What keeps you busy?

I’ve kept myself quite busy since I last posted. I have been working on a couple of local volunteer projects in my town of Beaumont, Texas. I started the Beaumont Chapter of the Social Media Club with a friend of mine named Justin McCullough. This is a club for people in my local area to meet and discuss social media topics like “how to best utilize facebook for my business”, “What is foursquare?”, etc. The club has been going strong and we have monthly lunch meetings every third wednesday.

The other local project I’m working with is the Boomtown Film & Music Festival. I’m helping as a volunteer and also update and maintain their website. Its basically an independent film festival and music festival combined. The festival takes place on February 25-26 and we’ve been hard at work preparing for all the activities. I just did an interview yesterday with a local news station trying to promote the festival.

The last project I’m working on is with my buddy Corey Charette from the Average Joe Show. We are starting a new podcast called SciFi Watcher. Its starts on March 3rd. Corey and I will be discussing the latest scifi news, trailers, and movies. One of the more interesting aspects of the show is our movie and tv “Re-Watch” segment where we will take a movie or show from the past and give our review of it. Make sure and subscribe to our podcast on itunes so you won’t miss an episode.

That pretty much sums up my time sucks for the past few months, that and some console gaming here and there. I hope to keep posting new content weekly. If I slip up be sure to harp on me like my buddy, Larry. Everybody needs a good kick in the butt to jumpstart to action sometimes. By the way, what do you think of the main post image of me? Too creepy? Leave me a comment.

“Imagine life as a game in which you are juggling some five balls in the air. You name them – Work, Family, Health, Friends and Spirit and you’re keeping all of these in the air.

You will soon understand that work is a rubber ball. If you drop it, it will bounce back. But the other four balls – Family, Health, Friends and Spirit – are made of glass. If you drop one of these; they will be irrevocably scuffed, marked, nicked, damaged or even shattered. They will never be the same. You must understand that and strive for it.

Work efficiently during office hours and leave on time. Give the required time to your family, friends and have proper rest. Value has a value only if its value is valued.”

Thanks everyone that showed up for the Southeast Texas tweetup. This had to be one of our biggest turnouts to date! We had the tweetup at Starvin Marvins Bar & Grill, a new restaurant/bar that opened up here in the last two months. I was fortunate enough to reserve their private room for free. It was nice being in a cool air-conditioned room instead of out on the patio in muggy Texas heat. We had a good mix of new and old faces. We had tweeters, facebookers and a couple that were neither. I counted 14 people in total. That’s a lot in lil Beaumont,TX. It was a far cry from our humble beginnings of 4-5 we had at the first tweetup. I think everyone had a good time. Some people socialized while others took the opportunity for some social networking.

I did make up some nametags this time around, where I had people write their twitter handles instead of their real names. This gave people the opportunity to match up a face to one’s twitter identity. Since we had a lot of people who used social media at the tweetup, I also broke the news about the Social Media Club of Beaumont that Justin McCullough and I have been working on the past few months. All in all a great event and I can’t wait to have the next one soon.

Thanks to @409now, @beaumartian, @beaumontbeth, @cookingoutloud, @curatorgirl, @irishplague, @jess_benton, @laurawxx @mccjustin @mickster09 @reneeintx , chad and steve.

UPDATE 07/30/10: Justin McCullough sent in this video he took from his Droid.

We are on our way to Seattle, Washington for vacation for a few days. So that means there will be no podcast this week I will try blogging while I’m there. If you want to keep tabs on me, be sure to watch my twitter stream. I’ll also be using posterous as well for pictures and videos.

Plugins are one of the many features that set WordPress apart from a lot of the other blogging systems out there. This post is in response to a question a  friend of mine had on what plugins to use for his WordPress site. Well here is the list of my favorite plugins I use for bryansays.com. I’m not saying these are the best plugins in each category, they are just the ones I’m currently using and like the most. To see all fifteen plugins I regularly use, keep reading.

Akismet

This is one of the default plugins you get with every WordPress install. This is by far the best plugin to guard against comment spam on your WordPress site. Its simple to install and easy to use. To enable the plugin, all you need to do is register for a free akismet API key from Akismet.com. Paste it in your Akismet configuration screen, and you are ready to have the power of the akismet community ready to help you block comment spam.

Akismet checks your comments against the Akismet web service to see if they look like spam

or not.

Blubrry PowerPress

This is a relatively new plugin for me. Blubrry adds podcasting support to my blog. It features a media player, itunes integration, and more. I use it for my BryanSays & Friends Podcast that I recently started with my Buddy RJ at SpareKarma.com The plugin is great because it helps me create a separate RSS feed that is formatted for podcasts and itunes.

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Disqus Comment System

Disqus is a commenting system that adds another layer to the comments placed on your WordPress site. With disqus your site visitors have multiple ways to login to leave comments. They can login with their twitter, facebook, openid, or disqus profile. The other neat thing about disqus is it brings in comments about your blog posts that take place outside your site like twitter, friendfeed, digg, and youtube. I run multiple websites and another cool features is the ability to moderate the comments from all of my blogs on the main disqus website.

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Google XML Sitemaps

This plugin is for generating a special XML sitemap which helps the search engines like Google, Yahoo, Bing, and Ask.com to better crawl and index your site. There may be better Sitemap Generators out now but this does what I need. This plugin rebuilds your sitemap and notifies the mentioned search engines anytime new content is added to your blog.

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Pretty Link

If you’ve seen WordPress blog post URLs, you know how long they can be and not very memorable. Mine for instance, has the year, month, day and then a description which is great for search engines like google but not good for someone trying to type in that address. Also with the advent of twitter with its 140 character limit on posts, you need to have as short a URL as possible. There are URL shorteners like Bit.ly out there but you get a goofy looking link that is cryptic at best. Along comes Pretty link to save the day!

With Pretty link, you can create a very short URL for each post for twitter and all of the stats stay inside your site instead of an external site like bit.ly. Below is the screen used to create a pretty link. Pretty easy, no pun intended.

Below is the Pretty Link Stats page which shows the number of unique hits for each of your pretty links.

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You are not limited to just internal links to your WordPress site with Pretty Link. You can make a link to any site. For instance, I created a link to the itunes page of my podcast from this long link:

http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=375722325 to http://bryansays.com/itunes

Secure and Accessible PHP Contact Form

This powerful contact form plugin is what I use on my contact page to create a contact form for anyone to send me questions about the site. Its fairly simple and straight forward to use and even has some theming capabilities to help match the forms to your theme using CSS or their own templates.

SocioFluid

This social bookmarking plugin is used to display the social media icons under every post, to help visitors who want to re-post a link to social media sites like twitter, facebook, reddit, etc. I always like this plugin’s “mac dock effect” where icons would grow as the mouse is dragged across them. I might have to look for a new plugin though, since it seems the developer has stopped updating it. It’s only compatible up to WordPress version 2.5.1.

Ultimate Google Analytics

This plugin enables Google Analytics on your site and adds the necessary java script code to all of your pages and has the option to also track external links, mailto links, and links to downloads on your site. For those of you that doesn’t know, Google Analytics is used to track the traffic to your site and gives you statistics which helps determine what is working for your site and what is not.

WordPress Admin Bar

This plugin creates an admin bar at the top of your site for logged in users (you) to see. It is based on the design of the admin bar located on the WordPress.com site. You basically get a shortcut to all of the major functions of the site that normally can only be reached by first going to the dashboard.

WordPress Mobile Edition

This plugin provides a clean look to your site designed for mobile browsers on the iPhone, Android and other phones. Below is the front page to my site on an iphone safari browser formatted using the Mobile Edition plugin.

WP Super Cache

WP Super Cache is a static caching plugin for WordPress. This plugin generates html pages for your content instead of relying on the server querying the content via SQL commands to the database. This plugin will save your site from crashing during heavy traffic such as when you site gets hit by digg or slashdot. The server only has to serve static html pages.

WP-DBManager

This is a great utility for maintaining your WordPress database(s) without having to get your hands dirty with MySQL. This utility has functions to optimize, repair, backup, and restore your wordpress databases. You automatically schedule backing up and optimizing of your database so its always in tip-top shape. You can also run SQL queries if you so desire.

WP-PageNavi

PageNavi adds a more advanced paging navigation to your WordPress Blog. It allows you to customize the look and feel of the paging of your site.

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Yet Another Related Posts Plugin

Funny name, powerful plugin. This plugin returns a list of related entries at the end of your blog post. This is important for keeping visitors on your site and viewing your content. There are a couple of other plugins that do this function but this is my favorite. It seems to be the most customizable. You can see this plugin in action on my site. At the end of this post, you will see the heading “Possibly Related Posts” followed by thumbnails of similar stories. Now you don’t have to be this fancy but chances are visitors that like the story they are on are more inclined to what to read a similar story. This takes the guesswork away from the visitor. They don’t have to use search, the similar posts are already there.

This plugin has come a long way. It has a templating system that rivals WordPress’s own and a ton of options to customize the user experience. Definitely give this plugin a try.

Well I hope this post was informative in some way or another. If you have any other good plugins to recommend be sure to post them in the comments below.

I added a reminder in google calendar for Monday, Wednesday, Friday this week to keep me on task. Included in the body of the calendar event is a list of all my sets.  If you want to share your progress, do so in the comments of this blog post or you can join the group of us on Friendfeed.

I think I found something to” push me” forward. The program is called the One Hundred Pushups Challenge. Sean Loyless (a friend on friendfeed) turned me onto the program. The premise is very simple and its something you can do without a gym membership. You start off with an initial test of how many pushups you can do until you collapse in a sweaty heap on the floor. This gauges your fitness level and determines how many sets and reps you will do for your first week. I did my initial test today and was able to do 28 pushups. Yay me!  I won’t go through the whole program in this post but I will say that I will be starting this program next week and keep you guys updated on my progress. The cool thing is there are a number of ways to track your progress. The site has a iphone app or you can track your progress on the 100pushups site. Leave me a comment if you’ve had any experience with this program or you want to join me in this quest.

UPDATE: If you are on Friendfeed and want to participate with us, join the Hundred Pushups Group and share your progress with us.

via wired.com

The next revolution in News Media is almost here. Checkout the video above which shows Wired Magazine as a Tablet Application built with Adobe Air. Can’t wait to see this on something like the Apple iPad or Android-based tablets.

Posted via web from BryanSays

Download now or watch on posterous

IMG_0037.mov (8759 KB)

Posted via web from BryanSays