Alan Kleymeyer's Blog » General

WordPress plugins

Alan — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 05:22:32 +0000

I love WordPress. I use it for all my web sites. Most hosting services offer it for free. I manage three primary Wordpress sites. My own blog, laketravislacrosse, and laketravisparents.

Below are plugins I recommend for WordPress

Members highly recommended for collaboration.
NextGen Gallary for simple photo management. Can be used to rotate through images. I use it to highlight VIP sponsors.
iFrame. Wordpress doesn’t allow iFrames for security reasons. This plugin supports iFrames which are necessary for embedding things such as a Google Form or PayPal buttons.
AWPCP for Classified Ads
Exclude Pages From Navigation. I found this plugin searching how to remove pages that showed up in the Classifieds Menu created by the AWPCP plugin. Previously, I had made pages private to keep them from showing up in the menu which is related to the theme I am using. Now with this plugin I have better control of whether a page should be on a menu or not.

Prefer Interfaces over Base Classes

Alan — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 02:12:05 +0000

Why Java Extends is evil

Let it crash programming

Alan — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 02:06:01 +0000

I’m not sure I’m sold on the notion of “Let it crash programming”. Here are some posts on the subject.

1 2 3 4

USTA 4.5 2011

Alan — Sun, 14 Aug 2011 22:44:03 +0000

I had a great season of USTA 4.5 tennis this year. Counting the three matches I played this weekend in Houston (Little State) I went 9-1 ! Not bad for the last year as a junior. Next year I qualify for senior leagues!

Thanks to my tennis partners: Clay Johnson, Steve Gilmer (we went 3-0 in Little State), Russ Needler and James Bronson.

And thanks to Gentry Sparling for captaining our team and to Darrell Breeden for all his help this season and for scheduling most of my practice matches.

Confluence for collaboration

Alan — Thu, 04 Aug 2011 18:02:18 +0000

My company is standardizing on Atlassian products such as Jira (for issue tracking), and Confluence for Wikis and collaboration. I have yet to use a system that works better than a simple blog with categories, pages and RSS feeds. I mean what is better than subscribing to a Page, Category (or tag) and contributing to the comment thread of a post you are interested in.

So far, I’m finding Confluence’s support for blogs leaving much to be desired. Starting with the fact you can’t subscribe to feeds with many readers since they require authentication and many (such as Google Reader) don’t support authenticated feeds.

Here is one option that uses a proxy

I tend to agree with Scott that a wiki without RSS feeds is a non starter. Email notifications? I find it funny that Confluence promotes itself as a solution for email chaos but then offer it as the primary mechanism for notifications.

You should completely drain your battery once a month

Alan — Sat, 30 Jul 2011 15:56:54 +0000

“For proper maintenance of a lithium-based battery, it’s important to keep the electrons in it moving occasionally. Be sure to go through at least one charge cycle per month (charging the battery to 100% and then completely running it down).”

“Apple does not recommend leaving your portable plugged in all the time.” It adds that, if you don’t drain and recharge your Mac laptop in the course of normal usage, “Apple recommends charging and discharging its battery at least once per month.”

Of course, many iPhone users find that it’s easy to completely run the battery down…

Kristen’s 10u All-star season

Alan — Fri, 01 Jul 2011 02:17:13 +0000

Kristen wrapped up her baseball All Star season with a triple and double in their only win in the double elimination tournament. They only won 1 of 9 pool-play games which served to seed teams for the season ending tournament. The LT Rookie Cavs had to play the #1 seed being the #8 seed. The only game they won during pool play was against the only team that the #1 seed lost to during pool play! The Cavs only lost 4-6 to the #1 seed who ended up winning the tournament. The tournament was held at the beautiful Round Rock Youth fields near the Dell Diamond
Link to playlist of Kristen’s all All-Star game highlights.

LTYA Rookie (10u) Mets Win Post Season Tournament

Alan — Tue, 24 May 2011 03:28:42 +0000

The Cardinals beat us in the 2nd round but after defeating the Rays in the loser’s bracket, we faced the Cardinals in the championship game, won, and played them two hours later and beat them decisively 19-7 to win the tournament.

Video Highlights of Season

Kristen’s Video Highlights

David vs JR

Alan — Sat, 30 Apr 2011 03:47:04 +0000

This is a video I made from a 1 on 1 XBOX Halo 3 cage match between David and a friend. I had recently watched the movie Inside Man with Clive Owen where the song Chaiyya Chaiyya was featured. I liked the song and knew I’d find a video to use it in.

Kristen’s Breakout game. No turning back now.

Alan — Thu, 10 Feb 2011 17:15:11 +0000

Kristen shoots 63% to score 30 of her team’s 38 points. For the first time she drives to the basket, and makes some unbelievable shots from the outside.