As expected, the auto-update to WordPress 3.0 from 2.9.2 was flawless, and took all of 30 seconds.

I continue to love WordPress as a blogging and simple CMS platform!

More volunteer work, but I like the results: I offered to help my local Little League out with their site, and did it all in WordPress. I used the usual suspects for plugins:

• All in One SEO Pack – very well done plugin for moving your site up in search engine responses.
• AWS Easy Page Link – I’m surprised this isn’t core functionality yet. I use this for easy linking between posts and pages.
• Contact Form 7 – along with gmail filtering, this is a great way of directing “contact me!” requests appropriately.
• NextGEN Gallery – good gallery, but in my humble opinion, still missing a lot of useful functions, like the ability to specify whether images in galleries should have descriptions below them.
• Page Links To - must-have if you want to have some menu items point to “nothing”, and other menu items point externally, or to some content.
• reCAPTCHA Form – well done anti-spam mechanism for Contact Me forms and comments.
• WP-Table Reloaded – very nice little Table creation utility.
• WP Google Analytics – you know… for gathering metrics on your site from Google…

All the graphics on the site are custom. I used “Function” as the base theme.

I’ve still got some “to-do” list stuff left-over, but the hard work is done.

Well – at least I’ m posting every month or so. But I have been busy. Here’s some of the reason why:

I was lucky enough to get into ‘Wood Badge’, which is the highest level of advanced Scout Leader training available. It entails two three-day weekends, and focuses more on leadership skills than outdoor ones. I’ve been to management training at work, so not a lot of this was new to me, but it was really interesting to see it all in the context of Scouting. I also learned a LOT about other aspects of the program that I hadn’t paid attention to, like Venturing. The most valuable outcome of the training was the contacts I made, frankly – my Patrol and the other attendees were fantastic to talk with about their experiences in Scouting, good and bad.

Still on Scouts, I decided to accept my pack’s leaders’ suggestion that I take on the Cubmaster position for the 2010/2011 year. I’m a bit trepidatious, only because things are really running incredibly well in the pack right now, and I don’t want to mess anything up. I’m sure I have nothing to worry about, because the leaders are all top-notch, and highly motivated and enthusiastic. We’ll see! I’ve got a bunch of ideas and projects (aka ‘tickets’) from Wood Badge I’m going to be working on in the coming months, and I’m sure I’ll be posting on the subject over the next few years (at least until Jacob crosses over into Boy Scouts).

Yours in Scouting!

P.S. For any Scout Leaders out there who are considering attending Wood Badge: do it. It’s a great experience – and feel free to get in touch with me if you’d like to talk further.

We had a fun day fishing today at the Blackstone Valley Fishing Derby in Upton, MA. They stocked Pratt Pond full of trout, and that’s what the tournament was supposed to be awarding prizes for. Unfortunately, very few trout were caught by anyone (we were fishing the right way for them, and still didn’t get a hook-up). So, for the second year in a row, I think we ended up tossing a winner back in without measuring it: within the first 15 minutes, Rebecca pulled a nice little Pickerel out, but I immediately released it.

Worms ruled the day for us. We tried a whole bunch of baits and lures, but none of the Powerbaits were all that effective. Salmon eggs were pretty good, both bottom feeding (for trout) and bobber-fishing when we heard that they’d opened up the categories for other fish. Jacob was getting some very impressive casts with his rig, but also caught a few trees too!

Anyway, I was surprised at how few people showed up for the event. Maybe it was me, but I expected to see a lot more kids fishing. We’re looking forward to the Upton Police Derby in June, and I plan on showing up early to get a good spot, and bringing both minnows and a few dozen nightcrawlers.

I’m a huge Firefox fan at work. As I’ve written about previously, it has tons of extensions that help me do my work, and the fact that it’s very fast is a huge plus.

At home, my wife and I use the same PC for our ‘couch browsing’, and since we don’t want to have to logoff & log back on every time to check our email, we’ve taken to using different browsers to handle it for us. She uses Firefox and I use Chrome – just because, when I installed it, Chrome was in beta and I wanted her using something familiar to her.

Having said that, the more I’ve used Chrome over the last months, the more I’ve liked it. Just to be clear, I’ve never disliked it: I just like Firefox more. But I’ve been finding myself more and more lately using Chrome instead of Firefox for my regular browsing, even on my main PC. Extensions have definitely helped here, but I think it’s just the rock-solid stability of it, the incredible ease of use, the minimal U/I approach (ok.. in Firefox this is my fault), and the SPEED.

I know that both Google and Mozilla are paying close attention to HTML5, too, and was surprised to see that, at the moment, Firefox seems to be leading Chrome for HTML5 and CSS3 support, although Youtube’s HTML5 video support is only for Chrome (and Safari) . I suspect (hope??) that this is going to be the next major battleground for web-standards, finally killing the proprietary standards of both Adobe Flashplayer and Microsoft’s Silverlight in one fell swoop. Hey, at least I can dream, right? I’m pleased to see that Microsoft seems to be largely ignoring HTML5, which is their M.O. for any new ‘standard’ that’s not theirs, and am hoping that this means that the IE standard will finally die. Again, probably wishful thinking.

update 3/3/10: DRAT! Microsoft is going to be paying attention to HTML5 after all.