Say someone you knew was throwing a big party out on a small yacht. The invitation started among friends, the food was good, the atmosphere was fantastic and everyone had a really great time. It went so well in fact that this friend decided to throw another similar party. All the guests had such a great time that they in turn invited a whole lot of their friends. The boat was starting to get crowded, but having more people also made it in a lot of cases more fun. That party went so successful that the boat owner decided they should do it again and this time invite anyone and everyone they could find and a lot of the guests did the same. The more the merrier right? So this time the it’s packed. All of a sudden the party isn’t so fun anymore. Instead of atmosphere, guests can’t even move. In fact it’s crossed the line to straight-up dangerous. The weight and person limit is way beyond recommended and a lot of the guests at the party at this point don’t even understand what it’s like to be on a boat. In an attempt to make the experience more fun, it’s created a dangerous situation that could even risk sinking the entire yacht.

I think in the same fashion, bandwagon followers will sink the Facebook and Twitter ship.

More and more products and brands are trying to leverage the success and usefulness of Facebook and Twitter for their own good. It seems you can’t look too many places and not see a little blue F and/or a little blue T that indicate you can share or somehow use this experience to share with your social circle. Let’s face it, they are everywhere. Even a lot of places they simply shouldn’t be. While I at first welcomed and embraced having those kinds of tools and appreciated the one-source approach, the more I have seen lately is leading me to believe that the bandwagon mentality is going to sink the ship.

Let me be the first to say I love using Facebook and Twitter. I use Facebook to keep mostly in touch with family and friends and have used Twitter pretty much from the moment I heard about it. I have multiple accounts that I use for different sites and of course my main one that I updated frequently from my phone. So I’m definitely on the ship. I don’t want this to be a, “It ain’t like it used to be,” rant. I think it’s absolutely necessity that things like this evolve and grow as needs and uses change. So I put together some clear points I want to make on why I think Facebook and Twitter, as they are now, will be sunk by over-popularity.

1. The people who make the decisions don’t actually use it themselves: Hands down biggest reason why I think this stuff will fail. I work as a web developer on a lot of different projects and quite frankly I’m getting scared at how many people are asking for Facebook and Twitter integration. Web designers are sprinkling little social icons all over psd mocks with little to no thought on how they will actually be used. It’s a buzz word, but the people who make decisions on what get coded into a website are not actually using these tools themselves. Anyone who uses the service would understand they don’t want your crap on their feed. Or how users would actually want to integrate with the content. More time is put into how it is marketed rather than the actual use.
2. Marrying your product or brand to a 3rd-party service is always risky: Associating with these brands and leveraging their tools and services is a marketing marketing strategy but almost always imposes technical limitations and risks. Like I mentioned marketers and designers love to see those little shades of blue on everything. The problem is though that many sites are integrating a lot using Facebook’s API and what happens when Facebook crashes or a service gets changed? Your product or brand is swept away in that too. You forfeit control and now rely on someone who isn’t necessarily tied to you. I’ve seen a couple really big clients and sites be rendered useless because Facebook decided to change their API and not tell anyone until after-the-fact or a bug on their side.
3. Loss of context: So much emphasis is being put on integrating all of the pieces of your life into a one-stop-shop, but one of the biggest complaint I hear is that pieces are losing context. Not just messages that are meant for some people are being misinterpreted by others. But it’s a fact that we don’t want to share everything in our lives with everyone we know. Information and our lives require context. When you loose context it all becomes a jumbled mess. And if you’ve looked at your facebook feed any more you’ll see what I mean. It’s filled with games, applications, statuses, pictures, notes, links, tags, groups and all manner of things fighting for your attention and the space but they almost all lack context.

Several years ago I had the pleasure and opportunity to visit with a number of communication related companies in New York City. They ranged from book publishers, to magazine writers, to public relation firms. They all said the same thing, learn about the internet. It is clear that the internet is changing how we communicate and learn. Along the way there will always be people coming up with new ways to do this and I’ll be the first to admit Facebook and Twitter has its uses. It fills a very important purpose. They wouldn’t be so big if they didn’t. But it’s also important to know that no system is perfect and there will always be issues.

I think there will be a shift very soon. A shift away from these one-stop-shopping style solutions and back to systems that preserve context. Where content creators can have full control on their user experience and good marketers, designers, and producers will design systems that meet the needs of their audiences directly. It will be a global scale system, but all will be used to go back to more niche groups and content. Combine these needs with a lot of recent outcry over privacy and I can see either the ship sinking soon or at least everyone bailing off the boat.

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Valentines Day is of course a day of showing love and appreciation for the people around you. Family is of course the closest people to me in my life. Even more than New Years, Valentines is a day of reflection for me, a day to remember all of the great memories we’ve made together and all the fun we’ve had. I put together a slideshow of 2009 with some of the highlights.

Happy Valentine’s day to my beautiful wife and baby boy. It’s been another amazing year. I can’t believe how blessed I am to have someone who supports me and pushes me to achieve and experience new things all of the time. She is my great inspiration and I know with her I can accomplish anything. I love you two so much.

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It’s no secret that Wordpress is being adapted to go well beyond its traditional blog functionality. In my free time I’ve been doing a lot with WP and in most cases it becomes a content management system. But for a site that isn’t a blog it’s kind of like fitting a square peg in a round hole. Pages aren’t quite pages, posts turn into special pages, tags and categories are adapted for organizing and showing data, widgets are modified to make universal yet flexible pieces on the site, and the whole thing you have to kind of “get used to”. Plugins help expand the functionality and I’ve recently started playing around with Flutter, which is proving itself to be very a powerful step in using Wordpress as a content management system.

I was so excited after I learned how to use custom fields in Wordpress. It gave me the chance to break up the data that a user would put into their post and place it in different portions on the web page. It did the trick, but there were issues. The data was sometimes different. In one field it would be a little text, in others it would be an image link, sometimes it was even more important than the post itself. Plus it was difficult to explain to the user or client what each custom field did and explain to them they had to make sure to set and each one. Flutter leverages the custom field options in Wordpress, but takes it to a whole new level, finally making it very clear what each field is used for, with clear labels and structure on the admin side.

Flutter changes the idea of posts and pages in Wordpress. With the Flutter Plugin you can create a template type for any type of data you want. Maybe you don’t add posts on your page, but you add information on Events or Reviews, maybe you have specific pages with completely different layouts and type of data. With Flutter you create what’s called a Panel. You can add custom data fields and types to that panel to create your very own template for the kind of data you wish your user to add. It then becomes a new option on your admin menu, just like a post or page, but the write/edit template is completely custom. In the settings menu you can even turn off posts and pages completely if you’re not going to use them at all.

I first read about the plugin about 6 months ago but didn’t have the time or experience with programming to really get into it, until today. Today I used it on a project for the very first time and I have to say, I wish I would have started using it 6 months ago.

Displaying a Single Variable or Image in your Theme

The plugin does require some coding work. Like using custom fields, you need to manually add the placeholders to your theme. Luckily it’s done pretty easy. Hear is some example of how to include the custom data into your theme:

  <? echo get('variable_name'); ?>
  <? echo get_image('variable_name'); ?>

It depends some on what kind of fields you get setup, and of course it can get a lot more complicated depending on what you want to accomplish. Here is a screenshot of just one part of the template that I created for a friend’s site:

Displaying a Duplicate Fields in your Theme

There are some downsides to this plugin that I discovered quickly after I began to use it. First is that there is not a lot of documentation. The website has enough basics to get you started, but there is not a lot of resources when it comes to looking for help with specific things. For example there is a really neat feature that allows the user to duplicate fields. Say for instance you have a custom template to enter for Teams and you want to have a field where a user can add Team Members. It’s a simple text field and Flutter is set up to allow the user to add more fields. It gets a little complicated on the display side, because you have to have the logic to find out how many fields have been created and to pull in each one. Luckily I wasn’t the only one with this problem and found a solution to it in the comments on a post at doc4design.com. I wanted to pass that along, as it is kind of a big issue. The code that I found works best is:

  <?php
    $total = getFieldDuplicates('variable_name',1);
     for($i = 1; $i < $total+1; $i++){ echo "<li>" .get('variable_name',1,$i). "</li>";
   }?>

This code needs to be run within the loop and of course swap out variable_name to whatever yours is. Something little like that can be super frustrating if you’re new to php like I am.

There are more disadvantages, it’s buggy. While inspecting the code that it places into the admin menus, there are a lot of tags unclosed or added in a funky way. It’s difficult sometimes to manage the Panels and it’s a little unclear the differences between a Panel, Module, or Template Option. I’ve heard the bugs get worse when you get into Edit-in-Place. That’s another feature I want to get into. I’ll be sure to blog more about it when I get into it. That will add a new layer of tools to the pages themselves to edit content, no longer requiring users to go into the admin tools just to change text. That I think will be even a bigger move to a true CMS.

So it has some bugs, but it does help change WP to fit that CMS role that so many of us are using it as anyway. If you have any experience with Flutter or questions please share them in the comments below. I’d love to hear from you.

UPDATE:

Just wanted to share some more of the fun stuff I’ve learned with Flutter since I wrote the last post.

Displaying Duplicate Groups of Fields in your Theme

In my original post I described how to show single data, even duplicated fields. But I didn’t at the time know how to setup duplicate groups of fields. I found out it’s actually almost identical to multiple fields. All you need to do is first call on one variable in the group and get how many duplicates there are (just like a duplicated fields) but in the loop go ahead and include the code to return the values of the other variables in the group and there you.

          <?php $total = getGroupDuplicates('variable_name');?>
          <?php for($i = 1; $i < $total+1; $i++):?>
              echo "<li>" .get('variable_one',$i,1). "</li>";
              echo "<li>" .get('variable_two',$i,1). "</li>";
              echo "<li>" .get('variable_three',$i,1). "</li>";
          <?php endfor;?> 

Flutter Alternatives

I discovered in working with Flutter that there are actual a couple different branches of the project. One popular alternative, based on the same original code is a plugin called Magic Fields. It works exactly the same way as Flutter and the code that I’ve provided works the same for both. Magic Fields however has stripped out a lot of the typically unused features of Flutter, making the plugin overall a lot more simple to use and less weight on your application. Another benefit to Magic Fields is currently their community is more active than Flutter, making it easier to find information on the plugin, how it works, and what you can do with it. Checkout magicfields.org for more info. I’ve personally made the switch from Flutter to Magic Fields for the reasons stated above.

I’ve done a lot with Magic Fields/Flutter these past couple months. It’s become a pretty crucial tool in taking Wordpress development to the next level. Especially when using it as a content management system. Of course a lot of the functionality that this plugin offers can be done manually with adding custom codes and functions to a theme, I’d rather let the plugin do most of the heavy lifting and just leaving the only work to be done setting up the fields and putting the placeholders in the theme.

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Nike+ is a system designed by Nike to work with Apple iPod nano, touch, and iPhone 3GS to keep track of your running and a lot more. I’ve been using it for almost two years now and love it. It’s a device that attaches on my iPod nano and gets data from a chip that’s inside my Nike shoes and keeps track of my pace, distance, etc. I can then sync my running data to nikeplus.com where it graphs and keeps track of my running history. The site is ok, it does have its weaknesses. The site is done completely in Flash. Which can be frustrating for a number of reasons.

There are your standard Facebook and Twitter sharing features built into the site, but as far as your data goes, there isn’t a lot you can do with it. When I created my blog my goal was to have all my content available in one place. I wanted to be able to share all my latest data here on my Wordpress blog and wanted to customize the look. For the majority of these widgets, it’s achieved through RSS feeds. My running data had no such feed.

I did some reading and found that the Nikeplus.com handled the running data in an XML feed. I would have to find the feed and then get the latest run information to update on my site. One big problem is that XML isn’t allowed to be displayed across different sites or hosts. Meaning if you have an XML file you want to share, you have to host it on your own site. There is a way around that however, you can using server-side language parse an XML feed from one place to make it availble to use on your own project.

After a little digging and a little trial-and-error I found out how to do it. I figured I’d share what I learned, in case others are out there struggling with getting your nike plus data into your own site. Here are the steps:

1. Find your Nike+ ID: First thing you’ll need is your Nike+ ID number. that’s not your login ID btw. It’s a 10 digit number assigned by nikeplus.com. I found mine with the help of this page. Their instructions are actually a little old. But I was able to find that same number from the object code from my old Niki animated mini guy that I put on my old blogspot blog a year ago. There is also a helpful snippit of code you can use for finding it as well.
2. Upload Nike+PHP: If you’re using Wordpress, upload nikeplusphp.1.2.php file into your template folder. If you’re not using Wordpress, upload it into your project and just keep in mind where you put so you know where it is come time to link to it.
3. Add the code to your theme or page: Next thing you need to do is add this code where you want your data to show up. Just make sure to replace the 0123. . . with your own Nike+ ID.

                <?php
   	  require_once 'nikeplusphp.1.2.php';
   	  $nikePHP = new NikePlusPHP(0123456789, true);
           ?>
         
       

4. Add a function: in that same block of php add a function. There are many to choose from, but in general they will look like this:

   $np = $nikePHP->fullRunInfo();
   

   There are a few different things you can call here. You can get your profile information, first run, latest run, all runs, runs between, past, or before a specific date. The full list is found here at the Nike+PHP website usage page.

5. Display the data you want: I had actually done pretty well before this point and from the instructions on the Nike+PHP website it showed a function to display the entire array, but I didn’t want that, I wanted just a couple pieces of data. For that you need to pull out that data out by doing something like this $np['duration'] the $np is whatever the function was assigned to it previously. I used $np because it was on the usage site, I think if you look at that page you’ll see what I mean. You can pass things into it like ‘runId’, ’startTime’, ‘distance’, ‘duration’, ’synctime’, ‘calories’, ‘name’, ‘description’, ‘howFelt’, ‘weather’, ‘terrain’, or ‘equipmentType’ and just echo the result:

   <?php echo $np['distance']; ?></li>
   

6. Tips: What I described above should give you the basics of pulling the data you want. Thing is though the data probably isn’t what you expect. Duration is measured in milliseconds for example and distance is measured a more precise than you might think. Here are some things that I did to change the milliseconds to minutes, cut off measurements past the 2nd decimal place, as well as figure out my pace.

         <h2>Nike+ Latest Run:</h2>
         <?php
   	require_once 'nikeplusphp.1.2.php';
   	$nikePHP = new NikePlusPHP(0123456789, true);
   	$np = $nikePHP->basicLastRun();
           $minutes = ($np['duration'] % (1000*60*60)) / (1000*60);
           $pace = $minutes / $np['distance'];
   
         ?>
         <p>Distance: <?php echo number_format( $np['distance'], 2 ); ?> Miles</p>
         <p>Time: <?php echo number_format( $minutes, 2 ); ?> Minutes</p>
         <p>Pace: <?php echo number_format( $pace, 2 ); ?> Minutes per Mile</p>
         <p class="credit">Nike+PHP</p>
   

   As you can see I had to modify things a bit. First was to change duration to minutes. For that the formula is minutes = (#milliseconds % (1000*60*60)) / (1000*60). To cut off the duration and distance after 2 decimal places I passed the variable into number_format( $variable, 2); that cut off anything past the second decimal. And pace I found by dividing the duration in minutes by the distance.

I hope this has been more helpful and not more confusing. My case was pretty simple, I simply wanted the time and distance of the last workout, but with all the data available, you can really do a lot with it in the way of customizing the showing of your own workout. The creator of this code is really nice and answered my questions via email pretty quick so if you’re really stuck I suggest to shoot him an email. If it’s something simple, like getting somethign like this to work you can also send me a message or leave a comment on this post and I’ll see if I can help.

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Two things you need to have to start your own website is a domain name and hosting. A name and a place to put it. Buying a domain name is pretty straightforward. Some companies offer different services, but pretty much all of the ones I’ve had experience with do and cost more or less the same thing. I personally like having my domain and hosting accounts through the same people, as it is easier to keep track of and handle, but that’s not even a necessity.

Hosting however is a different story. Not all hosting providers offer the same service for the same price. Not even close. And it’s not even a case of what you get, you pay for. I’ve met a lot of people that spend $15 to $20 a month for less service that you could find for $4 or $5 a month. I’m not going to tell you who to go through, but I can share a little bit of my experience and what I’ve chosen. I don’t want to give the impression that I know everything about every hosting provider, quite the opposite, but hopefully I can help spare you some heartache. Bottom line is, do your homework before you get in bed with a hosting provider. You can switch providers and move all your content and get used to a whole new system, but it’s a lot easier not to.

Things to consider when looking at a web hosting service:

• Speed and capacity: First thing I would look at and ask yourself is what kind of traffic do I plan on getting? I know we all have dreams of our websites getting hit hundreds of thousands of times a day, but realistically what do you expect it to handle? Chances are if you’re reading this post and just getting into it, a shared hosting account is fine. You more or less rent space on a hosting server. Now if you’re expecting to create the next Facebook or if you have a celebrity or prestigious client, then you’ll have different needs and may need to explore different options like dedicated servers. But look at the storage space and bandwidth capabilities. A lot of affordable shared hosting accounts allow unlimited space without any set limit on bandwidth. Look for those. My first first hosting account was the most basic of Godaddy’s accounts. It had a limit on both space and bandwidth. For the most part it was fine, until one day almost overnight, my podcast started getting very popular on iTunes. With that many video downloads, my bandwidth cap was reached and I got a fat penalty charge and my material was no longer available for the rest of that month. That was a costly life lesson. I paid more on that fee than I did for the hosting account the entire year. Think about what kind of site you’ll have and what kind of needs you’ll have in the future and plan for that.
• Multiple vs single site: Some hosting services require you to have only one site, others offer multiple sites. It’s always nice to have the option to run multiple sites. Even if you don’t plan on it, the opportunity does arise. A client I worked on for example last year wanted to start a new domain/site to handle all of their non-profit work, having at least the option to host multiple sites is something you want to weigh into your decision.
• Database and software options: If you are having someone else do the development on your site you’ll want to consult them about software and database capabilities before pulling the trigger on a host. If you’re going to do everything by hand with html (which hardly anyone should be doing these days) anything will work, otherwise you’ll want to know what kind of software and services the host supports. For example this site runs on wordpress, which requires php and database services. Read or ask if they have installation tools as well, those kinds of things will make the site much easier to develop for.

This isn’t something you normally think about it until you really need it.

• User tools and features: A lot of hosting places offer a demo, go in and try them out. Are services clear and easy to use? I can tell you, I hated logging into my Godaddy account. I felt like everything I clicked I had to triple check to make sure it wasn’t adding/charging me for a new service and I could never find the tools I needed. Another preference tip is I look for something called cpanel. It’s pretty consistent between different hosting services but the tools are always in the same place and all-in-all pretty good. Whatever you get into you’ll just have to familiarize yourself with it. Especially when switching, that can be particularly frustrating. Give it some time and things will come more smoothly the more you use it.
• Customer Support: This isn’t something you normally think about it until you really need it. Watch out, a lot of hosting companies don’t even provide tech support over the phone. That can be extremely frustrating when a site is down or if you are in the middle of something and you need support. It would be ideal if you never needed them, but you don’t want to get stuck in a sticky situation without the assistance.

There are probably a lot of other factors that play into finding the right hosting provider for you. I’ve based this solely off my experience and some of the snags I’ve come across along the way. If you have something to add or know something someone else went through, please share them in the comments. I’d love to hear and learn from your experiences as well. Anything to reduce the overall frustration when it comes to finding the right hosting provider will be appreciated I’m sure.

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So you know you need a website, or perhaps you already have a website but it’s being hosted by some free limited service. They had a catchy ad that said you could create an amazing website with anything you wanted, without any experience necessary. The more you use them however, the more you find out just how limited and frustrating they are. There are a lot of benefits of creating a site yourself or having a website custom created for you. Two of the biggest benefits that I always talk to people about are how important it is for a custom experience and the fact that you own and control all of your own content.

• Fully custom experience: Say you have a blog through blogger. It works fine, you change the background image and font color every-once-in-a-while, but you always have hated the way that pictures upload. It’s a long buggy process and you wish you could just upload an entire album. Maybe you want to add a footer or change the layout a bit. Having your own site means the sky is the limit. The ability to add features to already templated systems is near impossible (except a few plugins usually) but if you have your own site time and money is your only limitation.
• You own and control all of your content: I know this is completely hypothetical and unlikely to happen soon, but what would happen if officelive.com suddenly went away? A virus wipes out the whole thing or something happens to the company that causes the service to instantly shut down. What happens to your free business website? Content, information, everything is now no longer accessible. You haven’t paid for anything, you don’t own your right to that content. This isn’t an attack on officelive, something like this could happen with any service. Paying for your own website means you own your own content and you have complete control over it.

You can enjoy these benefits by actually designing and developing a website yourself or having one custom built for you. But which one of those right for you?

Finding a good designer and/or developer can be difficult. I’ve known a lot of people that have gone out on the web and hired the first cheap designer/developer they could find, only to have heartache when the project is almost completed and now no longer can get in touch with their developer. Sounds crazy but it happens, a lot. I’ve been asked by many to finish or start over a project that where another developer just disappeared. On the flip-side to that, a good designer and developer could cut off years of work to your website.

That’s a big mistake I’ve found with do-it-yourself type websites. Yes someone got a website up very cheap, but it does not perform at all like it was meant to. Professional designer and coders have often been doing it for years, with a lot of different types of projects under their belt for experience. Their knowledge and talent can shave off years worth of work and frustration on a site. Not to mention they have the tools to do this effectively. Did you know for instance that the same website can and does often look different in different browsers? on different operating systems? and screens? Did you know that search engines read your site much differently than a human does? Web design and developers have tools and experience to help them address these challenges that the average user doesn’t have.

But sometimes an agency or developer is just simply out of the budget or perhaps you just are curious and want to get started in the world of web publishing, like I did several years ago. I remember being very confused and frustrated at times. I decided I wanted to share what I learned and hopefully make your experience a better one. After all web publishing can be very exciting and fulfilling. To know that your content will be broadcasting to the world 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. I can’t tell you how excited I was the morning that I woke up to find an email in my inbox from Australia, a guy who just wanted some advice on a topic I made a video about. How exciting. So whether you’ve decided you just want to learn more about the web, your jumping into your very own first web project, or even if you’ve done web work before, feel free to read my upcoming posts and please leave comments. I’d love to answer any questions or comments you may have.

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I am a front-end web developer. The bulk of my day is writing and editing html and css. If you’ve ever written css and fought with browser compatibility or tried a million ways to get something to show up where and how you want it to on a website, you know how frustrating it can be.  Occasionally I come across tools and tips to help make my life easier, which of course gets me excited and I just want to share them. Sometimes they are small and help a little bit, other times I smack myself in the forehead and say, “man, why didn’t I know about that?”

So my first post on coding tips is on something that I ran across today called Zen Coding. I must publicly thank Elijah Manor for his tweet about it this morning. Elijah is actually a great developer to follow on Twitter. He usually has fabulous tech tweets for developers running the whole gambit front-end to back-end. This morning he linked to a tutorial by net.tutsplus.com on Zen Coding. Zen Coding is a plugin created for a lot of major text editors that expedites writing html and css. The project and code to download for the plugins can be found http://code.google.com/p/zen-coding/

Html and CSS is notoriously repetitive. With nearly everything there is an opening and closing tag, with id’s, classes, and attributes. When Zen Coding tries to do is limit the data that you need to type down to the essentials, while allowing the text editor to fill in the necessary yet repetitive parts of the code. Lets take a look at an example:

Take for instance a typical site navigation.

<ul class="nav">
  <li class="nav-1"></li>
  <li class="nav-2"></li>
  <li class="nav-3"></li>
  <li class="nav-4"></li>
  <li class="nav-5"></li>
  <li class="nav-6"></li>
</ul>

Zen coding simplifies this down to:

ul.nav>li.nav-$*6>a

That tells the editor you want a ul with the class “nav” and 6 list-items with the class “nav-( and number of how many li’s you want)” and an anchor tag inside each one, all instantly. Now all you have to go through and add is the content. This method works more than just for nested items. You can also add items after. Instead of > you can use +. Say for instance you know you’ll have 3 paragraph tags and then a div. That can be created with:

p*3+div.test

That will output:

<p></p>
<p></p>
<p></p>
<div class="test"></div>

Not bad eh? My first thought was, “oh I just copy and paste.” but I decided to give it a shot anyways. In only the few minutes I’ve messed around with it I became pretty impressed. Even new to the system I found I was writing code significantly faster. I can only imagine that if I continue to use it where it become second nature, it will significant reduce the time (and not to mention dullness) of writing standard Html.

It looks like there is a similar plugin for css and I’ve tried messing around with it, but couldn’t get it really to work yet. I’ll keep trying though.

So to use the plugin in textmate go to that google code link I mentioned earlier, download and install TextMate.Zen.CSS.1.3.1.zip TextMate.Zen.HTML.1.3.1.zip and Zen Coding for TextMate v0.5 Create an Html file and enter in the code like how I mentioned then use command+e for the plugin to expand the line of Html.

Have fun, I hope you find it as useful as I do.

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Here’s a run down of our 2009 Christmas Holiday vacation:

When flying across the United States it’s either convenient to leave or convenient to arrive.  For this trip we had convenient times of arrival, which was perfect for Christmas time, but the drawback was we had to be at the Boston Airport (which is two hours away from our house) at 5 am. So the original plan was to leave at 2am and get into Idaho Falls at 2pm Mountain Time (4pm Eastern Time). The day before we left though I saw an advertisement online for “stay and fly” packages at hotels. With a little investigation I found a hotel near Boston that would give us a ride to the airport, a night’s stay, and parking for the same price as just parking at the airport. So we booked the room for the night and headed to Boston. One problem however was that I lost my credit card at some point between booking the hotel and leaving to Boston. So the trip began with a lot of stress as I called the credit card company to cancel our credit card, dealing with the hotel room, and the added stress of not having a credit card on our vacation, but we didn’t have any time to do otherwise.

The flight and trip went really well. Other than the roughest turbulence I’ve ever experienced, we arrived on time and everything went as planned. Oliver even slept a lot of the way.

The first few days in Idaho was caught up in a whirl-wind of Christmas, which was absolutely fantastic. Christmas Eve activities were celebrated first at my family’s house with a special story by my father and Christmas video and a nativity set given to each of my nieces and nephews. After that it was up to the Blacker’s home for their Christmas Eve traditions.

Christmas morning was of course a blast. We spent the morning with Clair’s family and afterwords a Christmas lunch. Of course a highlight of the morning was talking to her brother on the phone, who is on a mission. That is always a very special time. My family’s house was a tornado of Christmas with all the kids running around opening presents, playing games, singing along to Rock Band, and partying. With that many kids all celebrating Christmas at the same time, you wouldn’t expect anything else.

The days after Christmas were a lot of fun. We planned a lot of activities with friends and family and had the next few days pretty much planned out. We had a night of games with some of our friends, lots of going out to eat, sledding, a day of games and fun with Clair’s extended family, and in general we just enjoying the company of friends and family.

Things became a little unclear around New Years as activities were not planned out yet, but we did end up doing some things at my parent’s house that evening. It was fun to watch the New Year’s countdown in Time Square knowing that we’ve been there so often this year. How many times have we walked down those streets and I could imagine myself being there that night. The next couple days were kind of a blur as we finished meeting up with friends, family, as well as last-minute errands at the bank and shopping.

Visibility was terrible but the snow was beautiful, soft and powdery.

The whole trip ended with a bang, by going to Kelly’s Canyon Ski hill and going snowboarding. Visibility was terrible but the snow was beautiful, soft and powdery. Going into the trip we weren’t sure when or where we would go snowboarding. At one point we were going to go to Jackson, but I’m really glad we didn’t. We could barely keep up on a half day at Kelly’s Canyon. There would have been no way we would have appreciated a Jackson trip at $100 a person. No, we had a dang good time at Kelly’s. We both haven’t gone snowboarding in many years and this was a very refreshing experience.

The trip back didn’t go quite as smoothly as the trip over. Before it even began we had a big problem with luggage. Clair did an awesome job packing for the trip out, we were not however ready for the trip back. We bought a ton of good stuff, received a lot of things, and recovered a bunch of things we had in storage. I don’t know why but I had it in my head that it would all just magically fit into our suitcases. We brought back 2 extra suitcases, albeit they were small, we still didn’t have the space to fit in everything we wanted. After getting frustrated Clair finally kicked me out of the room and finished the job herself.

Oliver didn’t sleep a wink on the airplane, which of course meant we didn’t get any sleep, as we had to constantly entertain him. But it was such a great feeling as we landed in Boston. I felt great, excited to finally be home. The last two hours went by pretty quickly as we talked about our trip, life in Idaho and Connecticut.

Overall we learned a lot of lessons from our trip last year. That is to plan your time the best you can, that way expectations are clear and minimizes the family time balance debate. I was amazed at how busy we were this time and there were still people we hadn’t visited that I would have if we had had time. We learned some new things too, over time I think we will figure things out to maximize the time visiting out there. Thank you everyone for your hospitality and patience with us. We really had a great time visiting. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to everyone!

 

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I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about New Years Resolutions, this past year, and what I want for the year to come. My thoughts keep coming back to one thing, getting back to the habits and principles of my mission.

This past year has been phenomenal. Clair and I have had so many opportunities and experiences and it is a miracle what we have accomplished with the Lord’s help. I do have a small confession however, despite all what we’ve experienced I have not felt the same joy as I know I’ve experienced in my life before. There were a lot of times this past year where I felt my time was slipping away from me. I had thoughts about how my work and accomplishments weren’t of any real value and I was not really going anywhere.

These past few weeks I have been doing a lot of pondering, praying, and listening and I’ve come to the conclusion that I feel the way I do because I have strayed from the habits and principles I learned, lived, and taught on my mission. Those of you who have been on a mission or have been close to missionaries know exactly what I’m talking about. The consistent scripture study, constant praying, their focus, time-management, healthy living and priorities are the correct principles and actions of a happy life. It’s those habits and guidelines that I want to go back to.

Back to basics. Missionary life isn’t complicated, it’s simple. But it’s the simple things that are sometimes the most difficult to stay consistent with. Things like:

• Daily Scripture study
• Daily Prayer
• Taking time to ponder and reflect
• Writing in a journal
• Fulfilling church callings and responsibilities
• Taking time to plan
• Monthly temple attendance
• Service
• Developing Christlike attributes

That list could probably be added to, but those are the basics I want to get back to.

I don’t think I’m alone in this. This year’s manual for instruction at church is the book Gospel Principals. Normally that manual is used for new members or those investigating the church, but for whatever reason the Prophet and church leaders feel we need to get back to the basics, and I agree. It’s been my experience that the more I get back to the basic principles of the gospel I am happier and other things that I would otherwise stress about will fall into place.

I have a few other things on my New Year’s Resolution list, but this is going to be my focus this year, getting back to basics.

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Another year has gone by, I can hardly believe that it’s gone by so fast. New Years is actually one of my personal favorite holidays. Is New Years considered a holiday technically? I guess you get off of work typically on Jan 1st, I’ll count it as a Holiday.

Anyways, it’s a time of reflection on the highs and lows of the previous year, it’s also a time to look forward and plan for the future. Doing both gets me excited and inspired, like many. I love making New Years Resolution lists and I attempt to fulfill them throughout the year. So I’m blowing off the dust (metaphorically speaking of course. it was just an old blog post, it never actually made it to paper.) from my old 2009 resolutions to see how the year measured up.

2009 Resolutions

1. Read the Book of Mormon – once again, I slacked off considerably in the scripture reading department. I think we almost got through Mosiah.
2. Visit the Temple 12x in the year – Like the previous year I think we got about half.
3. Visit a place on our list Clair and I visited a couple places on our list. We had the pleasure of meeting my parents in Washington DC, Clair and I took a trip to Disney World all to ourselves, and we visited my mission earlier this Spring in Germany, so that’s pretty good.
4. Have/build a website that attracts 500 visits in a single day. (that’s on 1 site or a combined total of as many sites as I have) This was really close, not sure if I can count it or not, but my freeadobeflashtutorials.com site averages almost 400 a day, my Collinsvillect.org site gets about 15 to 30 a day and this blog. The sites I have are maintaining some steady growth. I really enjoy working on my Collinsville site and now this blog.
5. Run 500+ miles and document it on my nike+ system - Pretty big FAIL on this one and the next one. I did a really good job of running through the Winter and Spring, but as soon as Summer hit all my running habits went out the window and of course all the house buying stuff didn’t help that, as we everything was up in the air for a couple months.
6. Actually run the Hartford Marathon and make a plan on how I can qualify in the future for the Boston Marathon - Ditto as previous.
7. Read the rest of the Ender’s Game series and read at least the first 3 Harry Potter books - I didn’t read any more of Ender’s game, but Clair and I did listen to all of the Harry Potter books on tape. So I have now read/heard them all.
8. Read at least 1 spiritual/church book - read in many, but can’t say I finished one from cover to cover.
9. Buy a few stocks – Put off until the very last minute, I did buy myself some stocks for Christmas as well as received a couple as a gift. I’m now the proud owner of 8 shares in Blizzard/Activision and 2 shares in Apple.
10. Pay off the car OR Buy a house/condo OR have $10,000 in the bank by the end of the year. This was certainly the big story of the year, we bought a CONDO! We now have a more permanent place to live and it feels absolutely wonderful. I’d had it in my mind earlier in the year to look into it, but then decided not to. But of course life always keeps you on your toes and the circumstance changed that led us to look again. With the help of a fabulous realtor, a good friend who does home inspections and handy work, we are into our new place.

There was so much more to the year than just the list, but there are lots of other blog posts about those things.

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