Wordpress is one of the greatest things that happened to the web. It makes blogging so much easier, and so much more powerful. Part of the thing that makes it so powerful is the ability to customize by adding plugins and themes. These are the first 10 plugins (and currently the only plugins) that I’ve used on my blog:

Adsense-Deluxe - Makes it easy to manage your Google AdSense (and Yahoo! PN) placements by using ad administration interface and putting tags where you want the ads to appear.

Akismet - This plugin comes with all Wordpress installations, but you need to register at Wordpress.com to get an activation key. This is a must plugin as it is used to filter out spam comments.

Digg This - This ads a “Digg This” button to your story if it gets Dugg. This can potentially help your story get more Diggs, which would allow it to get a better chance of making onto the Digg homepage.

Enhanced WP-Contact Form - A simple way to add a contact form to your page, rather than using your e-mail address.

Feedburner Feed Replacement - Replace your standard feed and change it to Feedburner. This makes it much better to track subscribers.

Google Sitemaps - This will automatically generate a sitemaps XML file for Google to read. This way if you setup an account through Google Sitemaps, it will hopefully crawl through your pages more efficiently and faster to get pages into search results.

Related Posts - This generates a list of related posts to the post you are reading. It will obviously get readers to browse other parts of your site, especially helpful for new readers. The server to download this plugin has been down, so if you need it, contact me or maybe somebody will post a mirror link in the comments.

Sidebar Widget - Sidebar Widget is a great tool from an administration perspective. It allows you to easily adjust the data and order of information that you put on the sidebar of the site for templates that support it.

Sociable - Sociable is a plugin that puts in the “share” buttons at the bottom of a post so readers can submit something they like to sites such as Digg and Del.icio.us.

Subscribe To Comments - This is a plugin that allows users to subscribe to the comments for each individual post. It’s a great way to keep readers active and coming back to the site.

WP-Cache - This is a caching module which should help on days when traffic spikes, for example if a post is Dugg. One of the worst things that can happen is if you have the potential to have a high traffic day, and your server crashes. This will hopefully be part of the prevention solution.

A sweet product from a Korean company called SNT announced an in-dash PC at CeBit this week. The negative….it’s most likely for the Korean market only, but we can still drool and hope stuff like this comes our way.

A bunch of tech sites posted about this prior to CeBit, but I haven’t read any updates yet and none of them knew what kind of price or hardware specs were going to be available. They did post some interesting tid bits though. It will be powered by WindowsXP and equipped with GPS and touchscreen. It supports something called T-DMB which can be used for viewing live TV and later be recorded to a hard drive. It can be hooked up to the internet constantly through HSDPA. The fact that everything is built into the entire unit, it will be such a clean installation, especially in cars that support double DIN.

I can really appreciate this because I had an in-car PC setup in my 350Z. We had to custom fabricate a way to fit the screen, run all the wiring throughout the car, etc. This is a much simpler solution. Here’s the setup I had in my Z:

I have been through a ton of different web hosts since 1997. Over the past 4 years though, I’ve stuck with one company, Media Temple. I know there are a lot of cheaply priced hosting plans out there, but for me, I would rather pay a little bit more knowing I’m with a company I can trust and treats me right. Whenever I would call for an issue, there is somebody ready to pick up the phone right away…and actually knows what they are talking about.

Sometime in the past year or so Media Temple changed their whole shared server system into something called Grid-server. I won’t go into details as you can just read that link, but on paper it’s pretty cool. It had a cool new administration interface, and it was supposed to be Digg capable. People from Digg even posted trying to take down a site, and it seemed to manage ok.

So I thought I would migrate my server for ActiveTuning over to the GS from their old shared server platform. Everything migrated smoothly and quickly, I just had to change a couple config files to match the new system paths and what not. I was happy. Now I have all of my sites hosted through Media Temple, and a couple clients from Tri Megatech as well.

The problem is over the past few months, I’ve had all sorts of issues with e-mail and even worse, downtime. You may have noticed two days ago, any of my main MT hosted sites were down a bunch of times (ActiveTuning, Tri Megatech, VideoExperiment, and this site). This is a major issue for me especially for ActiveTuning because all of our sales are done through our website. When our website is down, business is closed. Even this website, which I’m trying to increase the readership suffered because my Viper with a matching helicopter article was posted on Autoblog, but I lost a lot of the readers due to downtime.

Yesterdays issue was apparently due to the configuration of the BlueArc storage segment, and affected web, e-mail, and FTP…everything you need to run a website. I’m not positive, but I believe one of the previous downtime issues was due to the same problem.

Speaking of issues, I’m trying to login to my account center, and it seems like their account center site is down right now! Ok, now that it’s back up, I can pull some of my support tickets. I had issues with downtime on 2/22 and 12/3, and I recall these were both fairly long before they were resolved. I also had e-mail issues with Tri Megatech where some would come in and some would not. That seems to be resolved now, even though the solution that could not be resolved according to MT was an ISP blocking issue:

(mt) Media Temple has made numerous attempts to contact Comcast Cable and AT&T in attempts to be delisted from their “blocklist”. However, both parties are refusing to communicate with us or are ignoring us. At this point and time, (mt) Media Temple has no way of resolving this issue and has no control over the mail servers that are blocking mail from our servers. We apologize for any inconvenience this issue has caused. Thank you for your understanding.

I know it seems like I’m bad mouthing Media Temple, and I do admit, in the past few months there have been way too many issues. It all seems to be from this new Grid-Server setup. It does look like it has been getting better with each version upgrade they do…but it’s to the point now where I can’t even recommend my clients to do hosting through MT because of the downtime. There was one point where I was on location for a client showing them a prototype design that was hosted on our MT served site, and it was down. I obviously could not sell them a hosting plan after that.

I think that I probably have one or two more chances with MT having issues before enough is enough. I truly hope they are not outgrowing themselves. If you are hosted through Media Temple, how have your experiences been?

I didn’t think it was possible to have an ugly Lamborghini, but John Ferci made that happen. John somehow acquired exclusive rights from Lamborghini to build custom versions and still retain the name and official badge. In the beginning of the month a rendering was released:

Not so good….but hey, it’s just a rendering, so maybe the final version will look much better. Think again! Autoblog has the what are supposed to be first official shots of the Lamborghini Alar.

That just looks horrific. The only good thing to say about it is that it should produce over 700hp and have a top speed of 223mph. Here are some of the classic comments from Autoblog in response:

• someone must die for this. - Ben
• The designers of this car should be sent to an island where they’ll never be able to hurt anyone ever again! - JC3
• Another reason to say NO to crack… - Eric

What do you think about the car?

Update: An official production picture can be found at Autoblog.

This past weekend I did a little house hunting just to see what I can get out there for the money that I can spend. Unfortunately this area is a very expensive one to live in, so a decent amount of money doesn’t really take you very far. I’ll have a post later on this week with the couple of houses I was looking at. While I was driving home, I happened to see a couple huge houses, and decided to look around the area to see what else I could find. Here’s a little gallery of what I found (these are all in the South Riding/Chantilly and Clifton, VA area, which makes the houses a lot more expensive than something you would find in a more rural location):

Gorgeous style house, and I love the deck over the garage! With a Mercedes, Lincoln Navigator, and a FJ Cruiser sitting outside, it makes you wonder what is in the garage.

This house has a 5-car garage! I didn’t get a good picture of it, but you can see the 2 car garage. There is also a 3-car garage attached to the left side of the house.

Continue Reading »

The but not John Chow aka “root of all evil” is giving away a Nintendo Wii courtesy of a company that makes promotional pens. Need proof? Here are the guys with the Wii they are giving away:

I was able to pick up a Wii a couple months back for the 20 minutes that CircuitCity.com had it available before it sold out. The console is like nothing else, and although the graphics are not as good as its competitors, the fun factor makes up for it and then some. From what I’ve read, Wii’s are still pretty impossible to find on shelves, and I know that my last few trips to stores that carry them haven’t had them.

From a blogging promotion perspective, this an excellent idea for both the advertiser and the blogger (John Chow in this case). If you look at the requirements that are needed to win, it’s an ingenious way which will boost the Google ranking for both parties.

If you are interested in winning the Wii yourself, you will have to create a blog post with certain guidelines. If you end up winning, make sure to let us know! If I end up winning, I’ll more than likely give it away through this blog since I already have one.

This was brought to my attention by my roommate Jason who owns a 93 RT/10 Dodge Viper. He was browsing the Viper forums and happened to come across a thread he knew I would like. Check out this picture of a new Viper SRT Coupe with matching helicopter:

Look closely and you’ll see a M60-D door gun hanging out. Apparently the guy that owns the Viper and chopper is the owner of Northwest Helicopters, a company that specializes in rebuilding helicopters. Here’s a picture of their oh so sweet facility, with 16 helipads:

They were building up the yellow helicopter for a show (I believe it was the Heli-Expo), and they wanted one that would stand out of the crowd. So they all got in a car and drove around all the new car lots looking for a color that stood out, which happened to be yellow. They said the best yellow they could find was Viper Racing Yellow, which was the color of the owners new Viper. They got the paint codes for the yellow and silver, painted the helicopter to match, and attended the show in Orlando, FL. According to the owner, the paint scheme was a big hit. I found a picture of the chopper at the actual trade show on display.

Even though this blog is just a few days old, I’ve decided to change the theme already. Originally I was using Redoable 1.1, but I was just having too many issues with it, and couldn’t get it to work the way I wanted. Plus, I’ve never been a huge fan of a dark background with white text for the main content. The new theme is called GlossyBlue 1.3, and I’ve already done quite a bit of customizing to it in order to make it look different. I’ve still got a lot of customizing left to do (like getting rid of the green), so you’ll be seeing some tweaking here and there over the next few days. For those of you that saw it before, do you like this look better?

Speaking of changes, I had recently converted my main computer over to Windows Vista Ultimate, coming from XP Pro. Although Vista has generated a good amount of bad press, I actually liked the new look and feel. It does take some getting used to, but once you’ve used it for a while, it’s very good. The problem though is software incompatibilities! I’ve had all kinds of problems with that, enough so that I plan on reformatting and putting XP Pro back on for now…It’s a good thing I didn’t activate yet. I think it’ll probably be a good 6 months-1 year before I give Vista another shot so that the software companies can catch up.

Hopefully the change back to XP goes flawlessly, I really don’t have time for problems to arise.

RSS feeds have drastically changed the way I browse the internet. I intake so much more data now than I ever have in a much faster way. For my feed reader I use Google Reader, it has been drastically improved since it’s inception, and is arguably the best reader out there. I am subscribed to 39 feeds currently

As you can see, I normally go through at least 300 new blog posts a day during the week. On weekends I usually try to stay and not use the computer as much so I can spend some time with friends or be active. Here’s a breakdown of all the RSS feeds I am subscribed to, feel free to click their name to subscribe yourself:

Automotive

• Autoblog
  • This is by far my favorite car-related website. They are owned be Weblogs, which is now owned by AOL. For all car-related information, this is your one-stop spot.
• Foursprung
  • This blog isn’t updated as often as Autoblog, but offers some good car-technology information every now and then.
• Nissan Autoblog
  • These are all of the Nissan-specific posts from Autoblog. I usually grab my Nissan news which is specific to me for ActiveTuning from here. The same posts would show up in my Autoblog RSS feed, but this is a safety just in case I missed something.
• Ultimate Garages
  • This is just a cool site that I’ve seen which profiles “ultimate garages”. I am obsessed with great looking garages as well as great cars. This allows me to gawk over others as well as give me an inspirational outlook for myself

Business

• Entrepreneur Daily
  • This is the blog from Entrepreneur Magazine. They normally post about things that I have read elsewhere, but it’s always interesting to get a couple spins on a subject. I’m a big fan of the magazine, so I get my daily intake from here.
• HarpzOn
  • This is a new one to my RSS feed. It’s the personal blog for a 24 year old named Mitchell Harper, his blog is a similar to mine in the terms that he is a entrepreneur as well. He started a software development called Interspire, and now has 12 employees and seemingly growing.
• Harvard Business School Podcast
  • This podcast from Harvard Business School is normally updated about once a week. They talk about different subjects of interest, authors, and more. I figure I may as well listen to what some of the smartest people in the world have to say.
• Neville’s Financial Blog
  • Nev’s Blog has not been as good as it was when I first caught on, but it is still interesting…even though he has turned commenting off. Basically Nev throws out everything from what he makes from all sources of income, and talks about it. He was one of the first on the net to do this and get acknowledged about it, so I’m sure he has a fairly decent following. The site is more of a fun atmosphere, so it’s nice to get a different tone sometimes.
• Rohail Rizvi
  • Rohail’s blog is fairly new to me as well. It’s definitely not updated as much as it was when he first started, so we’ll see if actually keeps going with it. Rohail is an entrepreneur that is also a student at Rutgers University. The biggest project on his plate right now is a site he started called Walamu.com, a college student marketplace.
• Unusual Business Ideas
  • As discussed in my “Making $1,000/Day From A Blog” post, this blog posts obviously unusual business ideas. It’s a great way to see what other people have done to make their ideas successful, and may even spark some of your own.
• University of Pennsylvania Business School (Wharton) Podcast
  • Like the Harvard Business School podcast, this is similar, but from the guys over at Wharton.

Design

• CSS Beauty Gallery
  • This site features great looking CSS-based designs. Since I also design websites, this is a great inspiration to me, and it gives me an opportunity to see the latest and greatest.
• CSS Globe
  • CSS Globe isn’t updated often, but they sometimes post good CSS-related links that may be worth reading.
• Killer PHP
  • This site hasn’t been updated in a long time, but I add to my reader just in case they do. They have excellent beginner videos for learning PHP, and hopefully at some point continue to do some more.
• OneTwentySix
  • This is an excellent design firm based out of Long Island, New York. They feature their new work through an RSS feed, and it’s always top notch.
• Photoshop Lab
  • I subscribe to this site’s tutorial feed for the latest and greatest Photoshop tutorials. Never hurts to keep learning new technique.
• Smashing Magazine
  • This is a recent add to my reader, but one of the best ones on it. Practically every post they make gets Dugg to the front page. Their posts are very comprehensive, and a must read if you are a web designer.
• ThinkVitamin
  • ThinkVitamin is a resource for web developers, designers, and entrepreneurs. They post very comprehensive and interesting articles in those topics, and is worth just adding to your reader.

For Sale
If I’m looking for something local for sale, I will setup a Craigslist search query feed in here so I know as soon as it is posted.

• South Riding Houses
  • I’ve been looking for houses lately in South Riding, VA. It seems like one of the best bang for buck areas in Northern VA. This is an RSS feed for a search query in Craigslist, so I know anything that comes in that area.

Gaming

• Nintendo Wii Fanboy
  • Latest and greatest on Nintendo Wii information. I purchased a Wii a couple of months ago, and have had a blast with it.

Miscellaneous Blogs

• John Chow
  • Personal blog for John Chow, owner of a popular tech site called TheTechZone. John is considered a “Dot Com Mogul”, by meeting certain requirements.
• ProBlogger
  • This is a blog managed by Darren Rowse, it’s all about blogging and how to help you make the most out of your own. Darren is a full-time blogger.
• Ted’s Take
  • Personal blog for Ted Leonsis, Vice Chairman of AOL. Ted is an amazing person and somebody I look up to, just take a look at his 101 list.
• Woot!
  • This is an RSS feed for any new products that come up on Woot!, a site that sells 1 product per day. Alternatively you can get the WootAgent which is more accurate in timing.

My Blogs

• ActiveTuning Blog
  • The blog for one of my companies, ActiveTuning. This blog talks about the latest updates on ActiveTuning products as well as Nissan & Infiniti news.
• David Pitlyuk Blog
  • The RSS feed for this site! I make sure to subscribe to my own feeds just to make sure all is like good. You should subscribe to.

News

• CNN Money
  • This is a feed for CNN, but specifically for their money section. This gives me all of the major financial news updates I need.
• CNN Money: The Browser
  • Here’s a more personable blog, and even though it’s through CNNMoney, it’s actually written by Fortune Magazine staff. It’s always nice to get a non-news article style twist of a controversial financial/technology topic.
• TechCrunch
  • A super popular blog (with 368,000+ RSS subscribers) from Michael Arrington. They are mainly known for profiling and reviewing new internet companies. Learn about the latest sites and ideas in the Web 2.0 world, this can spark many ideas for new businesses.
• Threadwatch
  • This is a blog which focuses on internet marketing and related technologies. I can’t remember how I found this site, but I’ve found many interesting links posted on it, so it’s worthy of being on my RSS feed reader.

Technology

• DailyTech
  • This site was started by an acquaintance I knew from back in the SLCentral days. It was a branch off from the news section on AnandTech, where they decided to start their own tech news site.
• Digg / Technology
  • I’m sure you all know of Digg, this is a feed of specifically their tech news. You can always find great things that may be hard to find on your own, like tutorials, interesting blog posts from sites you’d normally never go to, and more.
• Engadget
  • The end all be all on consumer electronics. Engadget is a popular site on consumer electronics, so popular it generated over 10 million pageviews on the day Apple announced the iPhone. The site is an excellent source of information, and the feed allows me to easily browse through what’s going on in the world of technology.
• News.com
  • The latest headlines at News.com, owned by CNet. I’m a big fan of CNet, in fact I own stock in them.

Video
I mainly use these sites to find new viral videos for one of my blog projects, VideoExperiment.com.

• AOL Video Blog
  • Even though I can’t stand the AOL Video Player (Due to change in the future), they do post a couple hidden gem videos.
• Digg / Videos
  • A feed of all the popular videos that get Dugg up on Digg. Almost anything that is truly a viral video on the internet will end up going through here, it’s our job to sort it out and pick the best!
• Fuvoo.com
  • A random site similar to VE that I happened to find through Digg. They also occasionally find that hidden gem video.
• ViralVideoChart
  • An automated sites that scans the internet for the most viral videos every 15 minutes.
• VideoExperiment.com
  • My own feed for VideoExperiment. It’s a full feed, so if you’re using something like Google Reader, you can see most of the videos without even going to the site.

Feel free to post a comment and let me know if there is a site you think I should add to my reader. I always have room for more good feeds.

I caught this over at Digg, an artist by the name of Yaya Chou created a chandelier made out of gummi bears.

Here’s a closeup so you can see all the Gummi goodness:

I found some more information on YaYa is one half of this so called Gummi Bear art:

Or in the case of YaYa Chou, who is one half of a two-woman show titled “Consumerism and Product #1,” to Gummi Bear art. Chou’s most noteworthy object to date has been a chandelier made entirely of the chewy kid’s treat. The other works in the show are a great deal more traditional, to the point of almost being Victorian. They consist of various types of appliqué work on small canvases. A representative work, “Rosie,” is an 18-inch tondo, painted tea rose pink and embellished with painted roses and flowers whose petals are false fingernails. In the center, there is a fabric appliqué of a baby bear examining its paws. The whole thing has the exquisiteness of a keepsake. If there’s irony intended, it is subtle to the point of invisibility.