www.markpude.com

Please welcome back the orange you all know and love from previous incarnations of this website, #FF9900!

That is all. Thank you.

Since I was so impressed with Windows 7 on my regular laptop, I decided to try it out on my netbook.  I’ve got a little Acer Aspire One job.  Its got a pretty low end CPU (1.6 GHz Intel Atom), but its got a reasonable amount of RAM (1 GB) and HDD (120 GB).  It also has no CD drive, so I had to google around to figure out how to install Windows 7 from a flash drive.  Once I did that, the install went smoothly.

It started off running pretty choppy, it clearly can’t handle all of the visual effects being thrown at it.  After about an hour of fooling around, though, I was able to turn off the non-essential things (transparency was a big offender) and get something that works pretty well.  No way this sucker would run Vista regardless of the setting…

Summary: I continue to be impressed with Windows 7.  Good day.

Alright, so I’ve let it sit a couple of days and think I’m pretty happy with the new setup I’ve got going here. As I mentioned before I was looking for a bunch of plug-ins to make my life easier in that I don’t have to update several websites at the same time (this one, facebook, etc). I was pleasantly surprised at the amount of things like that available.

As I promised before, I will list the plug-ins that I ended up with including a brief description of each.

1 - Contact Form 7 – Very simple contact form generator.  This one I probabaly could have done on my own, but I’m lazy.

2 - Easy AdSense – Added Google AdSense. I don’t anyone comes to this site let alone clicks on the ads, but oh well.

3 - Fotobook – This is a pretty slick plug-in that grabs all of my facebook pictures and stores them on the site. It also has cron capability to periodically check for new pictures. See 7 to see how this is implemented. Check it out via the Photos tab above.

4 - Lifestream – This was the last one I added. It grabs RSS feeds from a whole host of services including Facebook status, and things I watch on Hulu. Check it out from the Lifestream tab at the top of the page.

5 - MapMyRide Widget – This pulls off of my MapMyRun.com RSS feed to display the most recent workout I’ve logged. I had to do significant customization to this one. I wasn’t a big fan of how much information it posted, so I changed it.

6 - ShareThis – This adds the “Share This” link at the bottom of each post/page. I don’t expect this feature to ever be used, but it makes the website look more legitimate since you see that sort of thing all over the intarweb these days.

7 - Utopia Cron – I think this guy is a very slick piece of work. Its a pseudo cron job manager. Basically whenever someone loads the website, it checks the time to see if any cron jobs need to be run. This is what I use to periodically update the Fotobook stream.

8 - Wordbook – This one interfaces with Facebook to tell people there when something new is posted here. Its really the only evidence on Facebook that this site even exists.

9 - WordPress PDA & iPhone Plugin – This little guy formats the site differently when it is accessed via a mobile device. Again, not something anyone other than myself will likely ever use.

Finally, I added a Zune tab above that just includes my Zune card or whatever its called so you can see what music I’ve been listening to.

This is a long post. I will end it abruptly.

Posting this from the Windows 7 beta.  I had signed up for it a while ago and installed it as a virtual machine on my Vista laptop, but running Windows 7 INSIDE Windows Vista proved to be too much for my little Inspiron E1405 to handle.

Took me quite a while to realize I should just do a dual boot instead.  Set that going this morning and came home to it finished… and so far, MAN am I impressed with Windows 7.

Let me start by saying that I’m about one in a million people that don’t have much of a problem with Vista.  The only problems I had with Vista from day one were software companies that didn’t manage to update their software in a timely fashion to work with Vista.  Even with this complaint, it was only a certain TYPE of software, namely VPN software (this means you, Cisco and Juniper).  As far as I’m concerned this is through no fault of Microsoft.  I mean these companies get a hold of copies of the new OSes WAY before anyone else… You mean to tell me you can’t get me working software? Bull.  Now that that’s off my chest…

Windows 7, with the exception of a few UI tweaks, seems like Vista on slimfast.  I have no quantitative data to back this up, but I feel like it boots up much faster and uses about 30-40% less memory.  I like it, and I’m probably gonna stick around in it until I need to do something with Office or some other software I don’t have multiple copies of.

So, in an effort to force myself to use the website a bit more, I went through and did a little work on it today.  Basically my problem is that I don’t want to update 40 different things with the same information…  By 40, I basically mean 2… I really don’t feel like updating my Facebook and website stuff when I really want things to be identical.

I went fishing around through WordPress’s extensive plugin library looking for things that will simultaneously update my facebook and website at the same time.  I was pleasantly surprised to find quite a few options.  I’m still in the process of playing with them to figure out which ones I like and which ones I don’t.  Maybe when I’m finished I’ll post which plugins I ended up with.