carolina where they moved for some crazy reason. But, I digress. Apparently one of the ways that Craig keeps up with what is going on in Vegas is by reading the blogs of his buddies in Sin City. He made it quite clear that I have not been much help lately as my updates have been fewer and far between. I looked back and sure enough, Craig was right. Being right did NOT help him finish higher than 4th place in our poker tournament this time around, but again, I digress.

Sceen Shot I really enjoy the process of blogging. I love writing, I love researching topics when needed, I love telling silly stories. One other thing I love is messing with my site. Before the last time I updated my site template, I searched for quite a while to find a theme that I liked. I had settled on one of the themes from Woo Themes called Busy Bee. I loved the graphics that went along with each story. I felt they were an exciting part of the post and enhanced the visitors overall experience. But, over time, I found that those images had a totally different effect on me. They were stopping me from blogging. So as much as I loved the layout, it was time to say goodbye to Busy Bee.

In the past I have been known to take my laptop to lunch with me and type out a blog post over a burger and fries. But, what I recently realized was that since I needed to also create a header graphic, which usually requires poking around Flickr or Google, I wasn’t always able to complete a post. Instead I would put off writing the post until after work. But, by the time I’d get home, I’d have dinner, maybe watch a little TV and the momentum I had for writing the post had left me. If I sat down and tried to write it the next day, the story just wasn’t there. The moment had passed and that post was lost forever. And yet somehow, I didn’t immediately realize how it was impacting my blog. That is, until Craig pointed it out.

Here we are with a new theme. I still have the ability to add graphics to my posts, but, they aren’t required. The hurdle has been removed and hopefully I can get back to writing on a regular basis. So far, so good.

Take some time and figure out what is getting in the way of your productivity. Spend a little time removing the obstacle in your way. You’ll be glad you did.

Filed Under: Blogging, Ranting Tagged With: Blogging, productivity

Improve your blog in 31 days

March 31, 2009

A few times over the past couple years, some friends and I took part in a few 30 day blog challenges. The challenge was to write a blog post every day for 30 days. The goal was to train ourselves to getting in the habit of writing on a regular basis. The result was less than perfect. I ended up with at least half a dozen posts written at 11:45 PM that were hardly worth my time to write. I’ve sworn to myself that I won’t subject myself (or my readers) to that mess ever again. That doesn’t mean I’m not up for a good blogging challenge!

Darren Rowse from ProBlogger.net is putting together the “31 Days to Build a Better Blog” challenge. Each day he’ll send out an email that will have a 10-15 minute task for you to do in the interest of improving your blog.

Now this is the type of challenge I can get excited about!

If you aren’t familiar with Darren, his blog at ProBlogger.net has over 80K readers and his blog at Digital-Photograpy-School.com has over 160K readers. It’s not a stretch to say the guy knows what he’s talking about when it comes to building a blog. If he’s willing to share some of his insight, you’d be silly not to listen.

The challenge appears is set to start on April 6th. Register now and get ready to take your blog to the next level!

Leave a message in the comments if you plan on taking part in the challenge. We’ll compare notes when it’s all over.

[photo credit: James C. Mattison]

Filed Under: Blogging Tagged With: blog, challenge, problogger

The birth of Beer & Blog Las Vegas

January 30, 2009

“Who would have thought that all this would have grown out of WordCamp:Las Vegas?” That’s a question I’ve been asked several times over the past few weeks while attending Beer & Blog.

If you haven’t heard, Beer & Blog is a weekly meeting that takes place on Thursday nights at the Freakin’ Frog. A group of Las Vegas blogging and social media enthusiasts get together to talk about all aspects of blogging and social networking.

The idea for beer & blog was introduced to me by Aaron Hockley, who I met while organizing the WordCamp:Las Vegas conference. Aaron was organizing a similar conference in Oregon and mentioned to me that he was interested in speaking on the topic of Beer & Blog and how it has helped to explode the tech scene up in Oregon. After hearing his explanation, I knew this would be an excellent opportunity to bring the Las Vegas blogging community together and hopefully start our own group. I invited Aaron to speak at WordCamp, and to say that his message was well received would be a tremendous understatement! Before the end of the conference, one of the attendees, Jackie Mason, had already contacted the folks at Beer & Blog and we were set up with our own Las Vegas chapter. 4 short days later, using Twitter as the main source of promotion, we had our first Beer & Blog event with roughly 30 people in attendance.

I’ve tried in the past to coordinate weekly/monthly meetings to talk about blogging over beers, but it has been difficult to gain interest and the idea would end up being scrapped. So why is working this time? I think the answer is WordCamp. At WordCamp we had a room FULL of people who are already interested in blogging and were taking steps to better their blogging through education from other like-minded individuals. When Aaron introduced them all to the idea of Beer & Blog, the lightbulb went on over all their heads. I had a dozen people come up to me asking if we were going to get something like that going here in Las Vegas. The interest was definitely there. All it needed now was somebody to step up and set the date. Jackie stepped up, made it happen and the rest, as they say, is history.

While it’s too early to tell how the group will hold together over the long haul, the early results are impressive. We had 30 people in attendance that first week, a little over 20 people the second week and a very impressive 40 person turn-out last night.

So, to answer that question, “Who would have thought…?”, the answer is me. I knew Las Vegas had a passionate group of bloggers and I’m thrilled that we are finding each other and sharing our knowledge over a pint of beer.

Come join us and help put the “Social” back in social networking.

Filed Under: Blogging, Social Media, WordCamp Tagged With: #bnblv, beer & blog, WordCamp

JHU Face lift, 2009

January 26, 2009

I’ve known for a while that I have wanted to change the way that JohnHawkinsUnrated.com has looked. A big part of the issue was trying to figure out what the heck I wanted to do with the site. I poured over hundreds of templates trying to figure out what I was aiming for. Almost every theme that I liked was more of a magazine/newspaper style with lots of different areas that all required some form of separate content. The more I thought about it, the less I felt that this was the way I wanted to go with my blog. Hell, that’s pretty much what stopped me from blogging on geeeek.com was a lack of direction but still having the desire to write.

At the end of the day, the biggest question I had to ask myself was: do I want to try and turn my blog in to a way to make money? The more I thought about it, the more I came back with a resounding NO. JHU was started as a way for me to just write what I want to write about. Be it personal experience, product review, movie review or just a place to rant about whatever is bothering me. And, after a year of doing just that, I’ve come to the conclusion that THIS is exactly how it will stay.

So, about the face lift. After searching through all the templates, I realized exactly what I wanted to get from my theme. 2 column, clean design with a large content area to display photos in posts. I first found this theme a week or so back when I had the same list of needs for a different site, PhotoSafariNoobs.com. The more I looked at the template, the more I realized this is exactly what I’m looking for on JHU. I’m sure I’ve got a little bit of clean-up left to do, but I’m not worried about it too much.

And now that the design is out of the way, I can get back to working on content.

Stay tuned.

Filed Under: Blogging, WordPress Tagged With: themes, update

Return of the Mobile Micro Blog

From Shoe to WordPress Theme

Blog World Expo 09 wrapup

Get rid of what's stopping you

Improve your blog in 31 days

JHU Face lift, 2009

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