Fitness / Nonsense / iPhone — No comments
1
Sep 10

Technology + Fitness = <3 :: 3 Apps That Will Keep Even The Laziest Geek In Shape

If you are reading this post you are most likely a geek.  It’s true, otherwise if you were a reader of my blog and not a geek, you would be very confused ;) .

Well, being a fellow geek, I am prone to the same sort of problems as you when it comes to fitness.  As geeks we sit in our chairs and more often than not end up looking like this. (sad face)

Ok ok, that photo is a little cliché, but you get my point.  This prolonged sitting along with a lazy (Mountain Dew + Cheetos ) diet leads to this stereotypic geek look.

The Solution

Dun duh dun duh (those were trumpet sounds in case you didn’t know).  Well, we all love technology (duh), so why not combine it with some basic fitness and fight the stereotype.  With sweet gadgets (like the iPhone :) ), we now have some incredible tools that almost make a game out of exercise.

Here are 3 iPhone apps that I use on a daily basis to keep me in peak, geek, 1337 shape.

#1 100 Pushups

I stumbled upon this gem of an app when I started seeing my buddy @oodelali ‘s Twitter feed displaying the following.

160 Pushups! Gangster right?  Intrigued, I asked him about the app.  After a brief synopsis, I was sold.  Here is the rundown of this app (per its app store description).

“If you’re serious about increasing your strength, follow this six week training program and you’ll soon be on your way to completing 100 consecutive push ups!”

Basically, this app utilizes interval training where you exercise 3 times per week for about 10 minutes.  After 6 weeks of this, the app claims you will be able to do 100 consecutive pushups!  Here is a screenshot so you can see what I’m talking about.

So far, I’m on week 4 and am doing a total of 94 pushups (not consecutive yet).

Don’t have an iPhone (sad face), you can still benefit from this app by using their web interface at http://hundredpushups.com/.

The developer of this app has a whole suit of these including 200 Sit-ups, 200 Squats, and Twenty Chin Ups.

#2 Run Keeper Pro

Run Keeper Pro is a stellar app that has both paid and free versions.  It uses the GPS to map our your run and gives you feedback on elevation, pace, distance, and location.  I use this app every single day when I go for runs.

One killer feature of this app is its ability to sync with the web at RunKeeper.com.  Here you are able to track more statistics about your runs, create paths, and get more social.

The interface is both beautiful and intuitive. (Aesthetics are super important to me. You could have the most functional app in the world and I won’t use it if it looks like feces).

When I first started running, I could barely make it to the end of my street, and with this app, I am now running over 10 miles per week!

#3 iFitness

So, this app is for the geek that might actually go to they gym (you mean like…leave…the house).  Or if you are really a hobbit, have a home gym.  iFiness allows you to track all aspects of a workout.  It will track what exercises you do, on what day, with how many reps for how long.

With these killer features, it’s easy to create a fully customized workout and track it the way you want.

“But Brandon, I have never been to the gym and don’t know how to use the weights/machines because I’m level 75 in WOW.” Well, iFitiness has got you covered! For every workout they have in the system, they provide full graphics or videos on how to perform each one.  So if you are unsure about how to do anything, just take a quick peak at your phone, jump on the machine, get jacked, and the ladies (or dudes if you are a lady reading this) will be flocking from all over.

Another great feature of this app is that it has built in workout plans to suite your lifestyle.  So weather or not you want to build muscle or you just want to lose that gut you have been working on, they have a plan for you.  Whoa, I am starting to sound like a P90X commercial, time to pump the breaks.

Take Away

To wrap up, I feel that staying healthy and fit is very important. You have to make it a part of your lifestyle and these few tools are a great way to get a jump on it.  Feel free to post comments, questions, or grammar corrections (expected bc we are all the grammar police) in the comments.

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Wordpress / iPhone — No comments
30
Aug 10

WordPress For iPhone/iPad NSXMLParserErrorDomain Error 64 Resolved

If you have a WordPress blog and an iPhone/iPad, then you most likely have the WordPress for iOS app.  If you don’t, you should.

Over the past couple of days, I have been receiving the following error when trying to add my blog to the iPhone app.

After scouring the internet, I found that this could be the result of a few issues.

  • Special characters in a post body that are not supported by NSXMLParser
  • Special characters in a comment
  • Invalid post or comment RSS
  • An error in a theme/plugin file

For me, this turned out to be an issue with the comments RSS feed.  I loaded it up in the browser and long behold, even the browser threw an error.  But what could be causing this?  Turns out, I had left a space in a plugin that I created.  This caused a space to be output at the beginning of the comments XML, causing it to error. Notice the space between ?> and <?php below.  (Face Palm)

After removing the space from this plugin, I loaded up WordPress for iPhone and it added my blog without a problem.

So, the take away from this is don’t output spaces when you create a plugin.

I hope this post has proven useful for you, I can’t imagine that I’m the only person with this issue ;)

Wordpress — No comments
27
Aug 10

Feedburner Anywhere Plugin Updated

I have updated my WordPress plugin Feedburner Anywhere. In case you are unfamiliar with it, it’s a plugin that allows you to output your Feedburner subscriber count anywhere on your blog.

The Problem: Since Google took over Feedburner, I feel that it has been quite unreliable. A few times a week, Feedburner would return 0 for your subscriber count. This was an issue with the plugin. If the return value was 0 when the plugin pulled and cached the feedburner data, you would look like you had no subscribers.

The Fix: I am now caching the values returned from Feedburner. If for any reason Feedburner returns a 0 subscriber count, the last known value (greater than 0) is used instead.

Download the updated plugin here

If you have any other suggestions for the plugin, please let me know.

Fitness / Nonsense — 1 comment
21
Aug 10

Simple Office Fitness: Replace Your Office Chair With An Exercise Ball

When I was in Portland this past month, I saw that many people in my work’s office were sitting on large exercise balls instead of office chairs.  Curious, I researched the benefits and decided to purchase one for my home office.  The benefits include:

  • Improved posture – sitting on the ball forces you to sit up straight of you won’t be very comfortable
  • Constant movement – Sitting for long periods of time can be bad for you, even when you exercise.  Check out this recent study that was discussed on the New York Times.  When you use an exercise ball for a chair, you are constantly repositioning yourself and are combatting this issue.
  • Getting Jacked! – having a ball for a chair has encouraged me to exercise during my down time.  Code is compiling…bang out some crunches.  I will now do ~ 300 crunches per day while waiting for various tasks to complete.
  • They are cheap – Most exercise balls range from $15-$25.  Check out Amazon for some deals.  I recently purchased one at Target on sale for $9.
  • It’s fun – Need a break? Just bounce a bit on the ball ;)

While I’m not saying to completely replace your office chair with an exercise ball (you will end up switching back an fourth a bit), it is a great way to stay in shape and enforce good posture while at work.

Nerdyness / Twitter — 9 comments
6
Jul 10

Test Version of TweetPress 3.0

So WordPress 3.0 has broken Tweetpress for many people.  If you are daring, willing to help, and experiencing issues with Tweetpress, please download the 3.0 test build of Tweetpress and install it on your WordPress blog.

Here are your next steps after installation:

  1. Make sure you add your Twitter username and Password to the Tweetpress settings in your wp-admin and save it
  2. Attempt to post a photo to Twitter using Twitter for iPhone
  3. If it works, you win, let me know, if not do this:
    1. go back to the tweetpress admin in wp-admin
    2. click the log link at the very bottom
    3. copy the text and email it to brandontreb [at] gmail [dot] com with the subject “Tweetpress Log”

This will really help me troubleshoot the issues that everyone has been having.

Thanks!

Download Tweetpress Test Build 3.0

Wordpress — 2 comments
8
Jun 10

Feedburner Anywhere Plugin Released

Image representing FeedBurner as depicted in C...

Image via CrunchBase

I have just released another WordPress plugin called Feedburner Anywhere.

What it does is allow you to display your RSS subscriber count anywhere on your blog.

You have the choice of using the built-in widget, embedding it in your posts/pages, or a combination of both.

Check out my sidebar for an example of usage.

Download Feedburner Anywhere at WordPress.org

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Code / Nerdyness / Programming — 1 comment
15
Apr 10

HECK YES C Macro, For When Something Is REALLY True

Quite possibly the most useful macro you will ever use.

#define HECK_YES true && true
 
// Usage
if(self.sleepy)
{
   self.needsCoffee = HECK_YES;
}

Now if only I could replace semi colons with exclamation points…

Nonsense — 3 comments
6
Apr 10

Dynamically Load WordPress Post Images Like Mashable.com

What?

Have you ever noticed that the content on Mashable.com loads Incredibly fast?  Also, have you noticed that as you scroll the images seem to ‘fade’ in?  Well, this isn’t due to some crazy h4x0r code written specifically by Mashable Engineers.  It’s a simple JQuery plugin that loads the images ‘Lazily’.

The Jquery plugin can be found here and a nice tutorial for implementing it can be found here.

If you don’t feel like hacking it yourself, read on and I will point you in the direction of a great WordPress plugin that handles this automagically.

Where?

Luckily the hard work has been done for you and you can download a WordPress plugin that will automatically add this functionality to your WordPress blog.

You can download the plugin from WordPress.org

This plugin will work for EVERY image on your blog.  Even the Gravatar icons of the commenters.

Thats It?

Yep, try it out.  Just scroll down on my homepage and watch as the images magically fade in.

Happy Wp-ing!

Code / Wordpress — 2 comments
17
Mar 10

WordPress Coding: Programmatically Add Post Tags (and other meta info)


I was recently working on a script that imports from a custom blogging platform into WordPress and had some need to programmatically add post keywords.

The script to do this is actually quite simple and can be used to update any post attribute.

Here is the code:

// Create the post array
$post = array(
	'ID' => 5,
	'tags_input' => 'foo,bar,baz');		
 
// Update the post
wp_update_post($post);

This will assign the keywords “foo”, “bar”, and “baz” to the post with ID 5. This task seems trivial, however it’s very powerful when you think about automation. For example, you could write a script to scrape a google search for your target keyword and find related keywords for each of your posts automatically. Hrm… plugin idea?

Give it a shot. More info on available parameters can be found on WordPress’ site here

Here are some of the other fields that you are able to update this way:

defaults = array(
'post_status' => 'draft', 
'post_type' => 'post',
'post_author' => $user_ID,
'ping_status' => get_option('default_ping_status'), 
'post_parent' => 0,
'menu_order' => 0,
'to_ping' =>  '',
'pinged' => '',
'post_password' => '',
'guid' => '',
'post_content_filtered' => '',
'post_excerpt' => '',
'import_id' => 0);

Happy WPCoding!

Code — 2 comments
12
Mar 10

WordPress Programming Tip: Enable Database Error Reporting For Custom Queries

So this one should seem pretty obvious, but it wasn’t apparent to me at first.  It was only after digging through the wp-db.php file that I discovered how to enable error reporting.

The Problem

As you may have discovered, the wp_query() function isn’t a “one size fit’s all” solution.  Often times, you may need to query the WordPress database using a custom MySQL query.  Especially  if you are using WordPress for anything other than a blog (ie freshapps.com).

When writing custom queries, it can often be frustrating if you make a mistake in the SQL syntax as WordPress will simply display no results.  For example:

$results = $wpdb->get_results("SELECT * FROM $wpdb->posts 
   WHERE post_title = 'foo bar baz");
print_r($results);
 
// Outputs Array ( )

Since we have made an error in our SQL statement (I didn’t add the second single quote), WordPress will suppress it and simply return an empty array. This is not very helpful for debugging.

The Solution

The solution is actually quite simple. The global $wpdb object has a property called show_errors. Setting this property to true will cause WordPress to output the SQL errors to the screen for a given query.

Here it is with our example above

// Enables Wordpress's DB Error reporting
$wpdb->show_errors = true;
 
$results = $wpdb->get_results("SELECT * FROM $wpdb->posts 
   WHERE post_title = 'foo bar baz");
print_r($results);
 
// Outputs 
// WordPress database error: [You have an error in your 
// SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your 
// MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near 
// ''foo bar baz' at line 1]
// SELECT * FROM wp_posts WHERE post_title = 'foo bar baz

Now we know what went wrong with our query rather than just receiving empty results.

Let me know if you have any questions or comments.

Happy WPCoding!

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