Blog Lafayette

I finally got my wife’s blog website, www.seasonedwithtime.com finished and converted over to become the main website of Seasoned With Time. Working with all of the little things I had to do to get the javascript, php, iframes and the rest all working within the framework of a WordPress blog was quite interesting. The main reason that we switched our site to a WordPress.org self hosted platform was that we wanted to be able to allow easier manipulation of the content on the site. WordPress makes a great content management system.

For those of you who may be thinking of switching to WordPress and aren’t sure of all the steps to take, don’t be shy about sending me a message and asking questions. I will be glad to offer any help with the process that I can. Certainly no reason for you to have to re-invent the wheel so to speak when I and others have been down that road already.

Live well everyone!

There is a lot of great stuff to do in Lafayette Indiana the last half of January. Here is just a sampling of the great stuff going on in our community. Enjoy!

Purdue Men’s Basketball

• vs Penn State on Jan 19, 2011 at 8:30 p.m. at Mackey Arena, Purdue University, West Lafayette Indiana.
• vs. Michigan State on Jan 22, 2011 at 9:00 p.m. at Mackey Arena, Purdue University, West Lafayette Indiana.
• vs. Minnesota on Jan 29, 2011 at 1:00 p.m. at Mackey Arena, Purdue University, West Lafayette Indiana.

Purdue Women’s Basketball

• vs Penn State on Jan 20, 2011 at 7:00 p.m. at Mackey Arena, Purdue University, West Lafayette Indiana.
• vs. SIUE on Jan 27, 2011 at 7:00 p.m. at Mackey Arena, Purdue University, West Lafayette Indiana.
• vs. Indiana on Jan 30, 2011 at 12:00 noon at Mackey Arena, Purdue University, West Lafayette Indiana.

21st Annual Purdue Jazz Festival

• Jan 20, 2011 to Jan 23, 2011
• 3 big nights of music: Community Jazz Showcase/Local HS Jazz Bands & Purdue Jazz Band. Vanguard Jazz Orchestra/Legendary New York City Band. Michael Weiss (piano) and Dave Pietro (saxophone) with Purdue Jazz Band in Festival Finale.
• Thurs., & Sat.7:00pm, Fri., 8:00pm
• Location: Thurs.-Long Center All other times Loeb Playhouse, 111 N. 6th Street & Purdue University, Lafayette – West Lafayette, Indiana.
• Contact: Purdue Bands & Orchestra, 765-494-39333

Winter Wolves/Wolf Park Howl Night

• Jan 22, 2011
• Join us for a chilling day of fun featuring the wolves in their glorious winter coats! A day packed with fun activities such as games, updates on the wolves in the wild, and a few great surprises. A simple but amusing explanation of how animals adapt to their surroundings –why wolves don’t need winter coats. A lecture on wolf communication, the opportunity to see some of the staff enter the enclosure and interact with the wolves of our main pack, and the chance to howl with the wolves.
• Time: 1-5:00 p.m. and Howl Night/7:30 p.m.
• Location: Wolf Park, 4004 E. 800 N., Battle Ground, Indiana
• Phone: 765-567-2265

Wolf Park Howl Night

• Jan 29, 2011
• A lecture on wolf communication, the opportunity to see some of the staff enter the enclosure and interact with the wolves of our main pack, and the chance to howl with the wolves.
• Time: 7:30 p.m.
• Location: Wolf Park, 4004 E. 800 N., Battle Ground, Indiana
• Contact: Wolf Park
• Phone: 765-567-2265

Rubberbandance Group/Loan Sharking

• Jan 29, 2011
• Blending hip-hop dance with classical ballet, Rubberbandance Group presents a hybrid of dance forms that explodes with stylish physicality and emotional depth. The group will perform Loan Sharking, a collection of works featuring a diverse soundtrack that includes music by Stravinsky, Vivaldi, and Dave Brubeck.
• Time: 8:00 p.m.
• Location: Loeb Playhouse, Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana
• Contact: Purdue Business Office
• Phone: 765-494-3933

A story in today’s Journal and Courier, Purdue study puts livestock farms under examination, about a nationwide study led by Purdue University researcher, Al Heber, is a real stinker. Literally. OK, so the story itself isn’t smelly, but the animals in the Emissions Study are. If any of you are from a rural community that specializes in livestock farming as well as agriculture, you will understand immediately what I am saying. Large facility hog, cattle and dairy farms put off a lot of odor. With the recent advent of Climate research and the effects of human activities on the climate of the Earth, subjects like animal emissions are becoming important areas of research.

What is the possible impact of this research? Increased government regulation and increased costs for our farmers and livestock producers.

Why are they conducting these types of studies? Because of the “ammonia, hydrogen sulfide, three sizes of particulate matter and volatile organic compounds — all which are federally regulated” that the animals emit. Quote is from the Journal and Courier article. These are substances that are reputed to contribute to a decrease in air quality and possibly leading to Global Warming.

In case you have been in a cave for the last 20 years, there has been a movement of opinion in recent years that says that our Earth will warm to the point that our climate will be changed drastically and all life as we know it will be effected. Some of the more extreme proponents of this theory even go so far as to say that we are killing the Earth and all life on it and we need to take drastic measures to stop the course we are on. Who know? I would be happier if the data that these people are using was above reproach and if they were truly objective. But they aren’t. Objectivity is hard to come by.

Where do I stand? It is easy to see that I am not a member of the “mankind is murdering the Earth” crowd. I fall more into the category of “lets all work together to find a solution that makes the farmer AND the Earth happy”. I grew up in a rural community. Farming is a way of life. Most, and I mean that literally, farmers cannot afford to buy the very expensive machinery to make sure their animals are emissions free. The money involved to do that would put most of them out of business and drive up the costs of the food you and I eat to a level we have not seen in the United States. But by the same token, I do not want to see us hurt our environment or make our air quality worse either. What is the middle ground? I don’t know.

I suspect that there are solutions that would lower emissions without breaking the bank for the farmers, if only calm and sensible heads prevail. I hope that the knee jerk reaction by any non-farmers who really don’t understand the costs involved or the really low profit margin that the farmers realize will not be the course of action taken. As always, the middle course between the extremes is probably the best way to go. And as a side benefit? We might not have to smell quite the level of odor when living down wind from the local hog producer. That would be a good thing. Right?

For the last couple of weeks I have been working on my wife’s blog, trying to give it more functionality and ability to present more in the sidebars and such. It has been a learning process. In an earlier post I said that I would be bringing out the details of some of the knowledge I gained in this process. Here is a little bit of that knowledge.

One of the problems I was trying to solve was how to make different widgets and content show up on different pages. I didn’t want a cookie cutter approach where all my sidebar content looked exactly the same on every page. My solution? Two very useful WordPress plugins. They were “Custom Post Widget” and “Widget Logic”.

The “Custom Post Widget” is a great tool that allows the webmaster or author to create individually saved bits of content that can each be moved over to the sidebar area in admin as needed. The best part about the widget is that it allows the content to be authored using the Visual editor in WordPress. This allows formatting of the fonts, uploading images and everything else you can do with the visual editor. This is a much better solution than using the standard “Text” widget which does not allow easy formatting of the content.

That is great, but what about the ability to make these content blocks appear on different pages and posts and in different locations on those pages and posts? This is where “Widget Logic” comes in. “Widget Logic” puts an extra field in the bottom of each widget that you put in the sidebar area of your blog that allows you to tell the widget with a little piece of code which pages it can show up on. The bits of code are called, “Conditional Tags”. Conditional tags allow me to point the widget to only the pages or posts that meet the conditions of the tag. For instance, say I want a block of text to only show up on my Home page and my About Me page but nowhere else. I would drag the content block over to the sidebar area in my admin that contains that text content. I would enter the code, is_home() in the widget logic field in the bottom of that widget, and then click save. I would add another content block with the same text to the sidebar, and enter the code, is_page('about-me'), where “about-me” is the title slug for my About Me page, and click save.

Viola! I’m done. Took me about 30 seconds, and the text in that widget is only showing up on my Home page and my About Me page.

For further information about Conditional Tags go to the link, http://codex.wordpress.org/Conditional_Tags. To get the two plugins mentioned, just go to your plugins page, go to “Add New”, type in the names of the plugins into the search field, and install each when it comes up.

Hope this was a help. Happy blogging Lafayette and all!

Another month has come and gone and it is time for our monthly blog challenge on Virtual Online Learning, VOL for short. VOL is a meeting place focused on bringing together a community of people who are interested in blogging, social networking, online selling, and learning to use other online technologies such as Skype.

VOL makes learning fun AND profitable. VOL has many types of events each month, including this blog challenge and a Twitter challenge where each person tweets a minimum of 100 tweets in one day. These are great ways to increase exposure on Twitter and the Internet and to increase each person’s tweeting and blogging skills. VOL also has great “Go To Meeting” sessions where we learn new ideas, in depth, and have the opportunity to ask questions after the events to make the information useful.

If you are interested in learning and in being a part of an online community that is friendly and helpful, consider joining Virtual Online Learning. You will not regret it.