Simple Tag Bar for WordPress
So when I did the little redesign of my site earlier this week I added a right rail. With that I wanted to add some way to show tags that was not a tag cloud and wasn’t just a list of tags. I noticed on a co-worker’s blog (Kyle Slattery) that he had a really nice tag display. So I stole it, er better yet re-purposed it. The way Kyle did it reminded me of how Django makes its graphs, very clean and crisp. I really liked the idea and the presentation.
He doesn’t use WordPress so I had to build a quick script to accomplish this in WordPress. Easy enough actually. What it does it grab your top ten tags then do a little math to display them in a graph format. The more times a tag was used, the larger the graph. Again pretty simple.
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$5 Album Round-up – March
Well it’s only been a few days since my last $5 Amazon round-up but I was really late getting that posted, so I wanted to be on-time for this one. In case you don’t know every month Amazon releases 100 albums for $5 a piece. It’s a pretty good deal and sometimes you can find some really good albums for a few singles. So instead of hitting the strip joint, save your singles and buy some music.
Below the post is broken down into 4 categories: No Brainers, If I Have Extra Cash, Best Covers and The Wackness. Of course these are just my opinions so take them or leave them, no worries. Better yet, comment with what you think are the stand-out albums listed this month. Don’t hate; debate.
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$5 Album Round-up – February
I was going thru Amazon MP3 today, like any other day and saw a few really good albums listed for five bucks. Thought I would share them with you. I tried to run thru as many as I could and choose what I thought were some must-haves, nice-to-haves and the albums with the best cover art. Everything is listed below, hope you can find at least one thing you might enjoy.
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Departing from Viddler
After about 10 months at the internet start-up Viddler, I have decided to move on to something that better suits me. I am moving back into the media business with a company named Journal Register Company. I am very excited for this transition and to get back to something I never knew I enjoyed so much until I left it, the news.
Viddler is full of great people, smart people and they have developed a great product and I have no doubts they will be around for years. Personally, it just wasn’t fulfilling. I didn’t find myself growing like I would have liked to, really pushing the envelope of what I know I am capable of. Some of this is my fault, just lack of passion for this particular business; but all-in-all I am extremely happy that I took the chance to try something new and meet a lot of great people along the way. My last day at Viddler with be March 12th and I start JRC on the 15th.
This is actually quite comical because about 6 years ago I started at Tribune Company on March 15th as well. Must be something magical about this date. Maybe it’s destiny, uh, maybe not; just coincidence?
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Nike+ vs. Runkeeper
Okay, I have been a loyal Nike+ user for probably close to 3 years, that is until recently. The sensor for my shoe went dead, which is fine, it happens. I shelled out another 14 dollars and purchased a new one. No big deal. When it arrived I swapped out the old one and went out for a run.
The first thing you must do is calibrate your new sensor so that is can return the correct mileage as you run. My first sensor I calibrated for a quarter mile and it was pretty spot on for every run for almost 3 years. This one…not so much. I have calibrated it at least 10 times and even tried running with it uncalibrated; which the manual said will work for most runners. Lies all lies. I have calibrated from a quarter mile all the way up to a mile and every time I use it, it’s off by at least a half mile.
I can understand some margin of error but a half mile is a lot. I also noticed the longer I ran, the more it was off. A 5K was a half a mile off and a 5 miler was 3/4 of a mile off. This is unacceptable. I started to look for alternatives, where to look? My iPhone. I have an iPhone 3G no S so I can’t use the Nike+ that comes standard in the new 3GS. No biggie. I tried a few apps and settled on RunKeeper.
They have a free version and a paid version. The free version does not give feedback while you run which is important to me for motivation so I paid for the pro app, a measly $9.99 dollars. Also the free app is ad supported and the pro version is not.
The best 10 bucks I’ve spent. It has a good web site, great app and runs off GPS so it is pretty spot on. If you do not have good GPS reception in your area, I wouldn’t look at using this but for me, it was perfect. I took it out for a spin and the mileage was exact.
