March 21st, 2011
If you liked MeToday photos (which date all the way back to 2006) or if you’re of the DailyBooth sort you’ll probably like Everyday, an application for iPhone, which reminds you to take a photo of yourself everyday, takes that photo, and also helps you create a video from all of the photos you’ve taken. Fun.
March 5th, 2009
Every now and then I experience a 500 Error when trying to access and older post. I really have yet to figure out what is causing this problem but it seems to happen only on old posts. Really old posts. Posts at least 2 or 3 years old. Mainly the posts that I imported from when this blog ran on WordPress.com.
Fortunately I have a complete back up of this entire site and all of it’s data including notes, mobile photos, tags, comments – everything. So I can go through and restore any data I end up losing by experimenting. Again, I’ve yet to fully solve this problem.
This morning while I was watching Edwin Villanueva‘s March 4th, 2009 MeToday video I was reminded of a post I wrote in September 2006 and I wanted to link to it. After searching my site and, eventually, finding the post I was looking for – the page wouldn’t load. Then because of that error my admin wouldn’t load, then I couldn’t save anything, couldn’t find the post I wanted to edit in the admin, and a host of other problems. I pulled up my local copy of my Web site and found the post immediately. Very odd.
Turns out I’m not alone. Other people have had this issue with versions of WordPress doing back as far as the 2.x jump. I found this post by onepack on the WordPress forums that helped me (at least it seems to have helped some). While the pages take a long time to load (old ones) it seems like they are not resulting in 500 Errors as often. But the problem still persists.
Thanks to this small .htaccess patch and to using WP-Cache to cache the pages here – the 500 errors are not appearing as often. Has anyone else experienced this problem with WordPress? I’ve Googled and Googled and been unable to find anything that truly solves the issue.
Note to readers: If you’re looking back into my archives and run into this problem, I’m sorry. I hope to get it fixed soon.
Update 11:09am: I’ve turned off all plugins to see if this solves the issue temporarily. I’m going to be turning them all back on slowly to see if the issue props up again. Sorry for any site slowness in the meantime as my site does not have caching on for the time being.
Update 11:31am: I’ve turned WP-Cache back on, deleted the entire old cache, and will let it run for a little while before turning anything else on. So far, so good – and the site seems to be very fast. If you find a page that errors, please report it here.
Update 11:47am: Now that I’ve had WP-Cache on for 15 minutes and the site has had hundreds of page views with no problem – I’m turning on Akismet so that we’re safe from any comment spam coming through during our testing. I’ll let this run for a few minutes though I think it only runs when new comments come in.
Update 12:06pm: Wow – in the amount of time I had Akismet off I received more than 30 spam comments. 30 in an hour. I wonder if that attributes to the problem? Well, Akismet is back on. Going to let it run for a little while longer before pulling the trigger on another plugin.
As a side note: I think this is a good exercise to be doing regardless of the problems I’ve experienced. Going through each plugin to measure the effect it has on your site is one that, while a little tedius, might end up cutting some of the fat in the end.
Update 12:17pm: I’ve now activated the WordPress Related Posts plugin. We’ll see how this one does.
Update 3:00pm: I went back to work since playing with this. Seems the 500 errors returned. I am not sure if this is related to the Related Posts plugin or not. I have it disabled and have also switched to WP Super Cache since WP-Cache was giving me trouble.
February 24th, 2009
Yesterday, February 23rd, I did a lot of driving. I attended the February Viddler Board Meeting in Springfield, New Jersey. To go to a board meeting in New Jersey I end up being away from home for a little over ten hours. That includes 6 hours of driving, about 3 and a half hours for the meeting itself, and about one half hour for lunch. Sounds exciting right?
I’ll spare you from boredom. Here is my day in under two minutes.
I haven’t done a MeToday video, or any video for that matter, in many months so I was happy to use the Board Meeting as an opportunity to just bring along the Flip camera and take miscellaneous shots to stitch together. The music I chose for this particular MeToday was Happening by The Supremes.
February 13th, 2008
Basketball has been some part of my life, big or small, since I was very young. I’ve never been any good at it really, but that’s another story. As an early teen I would go to the elementary school playground in the morning and not return until it was dark. Summers came and went, meals were missed, and I can still hear my Mom yelling my name from the back porch as the sun went down.
There was a fairly long stretch from about 19 years old until 25 that I actually didn’t play as often as I now wish I had. Maybe it was discovering the world of programming that stopped me from getting onto the court. Maybe it was getting married at an early age, and dealing with the responsibilities that brought, that gave me the excuses I needed not to take the time to play. Or, perhaps as I gained more and more weight I just didn’t feel up to it.
But I’ve come to realize something I consider very important. After gaining, then losing, gaining a little, and now on my way to getting back to my goal weight again – I’ve learned that basketball is an essential part of my healthy lifestyle.
My MeToday video from June 6, 2007 (view)
When I play basketball regularly I’m able to stay in pretty good shape. I feel good. I’ve got energy. My outlook on my own health, and my goals for good health, remains high. When I do not play basketball very regularly, I keep my same eating habits, and end up gaining weight. Put simply, basketball is one of the very few forms of exercise that I truly enjoy doing.
I suppose that ultimate frisbee could also be a supplemental form of exercise for me, but I don’t get the chance to play that nearly as often, and I’ve only just started playing it a few summers ago. Ultimate, as it is often called, is a really fun sport and a great way to get cardio exercise – if you haven’t tried it, I recommend it. You can see how frisbee helped me during my diet. While you’re at it, you might as well see how basketball helped me on my diet too.
Now, at 27 years old, I’m playing basketball at least a few times a week when I’m in my normal routine. I’m loving it. Sometimes I really do not feel like playing but I always feel so much better after I’ve done so. I’m looking forward to losing a few more pounds, maybe gaining a few centimeters on my vertical jump, and playing some of the best basketball of my life.
Do you have a sport you love?
August 2nd, 2007
Yesterday was a huge day in the history of Viddler. So many different things ended up converging onto one another to end up creating one crazy day in Bethlehem. (Yes, I realize this sounds like a movie by Kevin Smith about the day Jesus was born.)
I knew I’d be going to ViddlerHQ to giveaway the second iPhone for the month of July. Giving away an iPhone is a production in and of itself. You have to prepare the entries. Get everything together to do a video “broadcast” to announce the winner and try to build a little hype by involving the community along the way. This alone is a pretty big thing to accomplish in a day.
My mobile setup – at the offices of Viddler
We weren’t certain that we’d be launching a brand new version of our site and our player on this same day until about the day before. Yesterday we launched a new player that, although aesthetically the same, takes advantage of an entirely new infrastructure that the Viddler team had been building for quite some time. Video playback and responsiveness should be vastly improved for most people, especially those that were viewing videos that had a high amount of traffic associated to them. We also managed to release Viddler Groups which allows our users to create their own little communities to add video and discussions to. I’ve personally been waiting with baited breath for Groups since before we launched Version 2.0 in April.
Rob working hard
While we were rolling out Groups we had a hiccup. I’m no system administrator (not by any stretch of the imagination), but from what I gather it wasn’t something we could avoid because we experienced a problem during a routine automatic upgrade process that happened to coincide with our update. I’ll let Rob, Kasper, and/or Todd elaborate on this if they feel the need to. We were able to restore everything fairly quickly once the problem was indentified and release groups with much success!
While one contest was ending, another one was beginning. Our MeToday contest in July was such a success that we wanted to do it again – so we came up with what I think is a natural extension to the MeToday contest – the MealToday contest. Just tell Viddler what you ate or drank today and you can win your choice of an iPhone or Canon TX1 HD camcorder. We’re running this contest with two of our favorite Viddlers WineLibraryTV and ForkYouTV for the entire month of August. We’re now planning an event in Philadelphia for September 1st to giveaway this prize in style!
To top off the day our very own Viddler Gary Vaynerchuk of WineLibraryTV was scheduled to be on Late Night with Conan O’brien! How much more jammed packed and fun could one day get? After watching Gary’s few moments with Conan last night – I have to say he did an extraordinarily good job. We’re all so proud of the success that WineLibraryTV has worked so hard for and we’re sure this trend will continue.
So that was my day; how was yours?
July 3rd, 2007
Before I begin gushing about the iPhone I have to mention, especially for those of you that do not have one yet, that you can win one of two free 8Gb iPhones that we’re giving away over at Viddler just for doing simple MeToday videos. Each video you do (one per day per person) is an entry into the contest. No, you don’t have to do one every single day. But since each video is an entry one would think that the more MeTodays that you do, the better chance you have at winning! We’ll give someone an iPhone on the 15th and 30th of July. So don’t read the rest of this post! Go get a Viddler account!
My precious!
Ok. So what do I think of the iPhone? As you might have already guessed, I love it. For the entire weekend I rarely got onto my Macbook to do anything except sync my latest settings of my iPhone to the computer. The iPhone is a great mini-computer for getting most of your core Internet activities done like checking/responding to email, surfing the web for information, or other simple daily tasks like this.
I won’t get into the speed of the EDGE network or how the virtual keyboard is. To me these are non-issues thus far and I don’t have much to compare these two things to since I have never had a cell phone that used the Internet, nor a full sized hard keyboard. I can type pretty fast on the keyboard and the Internet is nearly as fast as being home on Wifi. So again, both are non-issues.
One of my fellow line-waiters John Gruber did a fantastic job giving his general overview of each feature of the iPhone the other day. My impressions are on par with John’s except that I’ve found myself typing just fine. Be sure to read his thoughts if you’d like to catch some of the nice things about each “feature” of the iPhone.
However, I’d like to extend his list a little bit to remark on some of the little things I’ve noticed while using the iPhone that I think make the experience all the more enjoyable.
The weight of the iPhone came as a surprise to some. Yes, it feels heavier than it looks. To me this make the iPhone feel tough and rugged when compared to the way it looks. I think the fact that we’re seeing people surprised at how tough the iPhone actually is, is because it doesn’t look very rugged. It looks elegant, which doesn’t usually mean tough. However the weight of the iPhone makes it feel very rugged to me.
The speed of the interface is something that I was very skeptical about. The commercials led me to believe that the interface was just as fast, if not faster, than switching windows on my computer. In my relatively little experience with mobile phones – the interfaces on these things have never been described by me as “snappy” or “fast”. However the iPhone’s interface, in general, is incredibly fast. When speaking with John Gruber in line, he remarked how the iPhone’s “one app at a time” focus really lent itself to being able to be very fast. The iPhone doesn’t need to show windows inside of windows or multiple layers or even windows on top of windows. The application that you are currently looking at is obviously getting the priority in the Operating System which makes the iPhone blaze.
The sleep, volume, silent, and home buttons are the perfect combination of buttons that were decided to be “hard buttons”. Although one can easily adjust the volume in most applications within the iPhone’s interface, you can also use the hard volume control on the side of the iPhone. The same goes for the silent and sleep buttons – I never have to “turn on” the iPhone to use these options. And the home button is definitely far better than keeping the “doc” visible and having a “desktop” button or something. I’m really glad the iPhone has a home button.
Within each application on the iPhone there are small, hidden gems that you will only find through experimentation or someone telling you that they are there. Like the ability to turn on the caps lock key, or tapping the top bar to auto-scroll to the top of the page in Safari (both tips came from John Gruber’s site), etc. None of these small interface features are handed over, but once you find them you love them.
Keeping in mine that, technically, this is iPhone 1.0 which includes all the hardware and software that came in those beautiful black bags on Friday, I have a few things that I’d like to see improved. I’m sure that, internally, this is build 10,000+ of the iPhone’s OS and its applications, but from my perspective it is still 1.0. Being such, I fully expected to have the wish list that follows.
I’m going to cut this list short because, as I said, this is a 1.0 release and one that I’m overwhelmingly happy with. I’ve found the iPhone becoming an extension of my laptop in ways I hadn’t considered before. I knew that I’d find the iPhone useful, I didn’t expect to want to use it more than my laptop.
What are your thoughts on the iPhone? Any wishes that I didn’t cover?
June 5th, 2007
Sorry for the lack of updates (namely my weigh in today). But my thoughts have been preoccupied as you can see from my MeToday video for today (come to this post to view the video).
Do you want an iPhone as much as I do? Am I alone in my thoughts being primarily about the iPhone since the new ads were released? Gah!
Oh, not sure what a MeToday is? Take a look at these great video versions of a MeToday or you can look at all of the great photo versions of a MeToday – both will give you an idea of what a MeToday is.
I can’t wait for my MeToday on June 29, 2007.
February 28th, 2007
MeToday, the Flickr group where a group of us have been posting a single photo per day and one of the ways that I “blog”, has reached a milestone of 3-months. To celebrate, I’ve put together a short video highlighting some of the photos I’ve posted there, as well as a few that were not released.
The video is only a few minutes. Enjoy.
The MeToday group was founded by Luke Dorny (luxuryluke). Since then we’ve grown slowly to over 38 members and we’re still looking for more people to do this, so if you’re interested – join the Flickr group and start tomorrow!
Happy Anniversary MeToday-ers!
[tags]metoday, flickr, photos, video, viddler, anniversary[/tags]
[slug]metoday-3m[/slug]
February 22nd, 2007
This may seem like a weird topic but it has been burning a hole in the back of my brain for a few days so I thought I’d ask everyone. I’m currently “blogging” four very different ways and I was wondering if anyone else was too.
My personal weblog is the first way that I “blog”*. I use it to gather together most of the ways that I blog. If you haven’t seen my home page lately, I suggest you check it out. I wish I actually had the time, and the creativity, to write more often on my blog.
I also write on TUG.n (which is about to get a kick in the pants in March), ChanceCube (which is also going to get a kick in the pants), and the Viddler blog (which is bustling like crazy actually and we’re really happy with what we’ve been able to do there in such a short period of time).
My MeToday photos is another way that “blog”. Almost daily photo updates wherein I explain what I am currently doing, or just whatever I feel like. I’m hoping to continue this (though I may migrate it onto my site as a copy or something) for quite awhile. There are many others that do it too and it keeps growing.
My current statuses that I post to Twitter is another form of blogging. Instead of just saying “Away”, or “In the office.” as a status, I try to add a little more to it. I’ve been scalded for my number of updates so I am continually trying to strike a balance.
My videos on Viddler may not be very structured at the moment, but I have some plans in the works. I probably won’t structure it like a typical “video blog” but I plan on adding a ton of fun content to it over the next few months. More on this later.
So how many ways do you produce content? How many ways do you blog? I’m at four and I hope I don’t add any more anytime soon.
* By blog I mean put my thoughts into content. In my opinion there are many various forms of blogging that span the different types of media.
[tags]blogging, twitter, cdevroe.com, flickr, metoday[/tags]
[slug]my-blogging[/slug]