So like my friend, John I too tried the upgrade to 2.8 and had an incomplete/successful install of WordPress 2.8 today. I should have learned from his hardship with the new version.

All day today, I was unable to get into the admin tool, and all of the plugins sat disabled, giving me a glimpse of how important those plugins are for rounding out the display of the site, but more importantly, filtering out all the comment spam.

Anyway, for about 12 hours today, this site was limping along, but it’s now back to full strength, with its plugins all working fine with 2.8. It took my web host intervening to get me back up and running. He found a solution on a forum, overwriting some files with new versions for 2.8. Anyway, upgrade is working fine.. now.

So Amanda made the suggestion yesterday morning that we create a little blog separate from Keefer Madness’ catch-all. Instead, this one is is all about our little expectant baby. I’m certainly not going to stop blogging here at Keefer Madness, but expect more baby-related posts from both of us over on the new blog now and throughout the pregnancy and into the birth.

Little Baby K Blog

Sorry for no post yesterday, and none of substance today. I don’t get sick often, but this attack of the flu is/was a doozey. I can’t remember feeling this crappy years! Anyway hopefully back to the grind and regular posting tomorrow.

So I’m out of town this weekend, relaxing. But what that means is part two of my iPhone apps writeup is going to be delayed for all the reasons/limitations I wrote about regarding the WordPress app – I have a draft on the site, but this app can only see local drafts. I also have no desire to do that much writing on the iPhone keyboard. More posts soon.

This is a cool little way to visualize a given page, concept, etc. The image to the left is the Keefer Madness home page as of this morning.

I can see wasting some time and making some pretty neat visualizations for your web site, for making wallpapers, etc. I also decided to make one up with the text of my resume for a little visual flair on that page.

Go to wordle.net to make your own text visualizations.

Edit: I’ve been addicted to this all day. Check out a few more I’ve added to their gallery.

While I’ve been a bit slack on writing reviews, I’m trying to get back into the swing of things with the Keefer Madness reviews. I haven’t gotten any games lately to do reviews, and I guess I should go back and write reviews of the games I already own. I’m putting that on my list of things to do. But, with my time and interest in cycling skyrocketing over the lat 3 years or so, I’ve created a new category of reviews on Keefer Madness – cycling products.

Now I just need some products to review. I put out a Twitter message in hopes I would get some review products. Nothing so far. So consider this a plea from those of you with cycling product hookups. If you’ve got connections, let me know. I’d love to review all kinds of cycling products – nutrition, components, bikes (yeah I wish..)

So all you loyal Keefer Madness readers, and all of those of you who are stumbling upon Keefer Madness, from my Google Analytics, I’ve got a pretty good idea of what content people are coming to the site for, but wanted to also get some personal input. If you have a couple minutes, please leave a comment on what information you’re enjoying seeing on here.

Google Analytics shows a lot of you are coming here for my local cycling criterium writeups, etc. but the people that actually reading, subscribing to my RSS, etc., what keeps you coming back and reading?

Since having the current incarnation of Keefer Madness in all its Word Press-templated glory, I just hit my fiftieth comment across the site. While, that’s a small number, it’s still a nice little milestone worth noting IMHO. Daily page views continues to rise, and while it’s not a huge number, it’s still larger than some of the commercial sites I’ve developed at work or in my freelance projects of days past.

As I’ve gotten more into cycling and more posts at the site go that way on a daily and weekly basis, the site is finding its niche and voice on that subject matter – as I muddle my way through the local and regional ranks of Cat5 criterium and road racing. Keefer Madness will always be a personal blog and have its share of randomness and bits totally unrelated to any other theme in past or future posts, but it’s cool my race reports, etc. are starting to show up for those events I’ve competed in.

So again, thanks to everyone who takes the time to read, or stumbles upon my site. Thanks for clicking the ads on the site to help support it as well. It’s all much appreciated.