This isn’t rocket science, and this will be a big ‘duh’ for most of you reading this out there, but successful blogging is all about quality original content composition.

So much blogging is posting and rehashing news and information found elsewhere on the web. I’m as guilty as any other blog of mailing in posts simply with a couple of sentences and an external link.

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So I finally got my race team’s new site up and running – Tricyclists. You may notice some real similarities between Keefer Madness and the Trikes’ new site. That’s because they’re both utilizing WordPress and the same base template – Mandigo. I’m sure there are other great templates that would serve the purpose, but I really love the template, its options and flexibility it’s allowed me on both sites.

The two will continue to organically develop apart from each other as I customize both style sheets, images, etc. in both. But regardless, I’m a huge fan of both WordPress and the Mandigo template, and the combination of the two have made both those sites better.

Regardless, I was slack getting the new Trikes site up, but now that it’s up, it seems everyone likes it. Hopefully we can keep it updated withe regular content and keep traffic flowing to it. Check it out if you get the chance.

It was only a matter of time. When the iPhone app store launched just a few short weeks ago, another one of the big blog publishing software had an iPhone app.

You knew it was only a matter of time till the others followed. Now, WordPress, the software Keefer Madness runs on has an iPhone app – which I’m typing this entry on currently.

It’s pretty basic, but is definitely nice for making an occasional post on the road.

The app will also work with wordpress.com hosted blogs.

WordPress iPhone App

This is great – another way to get movies to the TV quicker. We tried doing the unofficial plugin route. We got that working, and while I give them credit for making a free plugin to stream from a Media Center PC to the Xbox 360, it was close to unusable in our network setup.. very laggy to the point that movement on the joystick translated to multiple seconds until there was an-onscreen response at best.

Regardless, this new official support will be great and will keep all of us Netflix/Xbox 360 users from having to shell out another $99 for the Roku Netflix Player.

Can’t wait for this *free* update to show up in the fall.

Netflix & Microsoft Partner to Bring Watch Instantly to The Xbox 360

So this week’s episode of “This Week in Tech” (TWiT), a podcast I’ve never missed an episode of, talked a little about the newly released Firefox 3.  One of the guests also gushed about Flock, which is basically Firefox with a bunch of addons for different social networking sites into it’s sidebar. I’ve found it integrates well with Digg, Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, YouTube.

Plus, I’m writing this Keefer Madness blog post from within Flock. It’s not perfect, but pretty cool to integrate it all in. If you use any of the above listed, it’s a great way to run fewer apps and/or tabs.

I’ll revisit this post after a couple weeks after I’ve used Flock more both at home and at work. I’m running the beta of Flock as it uses the newer Firefox 3 engine, while the Flock stable version is for now on Firefox 2.

This sounds like a no brainer for the good part of the population out there who have three things: a Netflix subscription, an Xbox 360 and a PC running Windows Vista. Luckily, we fall into that category and I’m going to try to get this setup in the next couple days, or possibly this weekend.

We already stream video content from the Mac to the Xbox 360 via Connect360.

Turn Your Xbox 360 into a Streaming Netflix Player

This is just a followup from an old post I made way back when regarding Mac users having their very own optimized versions of Firefox. It looks like that will continue with Firefox 3. There are Intel and G5 versions currently, with a G4 optimized version in the works.

Firefox 3 Optimized Builds for G5 / Intel

Doing a Google search, I’m starting to see more and more references to Keefer Madness that aren’t me or my site. I’ve had this web site for 8 years and have had the domain just as long. 1) Don’t I have copyright on that starting in 2000? 2) Should I go after people and sites for diluting my “brand?”

Any lawyers out there that read Keefer Madness.

Google Search for ‘Keefer Madness’

Oh, and Wayback Machine has proof of me using that site back to March of 2001.

This is refreshing to see. I am always at odds with the designers are work over hand coding all my HTML, CSS and PHP. They’re all about Dreamweaver, but that’s a bad word in my vocabulary. The succinct, clean and cross-browser compatible code I generate by hand is a thing of personal pride and satisfaction to me, and it’s nice to see a big site that admits they don’t take the easy/sloppy way out.

Anyway, it’s just nice to have some support for hand coding out there, and the article’s comments section offers even more.

NYTimes.com Hand-Codes its HTML

So, new WordPress software came out several weeks back – a fairly major overhaul marked 2.5. I decided to wait till they at least released one bug fix for it before installing it here and on another site (2.5.1).

Well, Friday night, I upgraded the other site with no problems. Keefer Madness though bombed this morning with a fairly obscure error. I had the same problem these guys had. I just deleted that one line though and looks like everything is fine. Nothing should have changed on the front end for Keefer Madness, but the new admin panels for WordPress will take a little bit of getting used to. Off to pack the car for the Iron Gate Time Trial.