“Has it really been almost a month since I’ve posted anything of value to the world? I know I’ve been living life and enjoying friends and the weekend, but really.. a WHOLE month. Not good.” That’s what I thought logging on tonight to my blog and considering writing a blog post. Blogging is an interesting thing. There are so many out there; some people share their life, some proliferate information, others share their thoughts about a specific topic. My blog, well this is a place for everything in my life.

When I started blogging I did so to capture what was happening in my life so I had my journaling all done when it came time to scrapbook an event. It have moved to all sorts of locations. It has been broken apart and brought back together I don’t know how many times. I’ve often felt that I “need” to write more on my blog, like I “owe” it to the few people I know that actually read it. I mean if I want more readers and more people commenting I need to post more, right? I was thinking about this the other day and realized this. I’m a lurker. I mean, when I’m on Facebook, Twitter, etc. I lurk and read more than I comment. I know, some of you reading this find that hard to believe because I do comment in Facebook and tweet in Twitter. In thinking about being a lurker, I realized this, “I like lurking. I prefer talking to someone in person than writing to a nebulous person(s) over the web.” That said, I have to wonder how many people are lurking on my blog. Since this discovery I have accepted the fact that this blog is well.. for me. If others want to know what I’m doing, etc. then they can see it here.. but I don’t need comments or readers to feel the value of the blog. The value comes, for me, when I’m talking with someone about say.. a recipe.. and I can tell them, “Go to my blog and select recipes, you’ll find a great recipe for gnocchi.” If they go great, if not that’s OK too.

So what does this all mean? Well, I honestly don’t know. What I DO know is that I don’t feel pressure to post to my blog. I don’t feel bad when no one comments. I feel good that I can share with others and they can read it when they see fit.. or maybe not at all. It’s liberating I have to say.

It’s a new year and so of course that means making resolutions for the year that for me, usually mean I’ll break. Actually, I like to think of them as goals more than resolutions. This year I have a lot of them and I’m hoping that I can reach most of them. I’ve broken the list into a few categories.

Warning: This is a long post.

Health & Wellness

1. Eat more vegetables and fish… less meat and chicken.
   I have eaten way WAY too much junk over the holidays and have never been good about eating enough veggies each day. I’m hoping this year I’ll turn over a new leaf and eat more veggies and fish. I even ordered some new recipe books from Amazon to inspire me. Eric is up to the challenge as well. He loved using the Epicurious iPhone app to find new recipes to try. I’m hoping that at least once a week I can get a recipe posted that we’ve tried.
2. Exercise for 30-45 minutes at least three times a week.
   Ahh… the elusive exercise. This spring and summer I did really well exercising and lost some weight. Of course with winter comes the rain and who wants to run in the rain? Not me and NOT my dogs. So exercise has been a bit elusive for me lately because of the weather and well, I’ve just been crazy busy at work. So this year I’m hoping to break that and get to getting. My mother-in-law, Julie bought me the Biggest Looser game for the  Wii. It was on my Amazon wish list. In any case I now have the Wii set up in my studio and have committed to exercising and playing that game. I’ve just started and let me tell you, it kick my bootie. Here’s to removed those unwanted pounds for good.
3. Walk the dogs three times a week.
   I’m a bad owner. I’m so terrible about taking my dogs for a walk and getting them outside it’s not even funny. Baylee is a little round and well, Kona will never be fat because she’s got the Jack (Crack) Russell in her. So I’m going to get them out and walk them three times a week. Maybe once a month or so I’ll take them to the winery to run. They love it there. I try to take them to the dog park but they get overwhelmed by the super big dogs and just won’t do much so, walking it is. I’m hoping I can get my lazy self up tomorrow and take them. Maybe Eric will join me?

Personal improvements

1. No more than 2 hours or TV or electrical entertainment a day.
   I think I’m a certified couch potato. Most of the time Eric and I do the same thing every day when we each get home. Plop in front of the TV and watch whatever is on or what we’ve got on the DVR until it’s time to go to bed. Go to bed and in some cases watch TV until midnight for no other reason than because it’s there. I have a stack of books, both professional and fun, that I’d like to read but haven’t had the time because I’m parked in front of the TV.  This year that changes. This year I’m only allowing myself two hours of TV or electronic entertainment a day. With any luck I’ll reduce even that. Tonight Eric is watching some football game so I’m upstairs reading and writing. I thought I’d be bored to tears but I have to say, I REALLY enjoy the quiet time. I like being able to collect my thoughts and write them down. I just like not having the blare of the TV. Tonight I only watched 30 minutes of TV and I have to say, that was enough for me. I’m feeling good about this one and hoping to continue it all year-long.
2. Read at least 2 books a month
   Again, I haven’t had, or made, a lot of time to read. I enjoy reading but I’m not a fast reader so it takes me a while to read anything. This year I’m hoping to read 24 books over the year, that’s about 2 books a month. I’m really looking forward to this one as I have several books to read. My “To Read” pile is HUGE, like 40+ books and that doesn’t include the ones on my Kindle. I need to get reading!
3. Try to blog once a week
   This one is here because I’m a bad blogger. I don’t feel the need to HAVE to blog but I want to blog. I often use my blogs to capture events that I later scrapbook. Some of my friends and family read my blog to keep up on things Eric and I are doing or have done. Note: I’m terrible about emailing people about what I’m up to. So I’m hoping to post a blog every week. They might be about thing I’ve read, things I’m doing, scrapbooky stuff, cooking, who knows.. but I’m going to try. If nothing else it will be a great way of me to improve my writing.

Home & Finance

1. Focus on one room a month to “super” clean and organize.
   Ahh… the elusive organization. OK, I’m an organized person. My house is pretty organized too but there are pockets of “junk” and clutter that need to go. In the past I’ve tried spring cleaning but that has ended up in the “junk” moving from one location to another. So this year, with the help of a book bought, One Year to an Organized Life, I’m going to tackle one room a month and clean it from top to bottom and organize everything in it. I’ll Craig’s List what I can and then donate the rest. By the end of this year I want the house it tip-top shape. We’ve just got too much stuff that we don’t use or need around here. I’ve even wrangled Eric into this goal. If we meet the goal for the month, we get to treat ourselves to a nice dinner out. I’ve actually already started. This month is my studio/office. Over New Years I took up the carpet and padding, painted the floor with porch paint and as I started putting things back in the room I purged my stuff. Now there’s a big pile of stuff on the ping-pong table in the garage waiting for Craig’s List. I have to say it feels great to have that room almost done.
2. Stick to our budget
   Eric and I are not good at budgeting. I mean we can plan a budget but it’s the sticking to it that we’re not good at. This year we’re going to really try to stick to it. Our goal is to be debt free, except the mortgage, student loan, and car payment, by the end of this year. That means some belt-tightening and sticking to a budget. We can do it I’m sure we’ve just been lazy.
3. Pay bills on time and together
   This has been an interesting one for us. Paying bills I mean. When we were first married I paid all the bills and kept the finances going. Early last year I couldn’t take it any more and just dumped it all in Eric’s lap to deal with. He has a different style that I do, like keeping the balance in his head rather than using something like Quicken or something to do that. he also doesn’t reconcile the account each month. Those things started driving me crazy so we sat down and wrote up our budget and then I made an Excel sheet with a column for each pay check we’ll get for the year. I then identified what we will pay with which paycheck. Now when Eric gets paid he knows what bills he has to pay and when I get paid I know what bills I need to pay. We also moved from Quicken to iFinance because it’s a Mac application and has an iPhone app that allows you to sync with your Mac so we can always know how we’re doing.
4. Increase 401K
   I’m getting older, hit 40 in 2009… that means retirement is closer. When I retire I want to be able to live the way I do now, maybe better so it’ time to throw more money in the 401K. I’m thinking whatever raise I get this year will go right into the 401K.
5. No credit card charges
   To meet our debt free goal by the end of this year that means no more charges on the credit cards. When we have them paid off I’ll be so happy. This month we’ve gotten two paid off already. Now we just have a little more left to go. I’m going to SO do the happy dance when we get there.

So here’s to a new year, new goals, and a great future ahead. I hope your year is starting out well too.

Today was day one of WordCamp PDX and let me just say.. it was AWESOME! I attended last year and really enjoyed myself. This year was even better. I couldn’t believe all the people there. There were WAY more than last year.

Here’s a summary video.. or you can read below. Note that the video isn’t that great because I did it right into YouTube (Won’t be doing that again).

Jason Grigsby – Speed Up WordPress. Make Readers Happy and Your Site Green

The talk was very interesting and really made me think. Jason pointed out that since 2003 web page size has tripled and the number of objects on the page has doubled. Now that may not sound like that big o a deal but what I also learned was that this increase means more servers and more servers means more energy usage. I can’t remember the exact numbers but I remember Jason saying something like the amount of power used by the increase of servers can power all of Mississippi for a day. I’m sure I got that wrong, but it was something like that. I have to say I was blown away. I mean I just never made that connections. Jason went on to show us how to optimize a site and reduce the energy load that it’s using. Basically how to minimize the server drain and optimize the site. It was so neat! After seeing this presentation I’m going to optimize my site in the next couple of weeks and share the information with other bloggers in hopes that they too can help decrease the footprint on the environment.

Cami Kaos / Dr. Normal – Bondage: How to be your podcast’s Dom, not its Sub

The next presentation was by Cami Kaos and Dr. Normal. They share with us all about podcasting and things to consider when starting your own podcast. I think the biggest challenge for me would be to be consistent with it. They do such an amazing job of bringing great guests on the show. I love it.

Matt Mullenweg – WordPress Q&A

Matt Mullenweg was the next presenter. His session was more of a Q&A session with people asking hims all sorts of questions.  It was interesting to hear the questions but also to hear his thoughts on WordPress. I also learned that you can post a blog posting from MS Word.  Interesting stuff!

Shayne Sanderson – WPMU and Ecommerce

Shayne talked about WPMU and ecommerce and how to monitize your blog and start selling things. He did a great job discussing ecommerce and the plugin for WP that helps with that. I think the bummer was that the wifi wasn’t cooperating and so that made it hard but he was a trooper.

Unconference topic – Using WordPress as a CMS

I have to say this was interesting too.  Not just because it was a non-conference topic but what began as a “how do you use WP as a CMS” really turned into what plugins do you us that help make WP a CMS. I loved the conversation and the recommendation of plugins I now have a TON of plugins to research and see if they could help in my blog(s). Thanks for the great conversation and ideas!

Tyler Sticka – WordPress-Powered Portfolios

Tyler was the last presentation of the day. I think it couldn’t have been better timed. I loved the topic of using WP for Portfolios. I really liked the fact that Tyler didn’t use bullet points in a presentation but used sketches to convey what he wanted to say. It was so nice and refreshing. He got me thinking about reposting my portfolio of ISD work and other things that I do. I really like Tyler’s website and how he has it arranged. I think I’m going to have to look at it more closely and see what I want to do with mine.

Now that I’ve attended the first day I have a HUGE list of things to look at. I thoughts I’d get them down here in case I lose my notes or someone has more to add.

List of things to check out now

• Gzip
• Sprite Me
• PHP Speedy plugin
• Podcaster iPhone app
• Podpress
• blip.tv
• intensedebate plugin
• sitepoint.com
• wordpress.org/showcase
• wordcamped
• wordpressme.org
• wordpress.tv
• bluelimemedia
• exclude pages plugin
• page mash plugin
• flexi page
• custom post templates
• wiki plugin?
• more fields plugin
• flutter
• pods plugin
• customize post listing plugin
• multilevel navigation plugin
• breadcrumbs plugin
• roles and responsibilities plugin
• advanced category excluder plugin

Final Thoughts

Today ROCKED! I can’t wait for tomorrow. I also got spurred on by the conversations and things. I’m now thinking about working with those that are interested to start blog/site for corp training, informal learning etc. I think it could be really cool. Bring together “training” people and “techie” people. If you’re reading this and interested, DM me on Twitter (@jltitus) and let me know.

Well, it’s finally ready. I’ve been working on this blog for a few months trying to get it “just right” and ready for the world to see. I’m pretty proud of this blog. So why did I make a new blog you ask? Well, I’ve been blogging, or not blogging, for a while and had several separate blogs; one for recipes, one for my personal life, and one for my professional life.  After much consideration I thought that it was time to make life easier on myself and reduce the number for blogs and give people one place to go and find me. So I melded all those blogs together, to this one. So you’ll see I have recipes, family stuff, work stuff, random thoughts, and more. What’s nice too is that I’ve been working on categorizing all my posts to fall in one of a few categories:

• All about us (Eric, myself, the dogs, and cat)
• Celebrations (holidays, special days, etc.)
• Geek life (work life, social media, techie things,etc.)
• People we love (people in our lives, some family, some friends)
• Places we go (adventures near and far)
• Recipes (our recipes)
• Things we do (activities we do… like wine touring)

I thought long and hard about the name for this blog too. I wanted to name is something catchy or that people would remember but in the end I decided to, “keep it simple silly” and was able to get my twitter user name. So…. welcome to http://www.jltitus.com

I hope to get more consistent about my posting and hope not to bore the few that read this blog.

I just found the coolest add ons to Firefox today, AideRSS Google Reader integration and Post Rank. These two extensions are making my life SO much easier. I’m sure many people have already found these two extensions and are using them but for the sake of those that have yet to discover them, here are a few reasons why these two extensions should be in your Firefox.

1. Skimming your Google Reader feeds becomes so much easier. I really like that I get a ranking for each post in my Reader.  It makes it so much easier to skim and get to those posts that people are bookmarking. I have to say using this feature has really cut down the time I spend reading posts.  I’m able to get to the really important things right away rather than hoping I find them.
2. Getting an RSS feeds of your feeds is very simple. I’ve used Yahoo Pipes in the past to get a feed of feeds but I have to say, this is SO much easier than that.  I just downloaded my Google Reader OPML file and uploaded it to Post Rank and now I have feeds for each tag I use.  I can see a lot of uses for this, one of them being getting the feed and using it on a Netvibes dashboard.  So much easier and less time consuming than Yahoo Pipes.

1. Page ranking everywhere you “surf”. I like this feature because now any where I go I can see how that page ranks.  It’s just so simple.  In the picture below the page I went to was ranked 8.1.  What a quick and easy way to see how pages I go to are doing and what others think of the information.

Recently I was reading  Wired magazine and stumbled upon an article from Paul Boutin, “Kill Your Blog”.  In Paul’s short article he suggests that blogging is dead and we should… “pull the plug” on them if we’ve already got them.  He suggests that social media applications like Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, etc are better, faster ways to express yourself.  He goes on to suggest that if you look at Technorati’s top 100 blogs, you’ll have to scroll for a long time to find personal blogs because the top 100 is mostly professional blogs like The Huffington post , Engadget and TreeHugger.

I have to say, I couldn’t disagree more.  Ok, maybe blogging isn’t as popular as it once was because we do have tools like Twitter that make it easy to micropost. But blogging does have it’s place. To suggest that one should kill their blog is beyond nuts.  Why?  Well, let me give you a personal example.  I have a personal family blog that I use to keep my family and friends updated on what I’m doing. I use a blog because quite honestly, most of my family isn’t technologically savvy.  It’s all I can do to get my mother to check my blog.  Many of friends are part of the 90% that are lookers and don’t post comments.

I honestly can’t believe that a person would suggest no longer using a blog.  Blogs are not dead and worthless, they are not used by those that are farther down the technological  path using social media. Not everyone in this world is an early adopter, not everyone embraces social media.  People and companies need to provide content to all  in all ways.. If it be a blog, Twitter, Facebook, etc. I think most companies have some sort of blog, Twitter presence, Facebook presence and more.. Why are they in all these places? Because they’re trying to go where their customers are, where the people are… and that includes blogs.  If they didn’t blog, they’d be missing a whole group of people.