Muddy Paws Pet Sitting and Dog Walking

Category : Work

Muddy Paws Pet Sitting and Dog Walking needed a small, clean site which would could be grown as needed. Their logo and initial design for the Web site was done by Dianna Bougher. I converted that design into a WordPress theme. I am also providing hosting for the Muddy Paws Pet Sitting and Dog Walking site.

Muddy Paws Pet Sitting & Dog Walking Screenshot

Muddy Paws Pet Sitting & Dog Walking

NFL QB Names

Category : Randomness

There seem to be a lot of active NFL quarterbacks named Matt.

Wordle: First Names of Active NFL QBs

BlackBerry Tour After One Week

Category : Tech

After one full week of having a new BlackBerry Tour 9630, I thought I’d write a quick review. This is my first BlackBerry, so there is a little learning curve to the operating system. I have been using an iPod Touch for several months and my phone for the last two years has been a Sony Ericson w580i, so the QWERTY keyboard is also taking a little adjustment. Overall, I find the messaging to be exceptional. Surfing the web in the BlackBerry browser isn’t quite as smooth as Safari on the iPod Touch/iPhone, but it isn’t bad experience.

Out of the box

I had one issue before I even started using the Tour. I took it out of the box and had a bit of trouble getting the battery cover off. The instructions weren’t really clear. I had to push up the silver latch then pry open the bottom of the cover with a fingernail.

WiFi would be a nice feature.

It would be nice if the headset jack was on top rather than on the side.

An Event Apart Seattle 2009

Category : Design, WebDev

For the second time, I was able to attend An Event Apart, a great “two-day conference for passionate practitioners of standards-based web design.” The conference was founded by, and includes presentations by, Eric Meyer and Jeffrey Zeldman. Both have authored essential books for any bookshelf sitting beside someone who works on Web sites.

This year’s AEA in Seattle was held at the Bell Harbor International Conference Center. This was a very hospitable venue on Seattle’s waterfront, between the cruise terminal and Anthony’s Pier 66 restaurant.

There was a fantastic mix of web standards advocates, user experience gurus and content specialists at this year’s conference. Some of the highlights for me was the form design session by Luke Wroblewski, the passionate presentation by Kristina Halvorson on the need for a web content strategy and Dan Cederholm’s presentation on why you shouldn’t worry about making sites look EXACTLY the same in all browsers.

Making Twitme use Bit.ly Instead of Timesurl

Category : WebDev, WordPress

This is a short post to test whether or not I correctly spliced this bit.ly PHP code into the Twitme Wordpress plugin I am using. If it works, I’ll expand on this post later.

UPDATE: Well, it seems to work. I basically just copied the code from James Cridland and replaced the TimesURL class that Twitme was using.

I was surprised to get a comment this morning from Johnny Mast saying he was going to use the Cridland code in Twitme 1.6.9.3 which just came out today. This would have happened without my help, but I feel like I had at least a bit part in this taking place.

Check out Twitme!

First Attempt at a Fake Tilt-Shift Photo

Category : Photography, tacoma

First Tilt-Shift Photo

Upgrading Multi-level Navigation Plugin for WordPress

Category : WordPress

I just installed an update to the Multi-level Navigation Plugin for WordPress on one of my sites and was briefly confused when only one page was showing up in the menu. Turns out the page I had set to ‘exclude’ got switched to ‘include’ so it was only displaying the page I wanted to be left off of the menu.

Easy fix. Just go to your Dashboard and select Settings>Multi-level Navigation Plugin. Under the Menu Contents page, scroll down to the Modifications section. Just review your settings where it says ‘Pages to include or exclude in the main menu’. I just had to change the dropdown from ‘include’ to ‘exclude’.

Fuel Summary for 2008

Category : Transportation

Total Quantity Purchased (Gallons) : 256.908
Total Cost ($): $969.37
Average Price ($/G): 3.784
Average Fuel Economy (MPG): 47.12
Total # Fill-ups: 24

Thanks for Visiting

Category : Randomness

Just want to thank the person that visited my site from the Supporters page at Exit133.com and let me know that one of the RSS feeds being displayed on my site was throwing some errors. But, while I appreciate the heads up, using the term “Epic Fail” is a little uncalled for. I don’t think some error messages constitute a catastrophic failure. Perhaps you just learned a new term and are overusing it. I don’t claim to have an ultra-stable site, I am using nightly builds of the WordPress 2.7 Beta and try out different themes, so some glitches are expected. Plus, I don’t tend to visit my own site very often, so thanks again for pointing out the errors.

‘Pages Link To’ plugin for WordPress

Category : WebDev

I just found a handy WordPress plugin that I have been pining for. It’s called Page Links To. This plugin allows you to add a link to a URL outside of the WordPress managed site structure, and have it show up in your navigation without hacking the Pages widget or template. The new link will show up anywhere the wp_list_pages(); function is used.

Once installed, the process is very simple. Create a new Page. Enter the desired link name in the Title field. Then, in the newly added Page Links To field, enter the URL that the new Page link should go.

I used this on a 2.7-beta3 install of WordPress.

WordPress Plugin: Page Links To by Mark Jaquith