For her five month birthday, Ella enjoyed playing in her ExerSaucer. She made it look so fun that it has me wondering where I can get one of those things.

Posted via email from Michael Wender’s Posterous

Through the years, one of the most popular pages on my website has been my online text messaging form. It regularly receives 80 to 100 hits a day, and at last count, users had sent 116,124 text messages with the form from January 16, 2008 through August 24, 2009.

Unfortunately, the latest upgrade to WordPress broke the form. During its two month hiatus, I’ve heard from many users via comments and email requesting that I get the form working again. Given the form’s popularity, as I worked on fixing it I decided to move it over to its own dedicated domain. As of this evening, I’m happy to report that my online text messaging form is back in business over at QwikTxt.com.

With the rise in Twitter’s popularity this year all manner of people have taken to sharing their thoughts in 140 characters or less. Persons associated with the University of Tennesse Men’s and Women’s athletics departments are no different. Lane Kiffin, Bruce Pearl, Candace Parker and Eric Berry are among many UT past and present notables on Twitter.

Up until yesterday, keeping up with all the tweets of your favorite UT personalities may have been a little challenging for those not technically inclined. That’s why I put together GoVolsTweets.com. A visit to the GoVolsTweets homepage presents you with a streamlined Twitter stream of UT sports Twitter accounts that I follow over at @GoVolsTweets. Continue Reading

Earlier today I discovered my site had been hacked! It was a great way to start out a Monday.

Fortunately, I back up my site each day. So, this afternoon, I was able to restore everything.

In the process, I upgraded to the latest version of WordPress. I’d been holding off due to a conflict between my Picture of the Day application and the new jQuery library that comes with the latest version of WordPress. That being said, my home page POD is currently out of commision until I get a chance to update the code. However, at least my website is now updated with the latest and most secure software.

In the meantime, continue checking my home page for updates. Rather than appearing in the POD app, they’ll simply be appearing as “blog” posts with the most recent being at the top of the page.

For those of you who aren’t in the habit of checking my Flickr stream, I thought I would share this slideshow of photos from my Friday Hike of House Mountain:

This week my new Nikon D90 camera arrived. Having spent the past seven years shooting over 15,000 photos with a simple point-and-shoot camera, it’s great fun having some real photographic horse-power in my hands. During a break in the workday today, I headed out to the mailbox to photograph some flowers Beth planted a couple of years ago. They just bloomed this morning, and it was a beautiful day for getting some fantastic macro shots.

Continue Reading

Yesterday, I went live with a “soft launch” of  the redesigned Fellowship Evangelical Free Church (FEFC) website. In cooperation with Erik Chandler, FEFC Communication Director, I started this redesign in December of last year. One of the hardest parts of this process was simply gathering all the neccessary information and content in order to accurately represent an organization as large and diverse as FEFC.

Without a doubt, WordPress made this process much easier. Given its ease of use and configurability, as the content started coming together, I was able to quickly configure the custom WordPress theme I was building. This allowed us to organize the content according to Erik’s desires for an easy-to-use and asethetically pleasing layout.

WordPress’s ease of configurability has been particularly evident during the past week as Erik, Mason (his new media intern) and I have made numerous last minute changes. My expertise with WordPress themes and PHP coding has allowed me to quickly implement their requests.

All-in-all, this redesign represents a giant step forward from the website’s previous design. What’s more, we realize that our work isn’t finished. There are many more tweaks and edits that we wish to make. In addition, we also will be reworking many of the sub websites that span off of fefc.com. However, the great thing about this process is that since the site and sub website are all built on top of WordPress, we’ll be able to make our changes in a much quicker and easier fashion than afforded by many of the other content management tools out there.

Oxygen from Christopher Hendryx on Vimeo.

Clever student film from the Ringling Collge of Art and Design.

Do you ask questions? How often do you ask questions to really get to know another person? Do you try to explore another person’s “insides,” their “what makes them tick?” If your answer is “yes,” what do you find when you go there? If your answer is “no,” why not?

When you ask questions, are you truly curious and asking out of genuine interest or concern, or do you have some self-serving agenda?

Have you ever thought about this much? What benefits might come from you asking more questions?

Image by Oberazzi

During the past four years I’ve been using Lingo for my office phone. I switched to Lingo because I wanted to save money over the cost of a regular landline. Now, in another cost-cutting move, I’m switching again.

As of this morning, I’ve emailed my clients to alert them of my new office number and let them also know they can reach me on Skype. In this post, I’m going to share my experiences in making this switch as a way of helping anyone else that may be looking to do the same thing. Continue Reading