This site has always been a tool for me to stay sharp on new web technologies and lately it’s been a great way to test my cognitive skills since the little incident in October. I’ve had three things on my web development to-do list for a long time: 1) use Let’s Encrypt to add TLS/SSL security, 2) make my WordPress theme mobile-friendly and 3) create some dedicated data entry screens for golf scores, runs and bike rides. During my recovery at home, I decided to tackle item #1…

Since I still had Homebrew installed on this server, I was able to get Certbot installed early on in the process and had a valid certificate ready and waiting. I haven’t tried automating the renewal process yet, but can manually renew the certificate with no problem (had to do this once already, in fact). For whatever reason, I had trouble finding examples online of people with similar setups and had several false starts in getting Apache configured correctly to use the certificate for this domain. This post got me most of the way there, but had more of a focus on Mac OS X Server and not plain old Mac OS X client. A few other helpful links here, here and here. And this thread on the Let’s Encrypt site helped me figure out what can/should go in the httpd-vhosts.conf file versus what should go in the httpd-ssl.conf file.

Combined with the Really Simple SSL WordPress plugin, I was able to get a green “B” rating on the Qualys SSL test site. After adding a SSLCertificateChainFile line to my VirtualHost config, I got the top A+ rating and just needed to figure out why my main page was still showing a “not fully secure” message in Chrome. After upgrading the Really Simple SSL plugin to the pro version, I was able to run a full scan, correct a few issues it found, enable HSTS and make cookies more secure. Now all pages in Chrome have the coveted padlock (with no warnings) and I still had the A+ rating. All was right and good in the world.

Then I looked at some old posts…

Almost everything looked fine, but posts and pages that had emoji in them were now messed up (hearts seem to display OK, but everything else was either a question mark or some other image). Emoji support in WordPress started back in version 4.2 and I remember having issues back then too. For this site, it was due to the MySQL tables on the backend not being configured correctly. I verified that the database was using utf8mb4_unicode_ci collation on the posts field and also discovered that phpMyAdmin wasn’t having any issue displaying the emojis (it runs under the same domain and those pages were getting a padlock from the Let’s Encrypt certificate, so this has to be a WordPress issue). I thought maybe this had something to do with the newest emoji release, which WordPress contributor Brandon Kraft writes about here. After I tried matching his page source code for things like charset=”UTF-8″, I still couldn’t get these emojis to display (which they did when the site was not secure).

After Google failed to turn up much for WordPress, SSL and broken emoji, I contacted Really Simple SSL pro support. Their first question was if this happened to new posts in addition to the old ones (yes), then asked if I had looked at all the character encoding angles (like this post). My wp-config.php file didn’t have DB_CHARSET or DB_COLLATE lines, so I tried various combinations of adding that back in and commenting it out, with no success. Made sure to check caches and different browsers too. They hadn’t seen this before, so I’m guessing it’s something with my custom theme and combination of various plugins that is causing the issue. If I paste the same emojis into a test post on a different domain on the same server that hasn’t had SSL added (and with the same version of MySQL and WordPress), the emojis display fine. Huh.

Standard WordPress troubleshooting would have you disable all your plugins and I have tried to go back and disable Really Simple SSL (I don’t want to turn them all off). I also started researching how WordPress implemented emoji display and found some core javascript code that gets inserted automatically (it’s a section that starts with window._wpemojiSettings and references a baseUrl of “https:\/\/s.w.org\/images\/core\/emoji\/11\/72×72\/”). I thought maybe this was the issue, as I can’t seem to access that s.w.org domain using https, but when I compared the page source from my site to the javascript on Brandon Kraft’s page, it was exactly the same (and emojis appear fine on his site).

So in the grand scheme of things, I’d much rather have the A+ security rating and not worry about displaying emoji in posts. It does bug me, though, that I can’t find anyone else online with a similar problem and that I haven’t been able to successfully troubleshoot this issue. If you have any ideas, please contact me via email here.

Nights like tonight are when I remember just how stressful it can be to have servers remotely hosted 1,300 miles away. As I’ve written many times, this site runs on a Mac mini located in Las Vegas in a data center run by the fine folks at Mac Stadium. While trying to fix my SSL/WordPress/emoji issue (which I’ll write about later), I managed to almost completely lock up the server. I could ping it, but the Screen Sharing session dropped and SSH was unresponsive at first. Eventually I was able to login via SSH and issue a quick “sudo shutdown -r now” command before getting kicked out again. About ten minutes later, I was able to get in via Screen Sharing. Since I had a couple of security updates to install that required a restart, I decided to just continue the unexpected web server downtime and run those installers too. This ended up taking nearly an extra hour, so I apologize if you were trying to load the site and got nothing.

Now back to researching just how WordPress core supports and displays the latest emoji characters…

…since we moved in, anyways

Doggie dingles

The first week away from social has been a good learning experience

Decided to try something this week that I’ve been thinking about for a few months. I stopped visiting Facebook regularly a while ago, as I become tired of all the BS there (even after I massively limited who and what I was viewing). Twitter had been my favorite of the social networks, but lately my more political friends (both to the right and left of me) have made that platform as bad as Facebook (if not worse – thanks for nothing, @jack). No major beefs with Instagram, aside from the fact that Facebook owns them.

So what’s the plan? Well, I don’t want to close those accounts, as I’ve “owned” the kingsbury handle on all three for years. The main reason I’ve kept the Facebook account open is all of the other services that use it for authentication and tracking of progress/levels in various games. You can close your Facebook account and still prevent others from taking it over, but anytime you use one of those other services, it reactivates your profile automatically. Not sure what the rules are for Twitter and Instagram, but I imagine they would eventually allow someone else to take over those handles at some point if I closed them.

For now, I’m keeping the accounts open, but removing the apps from my phone. I closed Tweetbot on all of my computers and will try to go a few weeks without checking the timeline. I spent a few hours going through the layout of my phone apps, deleting a bunch I never use, eliminating folders and grouping apps by pages (primary, secondary, content and media, work and games). I have a great fear of missing out, but I feel like I need to compartmentalize these groupings and look for “cleaner” sources of information. I really just want to know about sports, food, concerts and unbiased business, technology and (I guess) political news. I’ll have to make a concerted effort to reach out to family and friends in others ways to stay up to date with their lives…just like the old days.

I will post more original content here, including short tweet-like status updates. I know the “audience” won’t be as big as the other networks, but I own the content, the platform and the server. You won’t be served ads or tracked (at least not beyond the generic web server log stuff) and I’ve done what I wish more sites would do – turn off comments. My email and phone number are on every single page of this site, so please feel free to reach out directly if you feel the need. And watch for TLS, video and mobile-friendly enhancements coming soon.

Thanks for reading!

Lookin’ good

Just a short post to document an issue I needed to troubleshoot the past few weeks on my web server in Vegas (Go Knights Go!). I’ve been running Homebrew versions of MySQL for some time now with no issues, but recently was receiving quite a few “Can’t connect to MySQL server” errors on all of my virtually hosted WordPress sites. It was particularly difficult to troubleshoot at first because it wasn’t an all or nothing situation – some database calls would go through, while others would not. All I knew was that the old “brew services restart mysql” command would clear things up for a few hours before the flakiness would return.

When I first started looking at the web server logs, I found a lot of error messages like this:

WordPress database error Table 'wp_termmeta' doesn't exist

There were a ton of these – guessing this was relating to the earlier database corruption issues I had related to InnoDB. Turns out that table really didn’t exist and I found this post that had the required SQL to properly recreate it. I wasn’t really sure if any of the themes or plugins that were looking for this table would actually re-populate the table with data (it doesn’t appear so), but the error messages in the logs have gone away (and everything seems a little faster now). Unfortunately, this did not have any impact on the MySQL connection issue.

Going back to the web server log, I found a number of mysqli errors:

PHP Warning: mysqli_connect(): MySQL server has gone away
PHP Warning: mysqli_connect(): Error while reading greeting packet.

These made me think it was on the database side and not an issue with Apache or PHP. I had tried messing a little with the my.cnf file, but it didn’t seem like any of the changes were having any impact. When I started looking for Homebrew MySQL tips, I first decided to reinstall MySQL while keeping the data directory in place (brew reinstall mysql). That seemed to work fine, keeping users and permissions in place while just recompiling the latest MySQL. All of the virtual sites came back up, but the can’t connect errors reappeared later in the day.

Next up, I was fully prepared to follow these instructions to blow away every sign of MySQL and reinstall from scratch (dumping all of the tables first using the awesome Sequel Pro). While looking at the /usr/local/var/mysql directory, I realized that Homebrew MySQL stores a local.err log in that same directory, which I hadn’t looked at (since Console doesn’t include it by default). This log was chock full of lines like this:

[Warning] File Descriptor 1024 exceeded FD_SETSIZE=1024

That lead me to this excellent post by Derek Jones that had me change a number of lines in the my.cnf file (specifically interactive_timeout = 300 and wait_timeout = 300). Some of the comments in this thread were also useful. I restarted the database server yet again and so far it’s been up and running for 24 hours straight (fingers crossed).

So to summarize troubleshooting 101: read all your logs, Google the errors and be thankful for those that blazed a path before you (and took the time to document it online).

So much work left to do

From what I can tell, I didn’t do an anniversary post last year (lots of moving and Final Four posts, but no birthday cake pics that I can find). The first 7minutemiles.com post appeared on this domain twelve years ago last Friday.

Current stats:

• 8,934 Posts
• 201 Pages
• 386 Comments
• 50,616 unique visitors in 2017
• 691,339 pages displayed in 2017

Still running WordPress (currently 4.9.5) with my custom theme and roughly a dozen plugins on the old Mac mini server colocated in Las Vegas. Probably too much of my content gets auto-generated these days from social media (Twitter and Instagram), but that’s OK. I feel lucky that I get to publish most of what I want without interference from trolls or stalkers, which unfortunately isn’t the case for some people I love to read (RIP Daily Angst).

After the technical difficulties last year, things have seemed to stabilize. The highest priorities for enhancements right now are moving to https via Let’s Encrypt, making the theme more mobile-friendly and finally adding a video post type to the mix. I’d also like to experiment with some form plugins for easier data entry of golf scores and adding to the run log. If I ever get my iMac photo library organized, I’d like to add more to the photo gallery section as well…

As always, thanks for visiting!

Took a bit to install, but I already like it a thousand times better than the old model

It’s been a long time since I wrote a longer post here, which actually wasn’t caused by being busy. I’ve been battling technical issues with my web server for months, which is a co-located Mac mini in Las Vegas (now at MacStadium since their merger with Brian Stucki’s excellent Macminicolo). I created my own perfect storm by trying to remotely upgrade the OS (which was two versions behind) *and* moving it from the old Macminicolo data center to the new MacStadium data center across town. Somewhere along the way, I also ended up corrupting my database backups and discovered my old backup processes weren’t working the way I thought. Thankfully I didn’t lose any data, but it wasn’t the best example of being a good sysadmin.

With work being work, I haven’t had time to focus on fixing these issues, so it’s been little bits and pieces here and there to finally get back to a semi-functioning site. I messed with moving to AWS for a little while, but decided to just rebuild my mini server from scratch. I use Homebrew versions of Apache, MySQL and PHP for the core stack, which I’m now familiar with enough to mostly breeze through those configs. I learned that over the years, my MySQL data got split into MyISAM and InnoDB islands, which caused some major problems with restoring the InnoDB side. Then I found out that I had MySQL collation setting issues, which created a bunch of weird characters (and a loss of emoji support).

This site uses a number of WordPress plugins to help automate things and several of those plugins stopped working due to the issues mentioned above. I needed to blow away both WordFence (security) and Intagrate (Instagram integration), reconfiguring both from square one. I’ve also had some general response issues with the server, which was mostly fixed with an ARP patch from MacStadium. I still need to go through the web server error logs to clean up a few other performance issues, but those are a little harder to research and isolate (wordpress termmeta doesn’t exist, anyone?).

So now that I can reliably post from the mobile app and have Twitter and Instagram integration working again, it’s almost time to get back to my enhancement wish list:

• Recreate my Coda web development environment on the new iMac
• Add Backblaze support to the server
• Rewrite and test my database backup scripts
• Move to https with Let’s Encrypt (this should help)
• Create data entry screens for golf scores and runs
• Make my default theme more mobile-friendly
• Add a video post type
• Make my header photos retina-ready
• Update the about and biography sections
• Bring back more of the old photo gallery pictures

As always – thanks for visiting!

SK has built an awesome spot

Haven’t been here much the past two weeks

Revival chicken and Easy/Easy & Oskey gimlets @ Rayette Lofts

Thanks again, Mystic Lake

Change is good, right? Well, we’ve been charging ahead full force the past month. Kid one moved out and into her own apartment mid-February, while the rest of us decided to pack it up and move back to the city. Today marks three weeks in our new loft in St. Paul’s Lowertown neighborhood, which the local boosters describe as:

A vibrant artists’ quarter filled with beautiful workspaces, hip cafes, fine dining and the stunning CHS Field.

We are kitty-corner from the wonderful St. Paul Farmer’s Market in the Rayette building, which we share with the home of my all-time favorite cheeseburger, Saint Dinette. The building has had an interesting history, opening as a millinery in 1911, with stints as the home of Aqua Net hairspray and as a parking ramp before being converted to lofts in 2014. We downsized from three bedrooms to two, but added 13 foot ceilings, huge windows and a layout that seems much larger than before (ours is the Monroe, with 1,459 square feet). I love the exposed brick, industrial columns and lack of carpeting throughout (finally got to toss our crappy vacuum cleaner).

In addition to the suburb-to-city change, transportation has also been turned on its head. We still have two cars, but one is parked here and the other is in storage. Colleen gets a discounted transit pass from her employer and now rides the bus to work (express plus a short transfer). I bought a monthly Go-To card from Metro Transit and ride the Green Line trains to and from the stadium. The Union Depot station is a block over and takes just under 40 minutes to drop me off right across Chicago Avenue from the Legacy Gate (and/or the skyway entrance). I can’t express how much of a quality of life improvement it is to not drive in metro rush hour traffic any longer. Now I plug in my headphones, check social media, read stories, play games and just relax. Hoping to eventually sell one car and just stick with one (which kid two uses to drive herself to school).

We lived in downtown St. Paul the first year out of college at Galtier Plaza, but this area is now completely different. I read somewhere that Lowertown now has 3500 residents and I’m pretty sure about half of them have dogs, which makes me very happy (even though allergies still prevent us from adding to the total). Mears Park is a block west and has a mini restaurant row, with Bulldog, Barrio, Public Kitchen + Bar and Handsome Hog. Big River Pizza is across the street, with the eclectic Golden’s Deli a few doors south of that. There are a ton of additional restaurants nearby and we are super excited for Saints games to start. Our Twins ticket group also has Saints tickets, so we are buying one share this season to see how it goes. The stadium is literally on the other side of the building you see above.

In addition to having the option of that cheeseburger downstairs six days a week, the building has a bunch of other great amenities. The workout room is just perfect – it’s exactly what I would design if I had the opportunity: all Life Fitness gear, two treadmills, a room full of spin cycles, free weights, an elliptical, squat rack, benches and more. There are two large TVs with DirectTV and a speaker system that you can supposedly plug stuff into (can’t seem to get that part working so far). It’s conveniently located one floor below our unit and now I don’t have to go outside in the winter any more to exercise. The downtown YMCA teaches a free spin class one night a week and may bring back a yoga class later in the year too. Once it gets warmer, I will have some great new running and biking routes along the Mississippi that I can’t wait to try.

Directly across from the exercise room is the “Sinatra Lounge,” which is a shared community space that has a fireplace, bar, multiple TVs and a pool table. We’ve already spent a lot of time shooting pool – I really like having access to that again (and free is even better). Up on the roof, there is a community patio that includes a gas fire pit, grill, all-season TV and speaker system. The views of the river and surrounding areas are stellar, day or night. The office manager and maintenance guy are great, the mail and package delivery systems seem to work well and I love having chutes for trash and recycling. My only (small) issues so far are the overly complicated thermostat and the noise from one of the garage door openers.

We are mostly unpacked now, with just a few areas that need to be cleaned up (and a few more things to hang on the walls). Once that’s done, we’d love to have visitors – drop me a line at dk@7minutemiles.com and we will see you soon in Lowertown!

Staircase A is emergency exit only

Top 3 worst for sure – maybe #1

Really hope this works out

Rayette Lofts, Lowertown, St. Paul

Searching for a new place in 2017

When my automated Twitter plugins stopped working last week, I started thinking about ways to replace the tweet section at the top of 7 Minute Miles. Twitter Tools and Social used to pull in the last 7 tweets automatically, but the plugin authors decided to stop supporting them back in February (RIP Alex King). Twitter also seems to change up their developer connections from time to time, so all plugins will break at some point if they aren’t maintained.

Since the updates stopped, I learned that my wife and dad both read that section regularly for information instead of visiting Twitter itself. I looked at a lot of other Twitter WordPress plugins and couldn’t find anything that did exactly the same thing as Twitter Tools, so I looked at other ways to incorporate tweets into this site.

What I’ve decided to try is a new, automated post for each tweet. I’ve installed the Import Tweets as Posts plugin by Chandan Kumar and modified it to change the post format to “status.” It’s set to look for new tweets every two minutes and assign each post to a new “tweets” category.

I had to modify my functions.php file to add status to the post-formats array and wrote some new code for the homepage to style the display of these new tweet posts. The plugin even supports URL links and sets attached photos as the featured image. I’ll still need to find a way to automatically send links of full posts to Twitter, but this works for now.

Code rules…

Today marks ten years since the first post here at 7minutemiles.com.

Ten. Flipping. Years.

I can hardly believe it. As I do every year, here are the latest stats from the server logs:

6,769 Posts
198 Pages
351 Comments
61,428 unique visitors in 2015
1,617,437 pages displayed

As of today, I’m running WordPress 4.4.2 with a highly-customized theme and 18 active plugins (Wordfence Security, Twitter Tools, Social and Alpine PhotoTile for Instagram playing key roles on the home page). Just noticed that several of my plugins aren’t really being supported or developed any more, so I should probably start cleaning those out and/or looking for replacements.

Speaking of replacements, I used to use a plugin called WP Audioscrobbler to pull my last played information from last.fm. That feature broke when they updated their API to version 2, so I’ve been looking for a way to replace that. A UK developer named Sam Kitson wrote a nice blog post about using jQuery and JSON to access that data, but I haven’t spent enough time trying to figure it out. He was kind enough to respond via email with an offer of assistance, so hopefully I’ll get that working again shortly.

Also on the list of (hopeful) future development: coding new mobile-friendly data entry screens for the run log and golf scores database, adding my long-delayed video post type and creating a responsive design option for smaller screens. It’s getting tougher and tougher to find free time to work on these things, but it would be good to keep those web development skills somewhat fresh.

I’d also like to give a quick shout-out to Brian Stucki and his company Macminicolo. I’ve been a customer of his operation for many years and have always received great service and fair pricing. This site runs on a five-year-old Mac mini with the AMP stack (Apache, MySQL and PHP) in their Las Vegas data center and has never had any major issues (remote OS upgrades are sometimes a bit scary, but that’s the case with all colocated machines).

As always, thanks for visiting!

So much to shred

Today is the ninth anniversary of the first post here at 7minutemiles.com. As I tend to do every year, here are the latest stats (based on server logs, not Google Analytics):

• 5,866 Posts
• 191 Pages
• 339 Comments
• 73,896 unique visitors in 2014
• 1,248,423 pages displayed

This past year saw a few tweaks here and there – added the last nine Instagram photos to the bottom of the front page, edited and rewrote the biography, made some changes to my résumé, added a new coursework page (with transcripts) and changed the format of the list of lists page. Wanted to add a video post type, but still haven’t quite figured out how to best do that between the smaller, three-column front page and the single post format that appears when you click on a story.

I’ve also been experimenting with options to make the theme “mobile-friendly” per Google’s new guidelines, but 1) the easiest method (the WPtouch plugin) doesn’t work well with my content and 2) I really don’t care all that much what Google thinks about my personal site. That said, I do like some of the responsive design things other people are doing, so I’ll probably make it work eventually.

As always, thanks for visiting!

Last Sunday was the eighth anniversary of the first post here at 7minutemiles.com. Some current stats:

• 4,662 Posts
• 184 Pages
• 989 Comments
• 72,947 unique visitors in 2013
• 577,953 pages displayed in 2013
• 486 average unique daily visitors last month

Still running WordPress on a Mac mini co-located in Las Vegas. Not much in the way of theme design changes this year – I’m pretty happy with the way it looks and functions (particularly the ability to update easily from mobile devices). There are some new things I’d like to experiment with this year, but I’ll probably use a different domain for that.

Thanks for visiting!

At the risk of sounding like an arrogant narcissist, I love this site. 7minutemiles.com has been alive for about six years now and has always been a non-commercial, personal site. My kids call it “Daaa!” on their phones, my family and friends read it occasionally, it’s a test bed for my other WordPress sites, the design has evolved to a place I really like and somehow it currently averages around 600 visits a day (who are you people?).

I much prefer sharing information here over social media sites and really love the ability to publish Tumblr-style posts that don’t involve a lot of writing (image, link and quote posts – someday video). The latest WordPress iOS app makes it relatively easy to post on the road and the design auto-flows on the front page to keep things fresh (along with the automatic Twitter updates).

A podcast I listened to recently had Marco Arment on as a guest. He talked about his personal site, marco.org, and how that’s always been his personal site, separate from any project or employer, and how proud he was of it. I feel the same way about 7 Minute Miles, which I plan to publish indefinitely.

Thanks for visiting!

The Lerberg – sturdy, lightweight and cheap (under $20)

Trying out the clubhouse exercise room, Eagan, Minnesota

Very pleased with our POD experience

The pod leftovers, Eagan, Minnesota

The adventure continues this week, as we reverse the process started a week ago when we moved out of the house we’ve lived in for more than twelve years. I haven’t written much about it until now, as it’s been stressful, humbling and a whole host of other emotions. There are many, many others in the same situation, but that doesn’t make it any easier for me to process.

I would like to thank a few people, starting with attorney Jerry Probst. I can’t say enough good things about the work he and his team did to assist us through the short sale process. Special thanks to Michelle, Stephanie, Jacqueline, Genna and closer Kelly – I was delighted by your professionalism, attention to detail, tenacity and kindness throughout the long, long process (it took nearly eight months).

Our realtors Shirley and Phil Larson also stuck with us throughout the arduous journey. This type of transaction requires a special type of marketing and specific knowledge on how lenders and appraisers operate and there is a huge advantage if you have agents with those skills. If you need to sell your house, you should email or call them at 952-997-9466.

The saga started back in July when the house was first listed. We had an offer a day after the first open house, but the bank countered back. We had to re-list the house at a higher price and start showings again after the first buyer dropped out.

After a few weeks, we actually had two new offers and submitted the higher of the two bids. Thanks to the miracle workers at Probst Law, an agreement was reached with all of the parties, but the new buyer didn’t think they could meet the time deadlines. Eventually a closing date was set – one week out. We weren’t sure we could get everything out of the house that fast, but it all worked out and we closed on February 8.

The move out was quite a circus. I rented a huge 17-foot dumpster that was full within a day. We took multiple trips to Goodwill, sold a few things, gave some furniture to relatives and took many car trips to my parents and other family members for temporary storage. Then the largest POD they have arrived and we jammed that full from floor to ceiling. Oh, and filled another dumpster too. We left with the last car load full of stuff five minutes before the final buyer walk-through on Thursday night.

The lease on our new place was originally scheduled to start March 1, but we were able to move that up a week. That still left two weeks of floating, which has actually now involved five hotels (if you count Fortune Bay). That all ends on Friday morning, when I can sign the final papers and get the new keys. The POD should be delivered sometime that day and there will be a long weekend of hauling stuff around again.

I’m really hoping the new place works out. It’s a two-story, three-bedroom rental town home in Eagan with underground parking, a workout room and outdoor pool. There are bus stops for each kid right outside that go to their same exact schools, which is way cool (and surprising). They will still have their own rooms and painting and nails are on the approved list. Hopefully noise is not an issue (both from the neighbors and the kids).

It feels weird not owning a house any more, but I won’t miss mowing, shoveling, yard work and a whole slew of other things. My credit rating took a hit for the first time in my life and taxes might be interesting next year, but I plan to hire an expert for that (also for the first time in my life).

Suburban homeowner life was…different. After growing up in the city, I never thought I would end up living like that for as long as I did. If it weren’t for the schools, I would’ve found an apartment in Minneapolis or St. Paul for sure (or a lake cabin). The new setup is the best education option for the girls, though, so we’ll make it work.

I have a lot of great memories from that house and neighborhood – it’s the only house kid two has ever known. There were also a lot of rough times, but it’s best to move on and not dwell on the negativity. As Nina says, “It’s a new dawn, it’s a new day, it’s a new life for me and I’m feeling good.”

Thanks for the memories…

Never again…

Not sure when it started happening, but if you scroll to the bottom of the 7minutemiles.com home page and hover over the “Older posts” link, the URL shows as 7minutemiles.com/page/2. My web server, though, is redirecting that back to 7minutemiles.com via an Apache 301 redirect. Not good.

The older posts can be viewed by using a different URL – 7minutemiles.com/?paged=2 for the second page of posts, 7minutemiles.com/?paged=3 for the third page, and so on. So at least I know they are still there.

This type of problem is usually related to the Permalinks section in WordPress Settings and the .htaccess file it manipulates. I checked out the current .htaccess file, recreated it, restored an old version from backup to compare and tried various structural settings within the admin section (default works, but I want my standard day and name URLs that match what Google has indexed).

What’s weird is that pagination within category pages works fine (i.e. – 7minutemiles.com/category/golf/page/2 for example). My web server log isn’t throwing any errors and seems to be configured the same as it ever was (no recent upgrades). I did have a few Jetpack plugin upgrades recently, but deactivating that made no difference. I’m also not using any add-in pagination plugins.

A WordPress support site had a few threads mentioning that the 3.4 upgrade changed some things with pagination, but I’m pretty sure it was working since I moved to the 3.4.x series (currently on 3.4.2). My issue is a little different than that post, plus you wouldn’t think you’d need a function.php fix for basic pagination on the home page. Here is my theme PHP code that generates the link:

next_posts_link('« Older posts')

That generates the right URL, so I’m confused as to whether this is a WordPress issue or an Apache issue. Guess I’ll look at it with fresh eyes tomorrow…

Tonight I decided to switchover to the new photo gallery I started building last month. I still have a ton of golf photos to load (among others) and I haven’t re-written the random photo code in the footer yet, but it’s time.

The old Gallery2-based section is still live for now, but it’s not linked from any of the toolbars. Once I have most of the photos moved over, I’ll take down the Gallery2 code too.

My two month Facebook sabbatical ends tonight. It was a nice, productive break, but the influence of Facebook has expanded so much that you really do miss out on a lot of things now if you don’t have an account. I also needed to get back to being an admin on a few pages, watching out for kid one’s safety and catching up with friends who I only see online via Facebook.

I’m very proud of the changes I’ve made on this site and will continue to post (almost) daily here. My Twitter account is also still very active and automatically feeds the 7 Minute Miles home page.

I reinstalled the iPhone Facebook app, but I’m not sure yet how much I’ll post going forward. I don’t see what all the fuss was about regarding the layout changes, but I think the big stuff talked about at F8 is still yet to come, no?

As posted earlier this week, I finally implemented a few design changes on 7 Minute Miles. I discovered that the updated news feed still has some issues that I need to test out further (thanks Joss Crowcroft), but overall I’m pretty happy with how it turned out.

With the additional of post formats, I should be able to post something almost every day – favorite quotes, links to other sites I like and single images are quick and easy. I also want to write regular posts more often and will focus on my usual food, golf, running and travel stories, along with some personal posts about whatever grabs my fancy on that particular day.

I haven’t decided yet just how personal I want to get here – there is definitely a school of thought that says you need to cultivate your “online brand” and be aware of what a potential future employer might read. Others get all uptight if you swear, become too political or say something that’s out of the ordinary. And it’s much easier to write crazy stuff if you are anonymous (or an idiot).

Online publishing platforms like WordPress create an incredible opportunity for self-expression and wide dissemination of thoughts and ideas. Everyone likes to hold up freedom of speech as an ideal, but the reality is that words have consequences and must be wielded carefully. I hate self-censorship, but I’ve also been burned enough times by things I write to know I need to think twice (or more) before hitting the publish button.

I am who I am, though, and don’t plan to be anonymous or (hopefully) boring. So sit back, relax and enjoy the show…

I’ve spent a fair amount of time this week finally studying up on the latest and greatest features of WordPress, CSS and JavaScript. This was mainly in anticipation of the work I need to finish this month on the new Fortune Bay website, but I also wanted to change up the look and functionality of this site.

The biggest items involved adding post formats to my custom theme (which now supports standard, link, quote and image posts) and integrating a three-column formatting structure based on the jQuery plugin Masonry. I also modified the RSS feed to deal with post formats, tweaked the Twitter section and cleaned up the style sheet.

I’ve also been thinking a lot about how I spend my time online and how I present myself in various venues (I’m currently on a Facebook hiatus, quit Google+ before I really started and came very close to shutting down my LinkedIn profile). The simplicity of Tumblr drove the implementation of post formats and I like the idea of having full control over my content. Also have high hopes for the next version of the WordPress iOS app.

All of these things will hopefully mean I get back to posting more often, but no promises…

The oldest post on 7 Minute Miles was written five years ago tomorrow. I’ll skip the usual “time flies” references and all that – just glad to still be around to publish anything…

A lot has changed in my life during this timeframe, but the look of this site has not. I was kicking around the idea that I should write a new theme and incorporate all of the new features that WordPress has added over the years, but I’m both lazy and a slow learner. In the end, I decided to mostly keep things the way they’ve been, but did tidy up the joint a little:

• Added new background image
• De-cluttered the title bar and re-named some links
• Modified the color scheme a bit and cleaned up the style sheet
• Removed the sidebar and created a new sub-footer section
• New social media and contact buttons in the sub-footer
• Moved the bucket list items to the footer area
• Upgraded the photo gallery to the latest version
• De-activated and removed unused plugins (and added some new ones)
• Adding a new running log section (not quite ready yet)
• Re-writing the about section and merging it with the old bio and fetish sections (in progress)

I’ve been thinking a lot about how personal web sites fit in with the current social media landscape and decided I’ll keep this site as my online home base and have Twitter continue to feed the home page with short updates. When I do write the occasional longer post here, Twitter and Facebook will announce those posts automatically. And I still like the concept of owning the box (and the contents) and not worrying about the (sometimes) arbitrary policy changes of other companies. Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn all serve various purposes for me, though, so they will continue to stay in the picture (despite my occasional idiot freakouts).

A few stats as of today: 919 posts, 95 pages, 182 approved comments (78,255 blocked spam comments), 39,194 unique visitors in 2010 (who viewed 400,295 pages).

I know, I know, it’s been more than a month since I wrote a post here, but I’m not dead (yet). I promise I’ll get back to a more regular publishing schedule soon.

In the meantime, here’s a nice relaxing photo from God’s Country to liven up the 7 Minute Miles home page.

Yesterday was the fourth anniversary of the first post on 7minutemiles.com. An update on stats:

• 882 Posts
• 128 Pages
• 29 Categories
• 167 Non-Spam Comments
• 42,621 Spam Comments

These numbers reflect the integration of the old golfing, hockey, run and skiing in Minnesota sites.

I’ve been thinking about new designs and features lately – stay tuned!

As some of you may have noticed, there have been a few changes here at 7minutemiles.com:

• All of my former .mn sports sites now re-direct to this site. New sections have been created for golf, hockey, running and skiing. Archived posts from each site have been consolidated on 7MM and separate RSS feeds are available for each category.
• Photo gallery images from the old sites have also been consolidated in the main 7MM gallery.
• Links to other sites we like have been consolidated in the 7MM blogroll area in the sidebar.
• I added page anchors to the fetishes page, along with a drop-down selector so you can jump down to the exact section you’d like to read.
• A new 7 Minute Miles, LLC services randomizer box replaces my personal “to-do” bucket list section, which has moved to the footer.
• Information on the contact page has been updated to add the new 7MM PO box mailing address and the return of my iChat/AOL account name.
• Minor updates to the about page and the biography sections.
• A new company page has been created to describe services the new 7 Minute Miles, LLC, organization is now offering.

Speaking of the LLC, I decided at the end of the summer it was time to start a new company. With the help of Doug Podolak and attorney Kevin Johnson, I founded 7 Minute Miles, LLC, on August 28, 2009.

The legal framework is now in place and I opened new business checking and savings accounts with U.S. Bank earlier this week. A former co-worker from Northwest Airlines, Mumtaz Walli-Ware, will be providing small business accounting and tax services and I will be purchasing business insurance from Tapemark Charity Pro-Am presenting sponsor, Anderson Agency.

The new company is a technology consultancy that specializes in WordPress web publishing and Apple system administration and management. Our first two new clients are the Tapemark Charity Pro-Am and the Macalester College Relations department. With are in negotiations with several other organizations and hope to have more news to announce soon.

Please take a look at the services we offer and contact us for a free initial consultation today!

Today is the third anniversary of the first post on 7 Minute Miles. Wow, how time flies…

The Dashboard reports:

• 382 Posts
• 40 Pages
• 25 Categories
• 97 Non-Spam Comments
• 20,787 Spam Comments

We hit a new high for number of pages displayed last month (21,955) and visits this month (5,371). On an average day this month, almost 180 people dropped in to read my ramblings. Crazy.

Note: Due to server maintenance, this site will be off-line from approximately midnight tomorrow until around 8AM Wednesday morning.

Today I decided to upload all of the old photos I scanned a few months ago to the photo gallery here on 7 Minute Miles. Most of them had already been uploaded to Facebook, but I only allow people on my Facebook friend list to view photos on that site. These are available for all to view and have the added benefit of a link below each photo to download the original, full-sized file.

Lots of great memories in there…

I’ve finished some site maintenance the past few days:

• Upgraded to the latest version of WordPress (2.7.1)
• Upgraded to the latest versions of all my plug-ins (except for Exec-PHP)
• Added back my office webcams to the contact page (see sample above)
• Updated and consolidated all of the fetishes information on one page
• Made some minor edits on the biography and résumé pages
• Changed the menu bar “stamps” link to start on the 1980 first day covers page (still adding more)
• Added the 2009 Walt Disney World Marathon medal to the background image

Seems like the new version of WordPress is allowing much more comment spam than before (despite using Akismet)…

I’ve been a member of the Amazon Associates program for a long time. I publish special links to items in their online store and when people follow those links and buy something, I get a small commission from the sale. This has never been a big revenue source on any of my sites, but it was easy to set up, so why not.

A few weeks ago, I found out that Amazon started offering a new feature called aStores. Associate members can basically build their own custom store: custom look and feel, hand-picked items and a localized shopping cart.

I’ve built a new aStore I’m calling the DK Depot. It’s linked from the banners on this site and all of my MN sports sites (golfing.mn, hockey.mn, run.mn and skiing.mn). There are sections for each of those sports, along with areas of interest such as iPods, laptops, music, movies and cameras. All of the items listed are things I either own, have used or would like to buy.

Visit the DK Depot today for all of your last minute holiday shopping. Cheers!

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:

This week I am on the road for spring break and will have limited posts, as the only Internet access I have is on my phone (I sound like Russo).

One quick note, though. I was riding the train west just south of Edmonton yesterday night and I could just feel the bad vibes coming from Canada when I read Butch and Demitra were out.

The final score didn’t surprise me, but it’s still disappointing…

Finally decided to just launch the damn thing tonight. Hockey posts I used to write here will now be on the new site (just like what happened with golf before).

Thoughts and opinions on Minnesota high school, collegiate and Wild hockey, plus whatever else I find time for before the season ends…

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

I’ve added two quick links in the sidebar under the Random Photo section. One goes directly to my golf scores database and the other links to the new first day cover database I’m building. I have a huge backlog of first day covers to photograph and catalog, so that project will take a while. There is also a new fetish page for those, in case you are wondering what the heck first day covers are…DK

Today 7 Minute Miles was named the “Minnesota Blog of the Day” by City Pages newspaper. I don’t publish this site with an intent to have a large audience, but it’s always nice to get recognized. For the record, my goal is not to run the Boston Marathon–that’s more of a wish. My times are so slow that I’d have to be about 70 years old to qualify, but I’ll keep trying to get better.

Last week, City Pages published their annual “Best of the Twin Cities” issue. The controversy over “Best Cheap Thrill” was dumb, but I always enjoy that issue because it gives me ideas of new places to eat. Like most people who grew up in Saint Paul, I don’t know much about what’s good on the other side of the river. City Pages seems to favor Minneapolis establishments, so this works out well for me (but why no “Best Wild Player” category?).

Locally-owned restaurants are sometimes more expensive, but they are also more unique and often have better quality food and service. This week I tried two of the winners at lunchtime: Matt’s Bar for best burger and Cafe Barbette for best fries. I had been to the latter once before for dinner and the sirloin burger special with fries didn’t disappoint. I had a Jucy Lucy at Matt’s and got burned by the cheese (despite the warning from our server). It was very good, though, and you can’t beat the atmosphere…DK

Based on feedback, I’ve made some changes to the site since the launch. There are several new sections in the fetishes area:

• Cirque du Soleil
• Movies
• Television

I’ve also added some iTunes functionality to the footer area and the music page and added a webcam image to the contact page. I appreciate the feedback and will continue to make improvements down the road…DK

Welcome to 7 Minute Miles!

Today is the official site launch of 7 Minute Miles–my personal site for sharing news with family and friends, improving my writing skills (hopefully), testing new web technologies and discussing various topics I find interesting. Sort of like a virtual Speaker’s Corner, but hopefully not as crazy…

I’m using a wide array of technologies here, with an effort to become as standards compliant as I can so that the experience is the same across platforms. Windows visitors–give the Firefox web browser a try if you can. It is more secure and conforms to web standards better than Internet Explorer. Click on the Firefox button in the sidebar to learn more.

This site is the most I’ve ever published about myself, so please browse around and let me know what you think. Some areas will be private and password protected and some things are better left unsaid. Click on the register link in the sidebar to get a subscriber account that allows you to post comments, if you desire…DK