Those of you who are close to me know that I am getting married soon!  Liz and I tie the knot in 38 days (from the writing of this post.)  We are both very excited to celebrate!  We’ve really kicked it into high gear for eating healthier and doing some physical activity.  Liz is doing a boot camp over the next month, and I’ve vowed to do a lot more walking.  On the nutrition side, we are both really stepping it up.  Along with some general calorie reduction, and smart eating… we are also trying to eat 5 smaller meals a day to keep our metabolism running on high!  Today marks 72 hours for me without having a soda… which is amazing.  I’m over the hump!  Anyone who has a soda habit like I did can relate.  The caffeine with drawl headaches were intense, but today I can barely feel it.  I know tomorrow morning, they should be completely gone.  I’m sleeping “harder” and for the time being, I’m finding it easier to fall asleep at night.

All in all, a great start.  I’ve got a modest goal of losing 15 pounds before the wedding.  That is do-able, right? RIGHT?

I thought so too.

Today I ushered in Summer with a viewing of The Land of the Lost — skip this movie. It had a few funny moments, but it just didn’t do it for me overall. Then I hit the Gelato stand at Norton Commons. LOVE their chocolate. I also grabbed a small of the Key Lime Pie! Although very good, it was a bad combo on my taste buds. The Key Lime Pie was brutally tart and my taste buds were having no part of it after that sweet chocolate!

For those of you following along at home. WordPress 2.8 Beta release 1 has been released for testing. I’ll probably install it on a test blog here in a few weeks and start testing plugin and theme compatibility. I noticed they made changes to the default theme, so I’m wondering what tweaks and upgrades I’m going to need to make to my themes. If anyone else comes across anything interesting, report back!

It never ceases to amaze me that when I want to find some sort of additional WordPress functionality, I normally can find a plugin that does it! Today is another one of those examples. On this site right here, I wasn’t interested in having my contact page “followed” — so I was looking for an easy way to nofollow it from my navigation bar. A quick search on google and I had my answer.

Along comes Page List Plus to the rescue. This a very handy plugin that not only lets you specify if the page is followed or not, but it also allows you to change the anchor text and attributes in the navigation. Have a page named “Search Louisville Kentucky Homes” as its name, but have it say “Search Homes” in your menu navigation. Just another tool for the toolbox! You can find the plugin at the WordPress Plugin Database, located at http://www.wordpress.org/extend/plugins/page-list-plus/

If you are running a WordPress blog or website, take notice — I have a few friends who have told me about having their websites hacked.   Keeping your WordPress version updated, as well as paying attention to what plugins you install can go a long way.  However, this little gem of advice will help keep your blog invisible to some spam searching bots.  Simply add this code to your .htaccess file.  This bit of code will return a 404 for a request to wp-config.php which, hopefully, will confuse spam bots into bypassing your WordPress site.

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^(.*)wp-config(.*)\.php$ $1wp-config$2\.php [R=404,L]
</IfModule>

Give it a shot!

Today I spent a few hours updating some of the titles on my real estate site. It will be interesting to see if this increases my position in the search engine rankings in 3 or 4 weeks. I had previously done some updating a few weeks ago, and had positive results. I’m hoping that these changes are positive as well. This post will serve as a reminder to check and see what effect the changes have made.

Earlier today I was doing some updating on my real estate site and my host was hit with a DDos attack.  Thankfully, they got that all squared away and fixed.  However, something happend along that same time period.  I don’t know if the two are related (although, I think they are) I was updating a post, and when I saved the post — it locked  up.  An hour later after my host had restored service… my post was GONE!  I started to feel flush and nervous.  I was cursing under my breath, trying to remember the last time I had done a full site backup.  Oh, and in case you were wondering the answer to THAT question — it has been too long.  It has always been too long.

WordPress Post Revisions to the rescue!  I was able to go in and restore one of my previous post revisions from last week.  It really saved the day!  For every time I’ve seen my post revision number stack up to 20 or more and wonder why in the world I haven’t researched turning this feature off, now I know why.