Supergeekblog

First, let me say, if you haven’t heard about the HP Magic Giveaway contest yet… go look at it! HP is having 50 different bloggers around the world give away $6,000 worth of computer equipment. It is a pretty cool (and fun) contest. I have entered a few of the contests, though haven’t won yet. (We can all hope right?)

Really the best part of this contest for me has been discovering some new blogs. This has been probably my favorite discovery so far. As you will see by the name, and looking through the site, they are a “fire family.” The husband (called FireDad on the site) is a 26 year old career firefighter. The wife (aka FireMom) is a 27 year old freelance writer and mother of 2. So seeing similar ages, interests, blogging, and loving all things department related, perked my interest to the site right away.

They are starting their contest today: Stop, Drop, and Blog. Here is the post for the HP contest. (Each site has their own rules, so make sure to read the contest rules before commenting.)

Disclamer: this post counts as an additional entry to the contest… but I also thought it would be fun to share how winning (if chance likes me) would impact my family, friends, and readers.

First, I would replace our aging family laptop, but more importantly I would give one to my wife so she can finally have her own computer. (Neither is in the Christmas budget this year.)

Secondly, I would see if anything would be of use to my (fire) dept. – I am guessing the photosmart the guys would have a lot of fun with and actually use productively. (Well sometimes.)

Last, I would share online as well by having a contest of my own on supergeekblog.com – not only would it be a blast, bring a lot of new readers, but someone I don’t even know would have a better holiday season as well.

So winning would have a positive, lasting, impact on myself and others. I encourage everyone to head on over and check out the Stop, Drop, and Blog site. It is a blast

Cross Post from Olorinpc.com

I just thought I would do a quick 100th post. Actually for Supergeekblog it is the 287th total post.

Supergeekblog first went live on September 1st, 2005 with three editors. Olorinpc (me), ThatEdeGuy, and Irrision. Due to different projects and whatnot, SGB kind of withered away for a year with minimal posting. A few months ago I resurrected it and have been working on building it back up since.

Here is how the site has looked in the past:

Nov. 2005

Jul. 2006

Jul. 2008

Nov. 2008+

You are looking at it!  I am still making tweaks to the template.  I started with one I liked and then I am ending up rewriting chunks of it as I see fit.  (I have rewritten quite a few of the pages/functions at this point.)

Well I hope you enjoyed that little look back at SuperGeekBlog and I hope you continue to visit in the future!  If you have seen all 4 revisions of the site – you clearly have and it is appreciated!

I normally don’t plug (pun intended) too many WordPress plugins, but this is the second one I have discovered this week that I installed right away.  This stats plugin impressed me with it’s layout immediately after installing.  It is called CyStats.

It integrates right into the WP-Admin section and starts recording data right away.  As a stats junky (my day job is reporting/business advisor/analyist/report development) I really like having this information at my fingertips.  Now I do use Feedburner, and there are some stats available there, but I like this built in site-wide stats viewing.  I encourage you to check it out and possibly install it yourself.  (Feel free to leave reviews or other recommendations.)

Well – I have finally given up and gotten sucked into Twitter. I had tested Plurk for a little while, but just found I didn’t use it and didn’t know that many people on it. However, I have a few people I already follow on Twitter, so have started to make use of it.

Anyone else out there using Twitter or Plurk?  Like it, Hate it, or just eh?

Here is my Twitter page – check it out, follow, etc (Original post from olorinpc.com)

(Cross post from Jake’s Corner)

One of the questions I get from time to time goes a bit like this: “Jake, where do you find this stuff?” That typically is a reference to a blog I linked to, news article, etc.

The short answer is – I read. A lot. I use Google Reader to subscribe to many different blogs/websites/newspapers/etc. Last count I have 109 subscriptions. So the follow up question to that would be – “Dude, how can you read that many sites in a day? Don’t you have to work sometimes?” Well of course I actually have to work. If I didn’t get my work done, I wouldn’t have a job, and if I didn’t have a job, I wouldn’t have money to pay for the internet to read stuff. Many of the sites aren’t quite that frequent in their updates… though I would say an average daily level for me is hovering around 250 items per day.

There are a few useful techniques that I use to get through higher volumes (some Mondays it gets more towards 500 unread) posts. The main one I use is (again with reader) sharing and starring items. I scroll through and note the ones that sound interesting, mark them, and review them later when I have the time.

I also know there are some sources (like a couple of the newspapers) that flood me with items that I quickly scroll past. So 10,437 items sounds like a lot, and it is, however the time spent on the bulk of those really isn’t. That shared number really just says that there are (using an average) a little over 20 posts a day that make me pause. That being said, I think anyone who really makes use of RSS feeds and reader can attest… some days you get buried and it takes a bit to catch back up.

So that is how it works. Other side of the coin is making posts myself. I am doing a similar process on that end. (Batch processing.) I write up 2-3 posts at a time and set the date/time I want them to show up on the web.