Category Archives: poulios.com

Year in Review – 2012

Early last year, just after the new year had dawned, I posted 3 separate blogs reviewing the previous year (2011). This year I’ve decided to lump the same 3 topics into a single, somewhat long, post. So get some popcorn to enjoy a little bed time reading.

The first half of 2012 ended of what might have been the toughest 2 year stretch of my adult life as my professional career was affecting my health and personal life. However, I was able to make some changes to get back to enjoying life the way I think I should… at the local watering hole. Just kidding, sort of. Now that the turnaround has started I’m hoping 2013 will turn out to be a great year.

Traveling Man

Last year I used travel itineraries saved in my inbox to determine where I had been during 2011. This year I kept a spreadsheet tracking my travels as they came and went, making things a bit easier to summarize now for all my loyal readers. Those of you that visited the blog during the year were also able to keep up following each of the various trips. I managed to travel a total of 92 days and 37,246 miles through the air during 2012. However, 27 of those 92 travel days were for personal trips. This was a decrease from 2011 when I traveled 106 days and 45,674 miles through the air, especially if you remove personal trips from the equation. Not included in the total days and miles were 2 trips to San Diego, a two day personal trip and a 4 day business trip, both of which I drove to. I reference those trips only because they required overnight stays at a hotel. Although I’m happy the travel days decreased last year, I was a little disappointed losing A-List status with Southwest. A small price to pay for a little more sanity.

Cities I visited during 2012 included:

Birmingham, AL
Denver, CO
Indianapolis, IN
Las Vegas, NV
Punta Cana, Dominican Republic
Sacramento, CA
Salt Lake City, UT
San Diego, CA

Goals

I set a standard group of 5 goals for 2010, which I decided to use as a baseline for 2011 and 2012, and will use again for 2013. The goals are pretty simple, with 1 overriding goal; work out 150 days during the year. This goal is supporting with 4 sub-goals regarding exercise and one other goal.

Total Hikes – 5
Total Destination Bike Rides – 5
Total Rounds of Golf – 8
Total Exercise Days (Cardo/Weights) – 132
New Vacation Destination – 1

Well, here are the final results:

Total Hikes – 0 (0%)
Total Destination Bike Rides – 0 (0%)
Total Rounds of Golf – 7 (88%)
Total Exercise Days – 25 (19%)
New Vacation Destination – Punta Cana, Dominican Republic (100%)

Outside of almost hitting my goal of 8 rounds of golf, all I can say is it was a bad year, having done some sort of exercise only 21% of the goal (150). Hopefully 2013 will turn out a little better.

I’m also adding a new mini-goal for 2013. During the past few years I’ve gotten to be a little lazy during the weekday morning, spending the first hour or two lounging in bed watching the news or a tv show. It really is just a big waste of time and a habit I’m going to try to break. This only includes weekdays though, weekends are for lounging. No reason to make any changes there.

Posting & Toasting

The blog incurred a big change during 2012, moving from the self hosted wordpress.org to the WordPress hosted site. This was mostly seamless to all of my (2) loyal readers, but required some effort in the back end to get things set up. This also resulted in some savings as I no longer have to pay GoDaddy to host my data, with WordPress only charging to host my domain name, which results in less cost and hassle.

Overall, this was probably my most consistent year posting to the blog as I had two main topics to post about, travel and fantasy football. Here and there I tried to add a few new topics, but nothing stuck. I’ll continue testing out new ideas and building on current ideas to make things more interesting. Then again, my posts are pretty boring, so things can only get better… assuming I at least keep posting.

Here are some interesting stats about the blog from last year:

17 – Most comments by a single reader (Joker36). I think he can do better during 2013.
89 – Busiest day on December 11^th;. This was the 2^nd; highest single day total to the 90 hits reached on October 26, 2010.
104 – Top viewed page belongs to the 2011 Fantasy Football Preview published on September 11, 2011. Considering the topic I’m a little confused as to why this was the most popular post during 2012.
428 – Number of page views during the month of March, beating out the best month of 2011 (November – 392).
2,995 – Total pages views, which is 88 less than 2011.
14,733 – Total page hits on the blog since WordPress started tracking page hits.

Overall it was a successful year for the blog and I look forward to more good years ahead.

2011 Year in Review – Posting and Toasting

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This is the last of my multi-post review of 2011. The 1^st part of the review included details about how I did against exercise goals I set at the beginning of the year. The last part of the review, which will be posted tomorrow, will include some details on how the blog did during 2011.

During previous years I blogged about fantasy football, but didn’t have another subject I would discuss consistently. That changed during 2011 as I began posting about airports, airlines, hotels, and car rental companies during my travels. Most of my travel was for business purposes, but I was able to mix in some personal travel posts here and there. Overall it was a successful year for the blog and I look forward to more good years ahead. Here are some numbers to chew on

17 – Most searched term that resulted in a google link to the blog. The search term: thessaloniki beaches.
48 – Total page views during 2011 for the most popular post, Apples (Mac) vs. Oranges (PC), which was originally posted to the blog in June 2005. This does not include the home and about me pages.
137 – Number of blog posts this year, the most for any given year since inception (2005)
392 – Number of page views during the month of November, the most monthly page views of any month during the 4full years stats have been tracked.
3,083 – Total page views at Poulios.com, which is highest total views for the year in the 4 full years stats have been tracked.

K

December 12, 2011

Just updated the blog to WordPress 3.3 (previously 3.2.1). I like the new welcome screen detailing the updates to look out for. The fly-out menus are a nice touch. But simpler media uploading by using the single icon or drag-drop might be my favorite. It amazes me that WordPress is able to build an open source blog, continues to push out relatively frequent updates, and (most of all) makes it free to the world. Thanks WordPress!

Milestone @ Poulios.com

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This was lost in the shuffle earlier this month. Sometime between September 2 – 3 Poulios.com reached 10,000 page hits since I started recording stats during December 2007. I mostly do this stuff because I like it, but it’s nice to know there are a few of you that make an attempt to visit a few times a week, especially Joker36 and my mom. Thanks!

WordPress v3.2 "Gershwin"

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On July 4th a lot of you were probably celebrating the 4th of July holiday… and so was I. However, a big change occurred that day at poulios.com. The site was updated to WordPress v3.2. I’d venture a guess that none of the few readers here noticed a difference. The big change that I was excited about came along with the new theme, Twenty Eleven.

Something I’ve tried a few times in the past is to have a seamless flow of data from Facebook or Twitter to the blog. However, most of the time it just didn’t look right. Tumblr actually does a really good job with this concept. Well, I think that’s changed now. WordPress v3.2 includes post formats like Standard, Link, Quote, Status, Image, and Gallery. The Twenty Eleven theme was created along with the most recent version of WordPress to make use of post formats. The previous post was actually a tweet which, when imported into the blog, showed up as a Status. The best part is it looks clean, which was my pet peeve with other options I’ve tried in the past. It did take a little hacking to get to this point though. I use Twitter Tools, a plugin created by Crowd Favorite. However, the plugin doesn’t have an option to create a post from a tweet with a post format. A quick Google search got me the answer I was looking for. With just one line added to the code tweets now turn into clean blog posts with a Status format. Anyway, we’ll see if this continues to work in the long run. I’m interested to see how it looks when I check into a location with foursquare, which then updates Twitter, which will then create a blog post.

Also, you may have noticed a little change to the header image, which I change every now and then. The picture is from my 2005 sailing trip to the Greek Cyclades islands. This specific picture is of the windmills on Mykonos.

Enjoy.

Poulios.com Site Updates

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It’s been a productive weekend for the website as I changed some things and added a few others. Figured I’d list them for the world to see.

Photo Albums – For the past few years I’ve used the Nextgen Gallery plug-in to create photo albums and display them on the website. There was a limitation with the plug-in that I’ve wanted to change for some time now. The limitation is it doesn’t allow for each picture to have it’s own page for visitors to comment. That didn’t take away from the plug-in too much as it was still the best plug-in I tested. Well, now there is a better tool… and it’s built right into the core of WordPress. Now all I have to do is upload the photos into a post to create a gallery. And by labeling all album posts with the “gallery” category I’m able to create a specific page to track them. Check it out by clicking the gallery link in the header menu to take it for a test drive.
Dakota Lodge Calendar – It’s been 4 years since I purchased a quarter share of a condo in Keystone, CO. Every once in a while a friend or family member will ask me to send them the owners calendar which details which owner “owns” each week. Well, by using Google Calendar I’m able to include the calendar here on the website. Check it out by clicking the dakota lodge calendar link in the header menu to check it out.
2011 Goals Tracking – This one is for Joker, who put together a spreadsheet to track the goals I listed here on the site for 2011. I imported the spreadsheet into Google Docs, made some adjustments where Google Docs had errors importing the Excel spreadsheet, and published the spreadsheet in html format. From what I understand all I need to do is update the spreadsheet on Google Docs and it will automatically republish to the blog. We’ll see if that works as we go along. Until then, check out my current status by clicking the goals tracking link in the header menu. You can even comment on how I’m doing.

It’s been a while since the site had this many changes all at once. Hope you like them. Enjoy.

5 Years of Poulios.com

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It was 5 years ago today that poulios.com went live. Blog stats were installed on the blog in December, 2007. Here are some stats for your reading pleasure:

I’ve posted 306 blog posts since November 2, 2005, some of them long, some of them short, most of the irrelevant variety.
There were 397 comments posted to the blog since November 2, 2005.
There were 7,829 page views by people other than myself.
There were 90 page views on Tuesday, October 26, 2010, the businest day for the blog. This was in large part due to a new way of posting photo galleries on the blog, which counts each photo click as a single page view… the way it should be. The previous way of posting photo galleries only counted the first time the Photos page was clicked. Prior to October 26, there were 76 page views on Tuesday, January 5, 2010, which is now the 2nd busiest day for the blog.
There were 370 page views during February, 2009, the busiest month for the blog.
There were 2,831 page views during 2008, the busiest year for the blog.
With 50 page views, Chase Bank and Unemployment is the most viewed post. This does not include the generic pages of Home, About Me, Photos, NY Sports (news links), and Contact.

And I still have no idea what I’m doing!

The plan is to start making some changes to the blog during the next few months. I’m going to change all the photo galleries to use the new format, which happens to be the built-in WordPress functionality implemented with the latest version of WordPress. I’m going to make some changes to the page links at the top to show “Quick Hits” (Twitter) and “Checkin’ in” (FourSquare). And maybe I’ll even implement a new theme to the blog, we’ll see. Any ideas to improve the blog are welcome. The only thing a can’t promise are more blog posts, not unless you want to pay me to do this for a living.

WordPress Theme: Twenty Ten

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As noted a few days ago, a new theme was added to the most recent version of WordPress, named Twenty Ten. This theme is now running here at poulios.com. My original hesitation on using the theme was I hadn’t figured out how to remove post titles from posts using the “status” category. Turns out the functionality was included in the theme, just with a different category named “asides.” A quick name change of the “status” category to “asides” and voila. There are a few things that still need to be cleaned up with the theme, but will play with it here and there until I figure it out. Next on my list is to figure out why posts have different font sizes.

WordPress 3.0 “Thelonious”

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WordPress 3.0 “Thelonious” was released earlier today and I wanted to give a little kudos to the WordPress team.

Major new features in this release include a sexy new default theme called Twenty Ten. Theme developers have new APIs that allow them to easily implement custom backgrounds, headers, shortlinks, menus (no more file editing), post types, and taxonomies.

And for the first time in years a new theme has been added to the release to replace the Default theme, this one named Twenty Ten. I’m hoping to be able to spend some time with the new theme, but until then you’re stuck with the one I’ve been using for the past half a year, P2. Although I like the new theme, I’d like to figure out how to customize the look of posts based on the post category. For example, when I post using the “status” category in P2, the post title is left out, giving the post more of a Facebook status or Twitter look to it, which I like.

Testing out a new theme here on the blog…

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Testing out a new theme here on the blog. It’s called P2, a microblogging theme (think Twitter), and developed by the same group as WordPress. There are a few bugs I’m dealing with, like the fact that the photo albums don’t show at the top of the page. Since I’ll have some time off during the next few weeks I’ll play around with it. If you have any ideas, feel free to add them here.

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