Last Sunday was the second anniversary of the first post on 7 Minute Miles. My how time flies.

A few stats:

• 308 posts
• 72 comments
• 5,875 attempted spam comments
• current average daily visitors: 109
• current average daily page views: 484

Thanks for visiting!

UPDATE: Here’s a graph of page views and unique visitors since the beginning:

Spent some time this weekend working on the first day cover archive project. I realized it’s been almost 30 years of collecting for me now, so I’d really like to get all of them photographed and added to the database.

This weekend I finished 1980, 1981, 1982, 1983, 1984 and 1985.

Still a long ways to go, but it’s a start.

The past few weeks I’ve been inspired by the TV show (and the ad campaign) that talk about things to do before you die. I’ve been very privileged to do the things I’ve done up to this point and would die a happy man right now, but it’s been fun thinking up new things to do.

I’ve added a new box to the top of the home page that displays a random list item each time the page is loaded. Also, the sidebar now lists my personal best times at various running distances. I plan to work on lowering these in the next few years as I pursue the list item “Qualify for Boston.”

Maybe I’ll make that namesake goal of seven minutes miles after all…

This weekend I finally got back to working on my first day cover project. I uploaded about 100 new covers and decided to re-work the structure of the collection online. Instead of a huge text listing on one page, I’ve divided it into yearly pages with thumbnail pictures that can be clicked to view a close-up of the stamp.

There are still literally hundreds left to enter, but I like the framework much better now.

Check out the new pages here:

2005 | 2004 | 2003 | 2002 | 2001 | 2000 | 1999

The photo section of 7 Minute Miles embeds an open source photo management application called Gallery 2. It’s worked well for me, but it’s pretty complex and somewhat hard to customize. There are a lot of hidden features and some that don’t work so well. It also supports custom themes, which I’ve done on this site.

This weekend, my sister and my wife both asked if there is a way to view a slideshow. I had experimented with that in the past and didn’t really like it. I just turned the latest slideshow version on and it’s not bad. The full-screen option is clunky, but the regular option is OK. Here are the steps to use it:

• Go to the album you want to view
• Use the album actions drop-down box to select “View Slideshow”
• Change the max size to 640×640
• Change the delay seconds (if desired)
• Click the [-] box to hide options
• Enjoy the show!

I also enabled simple RSS feeds for albums, so if you use a newsreader, you can subscribe to an album to find out when new photos are added. My favorite reader for Mac OS X is still NetNewsWire Lite, now offered by NewsGator.

Two final photo tips: when navigating single photos, you can click on the right side of the photo to go to the next one and the left side for the previous one. Lastly, if you are on page 2 of a multi-page album, you can change the page number in the URL and hit return to jump right to that new page.

It’s been a long time coming, but I finally found the time to research my validation errors and have resolved them all. So now I’m proud to add the W3C logo to the sidebar:

It’s a nerd thing, but web standards are a good thing. Happy to finally join the club…

My wife says this website was turning into a golf blog and looking at the post count, she was right. So I have decided to limit golf posts on 7 Minute Miles and started posting on a new golf-only site:

Golfing in Minnesota

Not all of the sub-sections are ready, but the posting mechanism is in place and I have moved all of the old golf category posts from 7 Minute Miles to the new site (they remain in the archives here as well).

We own several Minnesota sports-related domains and are working on potential business models for a new Minnesota sports blog network. Golfing in Minnesota is our first foot in the water to explore what’s possible and we welcome feedback and suggestions…DK