If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to our RSS feed or sign up for email updates. Thanks for visiting!
Tim and I are back from our holiday travels to Chicago and L.A. While away, we spent a fair bit of time outdoors, and acquired some new camping and hiking gear. Stay tuned for reviews, and the usual onslaught of random links and blatherings. And feel free to check out some pictures from our adventures in my homeland!
They bundle up and get out in it. Here’s a picture of two runners making their way around Lincoln Park, as seen on ChicagoTribune.com.
And here’s us on a walk in Leyman Woods near my parent’s place southwest of the city:
Good shoes and warm clothes makes anything possible.
I’m very sorry, I messed up and dropped the outside connection to our server so the site hasn’t been available for a day and a bit.
-Tim
Speaking of spreading myself too thin, I’ve been trying and failing to take a daily photo of my dinner in an effort to become a better food photographer, and a better cook. I had a good run in Paris, but since we got back I simply keep forgetting to take the photo until after the food is all in my stomach. It’s such a pity; we’ve had some delicious meals this week.
This is a job for the Seinfeldian Chain. We’ll see how I go…
Since we’re on the subject, here are some of of the tasty creations I enjoyed in Paris, proof that being a vegetarian in Paris doesn’t mean you have to starve:
With Thanksgiving over and Christmas less than a month away, there will be an inclination to start looking forward to the new year and the new opportunities it will afford.
Inevitably the Big Giant New Year’s Resolution Narrative will be dragged out from the back of the closet by mainstream media and given its annual airing. I reckon this old carpet is threadbare.
New year resolutions set you up for failure by requesting that you start A Grand New Plan sometime on Jan 1 when you’re slightly hung over and just want to eat something greasy to mop up the hangover.
How about this: resolve to go for a walk right now, today. Make that resolution each morning when you get up and before the New Year you will have walked every day for over a month and done yourself some real good prior to the new year. Small changes right now are so much better than grand schemes you can procrastinate on until January 1st.
We now have a little SmarterFitter link blog going in our sidebar. It’s updated constantly so keep your eye (or your feed reader) on it for the latest fresh and tasty news from the internet!
Hi,
The best way to keep up with the SmarterFitter blog is to subscribe to our news feed in a news reader like Google Reader. If you don’t know what a news reader is, and that’s perfectly reasonable because most people don’t, then you might like to check out this short video that explains what a reader is and why you might like to use one. Basically a news reader brings all your favourite sites including SmarterFitter to you so you don’t have to go to each site.
Link to RSS in Plain English video.
If you can’t be bothered with a reader and just like working from email, well, you can do that too. We’ve added a link on the blog page that will let you subscribe to our blog. You’ll get one daily email with all our updates and if we don’t post you wont get an email.
When you fill in the email registration form you’ll get an email that ask that you confirm your registration, click the link and the after that it is all set up.
Thanks for your time.
-Tim
Monica and I spent yesterday and this morning messing about with CSS and Wordpress. The blog is the first part of the site we’ve moved over to a new unified look with unified navigation.
I’m working on a big enhancement to the Food Diary and once that’s ready to go we’ll convert the rest of the site to the new unified look and feel too.
What do you think?
After the Seinfeldian Chain was Lifehacked, we received lots of e-mails, comments and suggestions from wonderful people who started chains of their own (thanks, peeps!). This got us thinking: hey, wouldn’t these discussions work really well in a forum?
Well, it’s been a while, but we’re finally getting around to making this idea a reality.
This got us thinking some more: What makes a successful forum?
I’ve been looking around at some top notch forums out there, and they seem to share a few fundamental qualities:
Purpose,
It’s that little flame
that light’s a fire
under your ass.
- Princeton, Avenue Q
All successful forums have a clear purpose. Our purpose is to create a community to discuss all things relating to SmarterFitter.com. Things like…
People join a forum because they can’t find the same community discussion elsewhere. It will be challenging to differentiate SmarterFitter’s forum from t he rest of the health and fitness forums out there. So what’s our niche?
We want to help people be fit and happy using their brains rather than diets. And we have a website of tools to help people along the way. My goal is for the forum to be frequented by smart lovely people who are also using other parts of the site. Then again, maybe we’ll make such a great forum that people will want to use it to discuss other things - that’s OK, toO!
It amazes me that there are so many high-traffic yet ugly forums out there. So I guess this isn’t a criteria of a successful forum, but it should be, and we’re gong to push that envelope. We will create a forum that’s easy to use and easy on the eyes (no flashing ads!). We’re going with bbPress for its simple interface and easy integration with Wordpress.
We’re also going with bbPress for its wicked Akismet spam protection.
This is where Tim and I come in to post new topics, respond to existing topics, look out for trolls and spammers, and probably spend a lot of time talking to ourselves for a while.
The forum needs to be active enough that people keep coming back for more. We will achieve this by
I know it’s going to take a while to get there, but Tim and I are used to being the first people to show up at a party.
Monica and I aren’t graphic designers but we’re pretty happy with the results of a couple of evenings playing about with different colours and looks for the site along with a tab based menu.
Expect this applied to the site in the next couple of weeks.
Inspiration drawn from Skype and 37 Signals.
Fresh from the Interweb
