Welcome to Smuggle Me

I must admit that it’s kind of sad to think that I’ll be basically shutting down this blog. Smuggle Me (this blog) was the first blog I ever created. It’s the start of what has become my blogging empire (a small empire, but an empire just the same). Who would have thought that me just playing around with WordPress one day would later become my full time job and me traveling to present at WordCamp Utah and Las Vegas.

Yes, my first post was June 2, 2005. Although, the post I remember most was when I posted that I beat my sister in Solitaire Showdown. Good times and great memories of the start. It’s hard to believe that it’s been 5 years already.

Don’t think I won’t be blogging anymore. I just won’t be blogging on Smuggle Me anymore. Instead, you can see my work blog at CrashUtah. That’s my new and relatively professional blog that I’ll be writing. Plus, you can follow all of my other blogs which are listed here.

I’ll still be posting here on occasion. This is basically my test blog where I test new plugins and updates. So, I’ll continue doing that. Otherwise, Smuggle Me will go pretty quiet. It’s been a great ride!

In case you didn’t know, I’m starting a new website called Giving Sports. At it’s core, it’s a website that helps amateur sports teams and other organization fundraise online. The website has a demo site up right now so you can check it out. Plus, if you know of any organizations that need to fundraise, I’d love to talk with them.

Well, I’ve got a number of logos to choose from and I need your help. So, in the comments, let me know which logo you like best.

I’m really glad I just spent 10:48 of my life watching this video. The style of the video is great, and the content really amazing for anyone that’s a manager at a company or an entrepreneur like myself. Very cool. I’m sure you’ll all enjoy this RSA Animate about what motivates us:

I really need to have a great BuddyPress photo gallery (and it would be nice if it did video also) for a project I’m working on. Unfortunately, there just aren’t many options out there for BuddyPress Photo and or video galleries on BuddyPress.

The 2 top ones that are out there now are the following:
BuddyPress Album+ – Free and Open Source
BP-Gallery – Paid Plugin

Here’s the challenge. I really need the BuddyPress Group Galleries or the plugin won’t work for me. The paid plugin has group galleries and the Open Source one doesn’t. However, the open source one has it on it’s future release list and suggested 3 weeks for the group galleries to happen. I have to make a good choice, because photo galleries are not the type of plugins you want to have to change later.

Don’t get me wrong either. The $30 for the paid plugin is not a big deal at all. It’s a drop in the bucket really. However, what bothers me is that the plugin is not open source. This matters, because then the plugin is only dependent on one person for development. This includes new features, bug fixes, security issues, etc.

I hate the idea that I’m building my website on the back of a plugin that’s so dependent on one developer. Plus, I also don’t like having to pay $30 to see if the plugin is what I really want. I want to try out the plugin and make sure it’s a good fit before I cough up the money.

Long term I think that the open source BuddyPress Album+ has more potential. I also love that it’s a Google Summer of Code (GSoC) project. However, I’m a little nervous waiting the 3 weeks to see if they built the features that I really need (ie. Group Galleries). Plus, timelines often slip when we’re talking about open source development. So, I won’t be surprised if the group galleries take longer than the suggested 3 weeks.

Oh the choices we have to make. Taking what’s here and available now or betting on the better long term choice which isn’t quite ready right now.

P.S. If anyone has an implementation of BP-Gallery I can try, I’d love to have a chance to try out the features.

As those of you who follow my Twitter account probably know, I’ve been diving head first into the BuddyPress development side of things as I build my Sports Fundraising website. So far I’ve made some amazing progress and I’m quite happy with my choice of BuddyPress as a platform for this project. I guess we’ll see how it goes once I launch the site in July.

In my process, I’ve created a number of BuddyPress plugins, but mostly just for internal use. I hadn’t written any for the public yet. So, today I decided to take some code written originally by Andy (founder of BuddyPress) and add in one piece that he was missing and make a plugin (he told someone to).

So, here’s the first release of the plugin: BuddyPress Disable Email Activation (download here). I’ve tested it and it seems to work, but I welcome any feedback.

Unfortunately, it only disables the email activation for a standard WordPress install (with BuddyPress of course). I’m still working on getting the WordPress MU email activation to be disabled too. I’ve got most of it disabled, but can’t get the email to stop sending (see more details of this problem here). If I figure that out, then I’ll likely incorporate it into this plugin as well.

Until then, enjoy my first BuddyPress plugin. Now I’m going to figure out how to post it to the WordPress plugin repository.

This is a Sponsored Post written by me on behalf of Tony’s Pizza. All opinions are 100% mine.

Everyone that knows me knows that I eat a lot of pizza. It’s my favorite thing to eat in the world I think. Well, there might be a few desserts that come close, but as far as a meal I eat pizza far too often. People at my work make fun of me for only eating pizza. What can I say? I will often be found going to a buffet and then just eating the pizza. To me a buffet is often just all I can eat pizza.

With this background, you can imagine how excited I was to get some Tony’s Pizza coupons for free pizza in the mail. My wife called me when the free coupons arrived and I told her to go to the store and get it, because I needed me some Tony’s Pizza tonight. Since I’m an expert on pizza, I’ve always found Tony’s to be the best value. It’s a much better quality pizza than say a Totino’s pizza, but isn’t overpriced like a Red Barron pizza.

The pizza was delicious as usual. The only problem was that my kids decided to eat the Tony’s Pizza too and so I didn’t get enough of it. Dang kids never eat dinner and they chomped down this pizza.

I must admit that it’s always nice to have a frozen pizza that I can just throw in the oven and eat. I say this because my wife recently ordered some Dominos Pizza. They told her it would be 30 minutes, but then it showed up 30 minutes late. Do you know how annoying that is? I can barely wait the 15 minutes for the frozen pizza to cook. Imagine waiting a good 30 minutes extra for pizza when you’re hungry.

Of course, Dominoes heard that we were mad that it was late and so they sent us something in the mail saying sorry and offering us some coupons. This would have been really cool. Too bad the coupons were of no value since they were the same discounts we can get by just calling and ordering. Seriously??? So, to make up for their crappy delivery service they’re going to try and sell us more of their product?

Needless to say, I don’t have to worry about that with frozen pizza. Looks like more Tony’s Pizza for me and less Dominos.

We just got the call from the management company that rents us our house. Turns out that the owner of the house has stopped making payments. It’s actually really nice of him to do this since most people don’t find out about it until the notice is on the door that the house is in foreclosure. Needless to say we have a lot to think about now as we decide how to deal with this news.

The news was pretty unfortunate since we had kind of settled into the idea of just staying there for a while. We thought that rent was a little high, but we didn’t want the cost of moving either. Well, I guess now we don’t have that choice it seems.

Of course, if you look at people’s comments on Twitter and Facebook they feel so bad for us. I don’t feel bad for us. Sure, it’s a bit of an annoyance, but we’ve already lived in 3 houses in Las Vegas, might as well live in a fourth.

Plus, there’s always a silver lining to everything. Maybe we’ll get cash for keys and make some money out of this change. Maybe we can get them to lower our rent since he’s not paying the mortgage now anyway. Maybe the new house we move to will be even better than the one we live in now and with lower rent. Renting is still 100 times better than if we’d bought 3-4 years ago and would now be $100k+ upside down on a mortgage.

Certainly, there’s plenty to complain about, but that’s not me. I prefer to see the good parts of whatever happens. Sometimes it’s hard, but for me it just comes naturally.

Get your minds out of the gutter. This is the mile high club for bloggers. I’m writing this post from 30,000 feet on a flight from Las Vegas to Atlanta. This is just awesome. I can’t wait until every flight has this available. Not to mention, I’m watching the Olympics on NBC at the same time. The US just won gold in 4 man bobsled.

I just did a speed test and it’s showing 0.97 Mbps download and 0.25 Mbps upload. Not bad for most of the things that I do. I might have to go test out Youtube and Hulu and some things like that and see how it does. Amazing!

Oh yeah, and the best part is that I got it for free. That a baby!!

Only problem is that now I won’t get any sleep on this red eye flight. Tomorrow’s going to be rough, but it will be so worth it.

I’ve been doig a lot of networking lately. What’s been interesting is the more that I network the greater ability and the more opportunities I have to network.

For example, I just won this little business plan competition. From that I was able to network with some really interesting people that I believe can really provide me and my budding business some amazing benefit. The next step is to turn the talk into action.

As I’ve talked with people about my business I think the one thing that differentiates me from some other people is that I just consistently hammer away at something. Networking is an example of that. You have to just keep going out and seeing what you can make of the experience. Plus, you have to be laser focused on why you’re trying to network. Not that you can’t and shouldn’t talk about them and their needs, but always keep in mind how your business could benefit bot people. Then, you’re getting the best of both worlds. You’re focusing on them, but still finding ways to build your business as well.

Life is a really interesting thing. There are so many things to do each day that you could never do all of them. In fact, you are certain to transgress something or someone in life. It’s just the nature of life.

This really isn’t a problem per se, but it does mean that you have to learn to balance your life. The better you are at balancing your life the happier you’ll be. Plus, if you balance it better I believe you can also get more done.

The key to that is that I believe you’ll get more done when you’re happy. That’s not to say if you’re out of balance you can’t get stuff done. However the sum of all the things you get done will be less. That’s why you have to balance.

Of course, it’s not easy to balance everything in life. In fact, it’s extremely difficult. However, the difficult things are usually those of the most worth.