Notice anything different at all here at Keefer Madness?

If you’re reading this from an RSS reader, everything’s the same. But the web site has had a complete overhaul.

For years, Keefer Madness has been utilizing WordPress as its flexible content management, and will continue to for the foreseeable future. But it was time for a new theme— something to help update the visuals, but also to reflect the changes in social media and the web since I introduced the last theme into fruition.

This new theme, is called Irresistible—one of the many free themese over at Woo Themes. The theme, in conjunction with WP-Lifestream allows a quick and easy way to hook in feeds from social networks and the like, and it really cleans up my homepage.

The homepage’s excerpts of the latest posts also will hopefully act as a motivation to write more in-depth and useful posts. Life sometimes gets busy, and I get lazy, posting sometimes nothing more than a single line of text and an off-site link. I’m going to try to do better with that. I’m not promising they’ll all be gems, but going to try to compose longer and better articles as much as possible.

Not only did it allow me to overhaul the visuals, it also allowed me to remove a lot of the plugins I had running on the backend. I’ve noticed the site getting slower with age, and this was my first step. The next may be to cull old and unread posts, though I’m working with my web host provider to see if there are other things I can do first.

While I’ve still got a little polish and the like to do, I’m pretty happy with where the site is at here in 2011 and this new (to me) theme. Let me know what you think of it, and thank you for continuing to read and browse our site.

Are you as tired as I am of looking at those same header images up there at the top of Keefer Madness?

Well I finally took the time to add a few fresh ones from our recent beach trip. I’ll be working on a redesign of KM soon, but in the meantime, enjoy a few new images.

Refresh a few times to see some of the new images.

These last few weeks, I’ve been able to sort of build a backlog of posts both here and especially at my other blog, Keefr.com (My more technical Web Design/Development blog focusing on all kinds of acronyms like xHTML, CSS, jQuery). While what I’m doing is pretty common sense stuff, I’ve been really satisfied with the flow its given my dual blogs. With my new job, I’ve been pouring all over new stuff daily about jQuery, CSS3 and HTML5 specifically, and it’s given me a bevy of links worth sharing and offering some occasional insight. Collecting all these links and articles, has allowed me to schedule out daily posts sometimes for up to a week in advance. While most of these are exciting and interesting to me, and hopefully to those reading, there’s really no timeliness tied to them. So I can schedule them for the next available day.

But then, when something timely happens, I am able to interject either an additional post for a given day, or insert one into that series of scheduled out posts. I’m sure all kinds of other bloggers and even media outlets work like this, but it’s just been a recent realization/execution on my part.

Hopefully, even with some crazy busy days and weeks, being able to have ready-to-go content will keep everyone happy. Like I said, this isn’t rocket science, but it’s been very satisfying to be able to get both blogs the past couple weeks into a routine of daily posts. At least a daily posting has always been one of my goals — both to give people a reason to keep coming back to the sites, for search engines to have new stuff to eat up, but honestly, overall, it’s just been for my own personal satisfaction.

Just wanted to take a real quick moment to say happy 4th of July. Hope you’re having as much fun with friends and family as we are! Daily posts on Keefer Madness to resume soon… promise!

Sadly, there’s been a bit of a lull in new content on the ol’ Keefer Madness blog. Sorry about that. Life and work have gotten in the way. Also coinciding with this lull is the fact that the way I aggregate new posts to my social networking accounts — twitterfeed.com, stopped working (had to reauthenticate all my attached accounts.

Everything’s back in order now, myself included. So look for daily posts to resume starting…. now!

Here’s a great list of eight tips/habits consistently found across successful bloggers out there, which helps if you’re a seasoned blogger, new to the game, or starting your fifth blog (what’s up, John?) I do a lot of these eight — but not consistently. The big one that I don’t do well is focusing on a single topic of interest. Fortunately, or unfortunately for any given audience member, Keefer Madness is all over the place. One day’s post is cycling-related. The next day is TiVo.

I was able to focus a recent blog endeavor into a singular blog topic — web development and design, but my original and most active blog here at Keefer Madness is all over the place and always will be because I am into a bunch of things — tech, cycling, HD, etc. Sure, I could segment each of those into their own blogs, but I like it this way.

As for the other seven habits of effective bloggers, take a look at the link below:

The 8 Habits of Highly Effective Bloggers

So with the birth of Tyler seven weeks ago and then Amanda’s two subsequent surgeries, it’s been difficult to get into the old routine, or even establish a new routine.

We’re still not there yet. Amanda’s two surgeries were pretty damn scary, but in the last two weeks she’s made a wonderful recovery. But then this afternoon, we had a bit of a scare. Some of the initial symptoms that accompanied Amanda’s eight day hospitalization have started to manifest themselves again.

So this afternoon, it was back to the emergency room again. Luckily, this one did not end with an admittance to the hospital. We’re not sure exactly if the symptoms are a part of the healing process, or what. She has a followup appointment with her original surgeon on Tuesday and hopefully it will all amount to nothing.

That being said, apologies if the content on Keefer Madness is a bit choppy and isn’t as regular as it once was. Hopefully, with time, that will smooth out. We’re going to lay low this weekend, relaxing at home. The weather’s supposed to be nice, so hopefully I can sneak away for a road ride or two on my ol’ neglected Tarmac. Then early next week, we’ll get more good news on Amanda’s condition.

Don’t adjust your browser. Keefer Madness has just begun the process of being revamping its look. For work, I was trying to dive deep into a WordPress theme we’re looking at using for a base install for clients. So what better way to play around with something than use it on a real WP install? Seeing as I was about to start the process of finding a new theme for Keefer Madness that was a bit more robust, allowed customization *and* the ability to continue to upgrade the theme and the like.

So please pardon our my dust. I’m pretty happy with it setup as it currently is (at the time of this posting), but still have more to add in, tweak, etc. Regardless I highly recommend the Atahualpa Theme for a pretty flexible and full-featured WP theme.

Another quite positive thing that this is going to do is force me to write longer posts whenever possible — which has been a goal anyway. I really think the single posts look a lot better when there is a good chunk of the gray text on the page.

If you all see something on the site that looks out of place, or just looks plain bad, drop me a line and I’ll look into it. There’s been a very very limited QA thus far. Customization and refinement will continue in the coming days and weeks.

I made a post yesterday but the thing never made it to the site, nor is it showing up in my drafts. That will teach me not to check my web site after hitting the publish button. So anyway, I’m reposting this from memory and post-dating it.

Watching football, we saw a funny Bud Light ad tying into a website Tailgate Approved. Funny stuff — parodies of the infomercial style advertisements (which themselves border on self-parody).

My favorite on the site is the Tailgate Companion, with the basset hound on the rotating carousel. I can’t see that product working in our household. Our beagle wouldn’t take to transporting condiments very well and in fact would find a way to get into the condiments and utensils he was toting around.

So like my friend, John I too tried the upgrade to 2.8 and had an incomplete/successful install of WordPress 2.8 today. I should have learned from his hardship with the new version.

All day today, I was unable to get into the admin tool, and all of the plugins sat disabled, giving me a glimpse of how important those plugins are for rounding out the display of the site, but more importantly, filtering out all the comment spam.

Anyway, for about 12 hours today, this site was limping along, but it’s now back to full strength, with its plugins all working fine with 2.8. It took my web host intervening to get me back up and running. He found a solution on a forum, overwriting some files with new versions for 2.8. Anyway, upgrade is working fine.. now.