Projects

One More Push-Up per Day

Posted by ngreene on Feb 8, 2012 in Featured, Projects

As part of my training routine for the Tough Mudder, I’ve decided to embark on a side-challenge.

Every day, I will do one more pushup than the prior day. Out of curiosity, I figured that I should see how many push-ups I could do at the beginning. Sadly, that number was well under 10. OK, that number was 6 … and the last was really shaky!

Completing this challenge will mean that on the day before the Tough Mudder event I will need to do 200 push-ups.

I don’t think it reasonable to expect myself to do 200 consecutive push-ups so I will plan to complete the daily push-ups goal within each 24 hour period. So, if on that last day before the Mudder I need to do 20 sets of 10, that is just fine.

I will be pretty impressed with myself at the end of this challenge.

New Year, New Blog Format

Posted by ngreene on Feb 7, 2012 in Projects

For those of you who read my blog regularly, you will have immediately noticed that I have undertaken a fairly significant redesign.

The last iteration of this site was designed to give you access to a broad variety of content with as few clicks as possible. What I realized was that very few of you are actually using the site in the manner that I had intended.

About half of you are coming to me through organic search such as Google or Bing and are looking for something specific. The other almost half of you are generally clicking through from somewhere that a specific blog post is linked directly, such as facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn.

Neither group is actually spending any real time on the site, but rather coming for the specific purpose that you came for and then heading off through the interwebs on your merry way.

Hence, I have redesigned in a way that ensures that only the most recent content will be found by those of you who are visiting directly, while those coming from search engines can still access the archives very quickly and easily.

Please excuse some of the funny formatting that you may come across as I tweak the design.

My Search for a New Car

Posted by ngreene on Oct 21, 2011 in Featured, Projects

I love shopping for cars. Even when I’m not in the market for a car I am constantly doing research and pricing out options. Over the years I have driven a lot of different vehicles and have refined what it is that I like to a near science.

Unfortunately, for our next family vehicle, my preferences are being thrown out the window. You see, in order to win the choice of our last car, a 2008 BMW X3 which we leased for 39 months, I had to give up future draft considerations. I told my wife that she could choose anything she liked for our next vehicle. Almost four years ago I never imagined that she would remember that conversation and, even worse, remember to take me up on it.

As our lease return date approached I began pairing down my own short list, but was stopped short with Susie’s list of must-have options for her choice. There weren’t many things that I needed to consider, but the one factor that stood out immediately was that our new car had to have a built-in navigation unit. I had never really looked at what was required to get navigation into a vehicle but I now know that most auto manufacturers make you purchase their most expensive options just to get the privilege of adding navigation to your vehicle.

Considering that anyone can purchase a GPS enabled handheld or other dedicated GPS unit for well under $500, it is ridiculous to me that most auto manufacturers seem to think that it’s reasonable to spend $700 to $3,500 to their most expensive trim level just for this one feature. For our purposes, we don’t care if the car has cloth or leather seats and we don’t care about any of the other features that differentiate trim levels aside from the presence or absence of navigation.

I decided to do a preliminary price comparison across a set of vehicles that I thought would work for our family using the manufacturers own lease estimation tools. The only qualifications were that the finance structure would be a lease, that the term would be 36 months, and that there would be $0 down to ensure consistency. The trim and options would be the absolutely most inexpensive vehicle available with the built-in navigation. I went through this same exercise twice within a span of 6 months and used the lower of the two prices for each vehicle in our consideration list. Unfortunately, there was no way to normalize the number of kilometers that we would drive across all of our options. Since we would be driving fewer than 20,000 km per year, I chose the lowest mileage option possible for each tool. Here is what we ended up with:

I should note that I also had a number of Subaru vehicles on the list, but their “built-in” navigation solution is a removable Pioneer unit that disqualified them from our list.

The real standout for me was the Ford Edge. First of all, Ford was the only manufacturer that didn’t force me to choose the most expensive trim level in order to get navigation. Second, I was really impressed with the MyFord Touch technology and the overall style of the car.

Susie took one look at the list and went for the cheapest option possible; the Nissan Rogue. I didn’t like that the Rogue only had a 5″ navigation option and I resented having to pay for leather seats that I wasn’t interested in choosing in the first place.

At this point, a new competitor entered the market. The Nissan Leaf. When plugging in the same leasing details and considering the $8,500 government rebate, the Leaf came out in the #2 slot, right behind the Rogue.

I hadn’t considered the idea of moving to an all electric vehicle before, but a quick napkin calculation showed that we could be saving a significant amount of money with the switch from gasoline to electric. We monitored our driving over a few weeks and realized that we never drove more than 50km on any particular day. The Leaf, with it’s 165km round trip range, would work out just fine for our day-to-day driving. The only problem would be that we wouldn’t be able to go on longer road trips.

The good news is that we really don’t go on road trips and, when we do, we usually rent a larger car anyway. We are very excited to be picking up our new Leaf next week!

One Thousand Pages Viewed

Posted by ngreene on Apr 7, 2010 in Projects

This site has been running for just over a month and this week marks the one thousandth page viewed!

In the grand scheme of things that number is really nothing, but it’s the first milestone and I am pretty excited about it.

A few stats from my first thousand page views:

- Most visitors to this site are visiting on apple products
- The most popular post to date was about how Lindsay Lohan is NOT the Etrade Baby
- 2/3 of visitors have come back more than once
- Only 10% of visitors are using any version of Internet Explorer
- The top referring sites for links coming into this site are: 1) Facebook, 2) Google, and 3) Twitter
- This is the 29th post, not including the static site pages

Overall, I’m pretty happy with how things are going so far.

I’m really looking forward to the next release of WordPress (3.0), which will include a feature that allows users to manage multiple blogs with one installation.

I would like to have a little more focus. When I think about blogs that I really like, the one thing that they have in common is some central theme that defines a reason for people to visit. I realize that this blog is really more of an assortment of my thoughts and random musings.

The problem is that my attention wanders too much to maintain a single point of interest for more than a few posts. I love having the ability to add tags to posts because, after just 29 posts, I can start to see the topics that I like to write about the most.

So far, according to my tag cloud, my favorite topics are Advertising, Google, and the iPhone.

Advertising is an obvious area of interest for me, given that I’m in the business. The iPhone is a tool that I never leave home without so it’s got to come up pretty frequently. The surprise for me is how often I write about Google.

Going forward, I can definitely see the iPad popping up in popularity of my tags. I’ve had one for two days and I am absolutely loving it. I will write a proper review shortly, but I want enough man hours on it to be able to have a valid opinion to share.

I’m not sure that I’ll ever be able to settle on a single theme for a blog so, until I do, I will continue with what I’ve been doing for another month and see how things progress.

In any case, thanks for reading and, for most of you, thanks for coming back after having read the first time!

WordPress Challenges

Posted by ngreene on Mar 18, 2010 in Projects

Setting up a blog and getting started was a really fun process. There were a lot of steps and some challenges along the way, but getting set up has been really quite enjoyable.

I’m left today with a few challenges that I am not sure how to overcome.

1) Sometimes, but not always, my social media buttons do not work the way I expect the to … Actually, facebook always works fine but sometimes Twitter and Digg give me an error implying that my website is “redirecting too much for their liking”.

And

2) Connecting to WordPress using my iPhone is sometimes, but not always, a challenge.

It seems to me that there is a connection because when the iPhone works perfectly the social media buttons do not and vice versa.

I’m not sure what this means. In fact, I spent 30 mins on the phone the other night with GoDaddy hosting tech support and the guy had no idea about my problem. He suggested that it was probably a WordPress issue an that I check in on the WordPress forums.

I guess that’s my next step.

Home Improvements ~ Update #1

Posted by ngreene on Mar 14, 2010 in Projects

I had delusions of getting a lot of work done at the house this weekend. The problem is that I didn’t actually set a goal to accomplish by the end of the weekend.

This project started about 4 weeks ago. I figured that I would do a quick recap to keep track of what’s been done. To date the following has been completed:

1) Framing of two doorframes and a wall to separate our home into two separate units.
2) Drywall
3) Drywall finishes (cornerbead / tape)
4) Mudding round #1
5) Sanding round #1
6) Mudding round #2
7) Sanding round #2

Considering that I am only working on weekends and the rare weeknight, I’m pretty happy with the progress. This weekend, two of us worked for about 3 hours on sanding and it took me about an hour to clean up afterwards so I wouldn’t say it was a lost weekend, but it definitely was not as much work as I probably could have gotten done.

My plan is to take another stab at getting work done tomorrow night but, this time, I am going to make a plan. Tomorrow will be all about mud. I need to build out a ridge to smooth it out, finish mudding a drop panel for one of the doors, repair three holes, and touch up a few places that we got a little overzealous with our sanding technique.

That sounds perfectly reasonable for a Monday night.

Blog Tweaks

Posted by ngreene on Mar 13, 2010 in Projects

I can’t believe how many options there are with WordPress. I am very impressed.

I have spent pretty much all of my spare time this past week tweaking and re-tweaking this site. I thought that I would share my configuration as of today and give credit to those who deserve it.

THEME:
I have decided on the theme Pixel 2.0.1 By Sam over at samk.ca It seems to be the best layout and look that I’ve found yet for my purposes. Since I like this so much I have also downloaded Motion 1.0.4 and Function, but haven’t had time to play with them yet.

WIDGETS:
The hasn’t been enough time for me to really get deep into the world of widgets. There are just so many and the descriptions for a lot seem very similar so I need to take a day and just play around with what is out there. The search cloud that you see to the left is WP-Cumulus with the primary author Roy Tanck I love how this looks on the blog. It’s actually the best tag cloud that I’ve seen anywhere. My only complaint with this widget is that I could not change options from the settings page, but instead had to make my tweaks (size, speed, etc) on the widgets page. Not really that big of a deal once you figure out that the settings page doesn’t work. The only other widget that is in use as of today is the twitter feed at the bottom. That was a simple cut and paste from the Twitter Widgets Page.

PLUGINS:
I have tried so many plugins that I was getting nervous about how things would be impacted by installing, activating, deactivating, and deleting as much as I did. I’m sure that I’m not done yet, but I feel pretty happy about my setup at this point. I will provide a complete list of what I have active below:

1) Ad Integration by ThaSlayer. This is a very easy to use implementation for pretty much any advertising requirements. I have no real aspirations of making any money off of advertising on this site, but I wanted to at least have a better understanding of what it takes to get ads onto a blog. On the other end I set up a Google AdSense account and I was up and running the same day I installed the plugin. Everything works beautifully. I haven’t yet figured out how to get the ads out of my main content into the right rail, but I’ll figure that out at some point.

2) All-in-One SEO Pack by Michael Torbert. I checked out a few of these SEO options and this seemed the easiest to install / use. I’m not sure how to tell if it’s working for me yet, but it’s only been a few weeks.

3) Digg Digg by Yong Mook Kim This is the best looking of these social buttons apps. Easy to install and customize. I really wish I would have searched for this plugin first instead of trying to pick up the code for the buttone independently … would have saved me a lot of time.

4) Facebook Connect by Adam Hupp I never imagines it would be so easy to connect my blog with facebook. The instructions were great, even for someone like me who likes to try and just turn it on first to see shat happens. The few points where I wasn’t sure what to do, the instructions and options page were intuitive enough to allow me to work through what probably should have been somewhat frustrating.

5) Google XML Sitemaps by Arne Brachold I’m not sure that I actually need this plugin with the All-in-One SEO Pack installed, but it sounded different enough that I thought it could be useful.

6) Ultimate Google Analytics by Wilfred van der Deijl With one touch of the button I was able to connect to Google Analytics. I was surprised how easy it was to get a Google Analytics account and transfer the needed info into this plugin. Literally, within 5 minutes I was up and running. Now I just need to figure out how to get some traffic to the site!

7) WPtouch iPhone Theme by Dale Mugford & Duane Storey Once again, this is a true turn-key solution. After activating, I was able to visit the site from my iPhone and immediately the touch version was able to detect the mobile platform and serve the mobile version as default. It also has a quick button at the bottom allowing users to toggle back and forth between the mobile and full versions of the site.

And that takes us to today. I’m sure that I’m not done. This seems like the kind of project that can evolve into a hobby that is never really done. At some point I want to take a look at what other people are doing on their sites and pick up some best practices.

In the meantime, I’m pretty happy with my setup.

Home Improvements

Posted by ngreene on Mar 7, 2010 in Projects

Our current home was purchased because it satisfied our lifestyle and lifestage requirements perfectly. Going into it I knew I was looking at some home improvement work and always intended on doing as much of that work as possible with my own hands.

The first round of work was fairly extensive and formed the basis of all my learning in the home improvement field. Essentially, the initial project had me tearing out all building materials on the main floor and main bathroom and rebuilding from scratch.

After a long hiatus, I have now begun a project that looks toward the future. It started with a decision to repair a little water damage, and has evolved into a plan to separate our stacked townhouse into two separate units.

At the time of purchase, there were two units that had been rented separately, but I needed to rip out the existing separating structures in order to be able to move construction materials into the upper levels. We’ve always had access to the full space and had not considered the benefits to creating the separate space until recently.

Our plan at this point is to live at this address and use the entire space for the next two years while we save some money for a downpatment on our next house. At the end of the two years we can rent the townhouse as two separate units and move to the next stage of our life while maintaining this property as an investment.

I figure that this blog will be an interesting way for me to remember my own trials and tribulations as I progress with the project. All the better if I can help anyone else with their own projects through my experience.

Getting Started

Posted by ngreene on Mar 3, 2010 in Projects

Out of the blue last week I decided that is was about time to figure out how web publishing works. In retrospect, I have no idea why this became a need for me so urgently. It just occurred to me that I wanted to be able to say that I could do it and it got stuck in my head until I could actually understand how things work.

I have absolutely no experience with development or programming, but I can generally figure out how to use any software that I come across.

I started by assuming that the best way for me to do this was to use an existing domain that I already own (www.theliftfirm.com) and host a website on my good ole MacBook Pro laptop. I did some quick research and decided that I would use Drupal as my content management program of choice. I figured that I would simply install a program, connect my url somehow and “presto” I would be ready for publishing. Wow was I wrong.

I spent my first night trying to understand the requirements to run Drupal. Pretty straightforward, you just need a web server (Apache), a database (MySql) and something called PHP, which I still don’t really understand. My first thought was to download and install each of these programs, which was easy enough. Next, there was the matter of configuring the programs and creating a database using the OSX Terminal.

I spent the rest of the night trying to figure out what I didn’t understand. I came to the point that I actually understood what I was doing in Terminal and was able to get Drupal to launch, but when I was asked for the name of the database that I created I had no idea. A quick ask for help from Vark.com and I realized that I hadn’t created a database at all. The other benefit that came from asking Vark.com was that there were easier ways to get started in the form of ready to use stacks such as MAMP.

The next night I started from scratch. I dumped all of my work from the night before, got a nice clean install of MAMP and tried again. Once again, there was something that I just couldn’t get working. Exasperated, I tweeted my frustration and a follower was kind enough to reply and suggest that I try an installation of Acquia Drupal. Free to try, but there was a small fee to use it going forward. Finally I had a version of Drupal installed that I could play with.

The next day I noticed that someone else responded to my Vark.com query suggesting that it might just be easier to use WordPress for my purposes. After looking into the features and the “free” pricetag I thought I should at least check it out. My experience with doing the Drupal install allowed me to have WordPress running on my local machine within a few minutes. I checked out a few templates and was now certain that I wanted to use WordPress.

Now all I needed to do was figure out how to connect my local installation of WordPress to the URL that I already own. Turns out that is not the easiest task. I went back to my new best friend Vark.com and within 10 minutes my answer came back in the form of a question. ”Why would you want to host the server on your laptop? Most people sign up for cheap hosting when they register their domain”

So I turned to the good folks at GoDaddy.com to look at my options. It was probably more complicated for me because I had a temporary placeholder page that was connected to a free hosting account and I didn’t realize that I needed to turn off the free hosting before I bought a new hosting service. It took me all night to get to know the interface and figure out what I needed to do. I had things set up before I went to bed, except that I had to wait for my new hosting account to be setup.

For anyone interested in setting up their own WordPress blog with a custom URL I can now tell you the easiest way to get started:

Go to www.godaddy.com and choose your URL
Select the hosting package you want. I used the WordPress and GoDaddy Hosting Economy plan for under $5 per month.
When I woke up the next day I was set up and ready to go. With the hosting package as chosen they had already installed WordPress and, on launch I was prompted to create a database with a user name and password and I was up and running in 5 minutes.

I wish someone had these instructions posted somewhere easy for me to find so I thought I would share my story in hopes that it makes someone else’s life easier.

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