We camped in Maine at Bradbury Mountain State Park this last Friday and Saturday nights. It’s a nice, small, clean campground close to Freeport. Got in late on Friday after work and set up camp in the dark (as usual). The firewood they sold us was wet so we went through about 6 Improper Bostonian magazines before the fire took. Saturday morning we woke up early (after freezing all night – need a warmer sleeping bag!) and took a ferry to Peaks Island. A Kayaking tour was waiting for us there. A group of 7 of us (couple from Boston, couple from Portland, us, and a guide) Kayaked around the islands for a few hours. We saw a seal… lots of water… and in general lots of nature. Spent the rest of the day wandering around Portland, then back to the campground for Sat. night.

Sunday we woke up and decided to hike up Bradbury Mountain. Turns out it’s only a 0.3 mile hike to the summit, but surprisingly it’s a really good view. Took the longest route down we could fine, then it was off to Freeport for some eating and shopping. Had a great weekend – really looking forward to camping again on Sept. 11!

I’ve been working on a new site for the past few months, http://www.triptitude.com. Funny name, I know. I looked up a list of suffixes and tried putting them after “trips”. Triptitude was about the only one that wasn’t taken, so it stuck. The idea is that if you have a question while your are planning a trip, you can ask it and someone will answer it for you. For instance, if you ask a question like Which resort in Tahiti has the best over water bungalows? beach bungalows? someone from Tahiti, or that has been to Tahiti, will log on and answer the question for you. As you ask and answer questions, you gain reputation. Users with the most reputation will have the most authority on the site, and they’ll have more features available. Basically the stackoverflow.com model.

Always open to suggestions of course. Check it out, let me know what you think! http://www.triptitude.com

We mixed it up a bit this weekend. Started off Friday night driving 4 hours to Utica, NY to spend the weekend with one of Emily’s internship friends. We ended up seeing the Erie Canal and betting on Harness Races. Along with the races we stopped by the casino and lost a few $. On Sunday, I ran (very slowly) my first 5K, while Emily walked a 5K for the first time. We tied, but believe it or not, she was the one slowing me down. I didn’t take any photos, mainly because Utica is a depressing down (no offense to anyone that lives there, of course…) and I’d rather not have photos of the place

I started my programming career with PHP back in 2003, but I’ve been a .NET-only guy for a few years now. Since I started this blog a few days ago I’ve been looking into using WordPress for a few web application ideas that I have.  The problem I usually have with starting ASP.NET sites is that it takes a while to get the basics up and running. I know… there are plenty of frameworks out there that get you up and running pretty quickly, but it’s hard to beat the simplicity of WordPress. In ASP.NET, I always get hung up on the details – for some reason I always end up spending hours tweaking CSS before the site actually does anything useful. With wordpress, it’s easy to find a theme that’s *good enough* and get to work on actual functionality. In a single hour of setting up styles, permissions, users, databases, etc. in ASP.NET, I can have WordPress installed, looking good, and actually *doing something*.

The *doing something* part is the key. Doing what? Well, I’m not sure yet, but I’ve just run across two plugins that make it easy to publish different types of content with WordPress. They are Pods and Flutter. Both plugins are Drupal CCK-style content-type creation plugins. That basically means you do this with them:

1. Create a new “Content Type” (not actually called “Content Type” in either plugin)
2. Add some fields to it (like textboxes, images, checkboxes, etc.)
3. Create a template for a page that will display the content type to your user
4. Add some data

Flutter seems to make the most sense to me, but I only gave each plugin a five minute trial run. To be honest I probably won’t end up using either plugin for what I’m trying to do, but I can see how they would be useful for simple-ish data entry and display.

• Pods
• Flutter
• Are there any others out there?