Still, I’d take today’s development environment any day.

I did a little reminiscing and came up with a few major phases in my years creating WordPress themes for customers.

Thematic

In the beginning I remember using the Thematic theme framework as the visual foundation for a few projects. It was my introduction to parent/child themes, hooks, filters, and other key elements of WordPress themes.

My development environment was as primitive as you can possibly imagine. I worked live on the web server, either modifying the files right in vim, or by editing them in my FTP client’s text editor.

Looking back, I’m happy this phase of my development career is way behind me. Yikes.

Genesis

Later, I began using the Genesis framework for a number of sites. It had a lot of nice features built in that could be used right from the admin interface and required minimal PHP coding to make customizations.

But eventually, I started feeling like I was working around Genesis instead of being more productive with it. Saving customized HTML markup and CSS styles in the Genesis settings didn’t feel right to me, nor did entrusting a theme with many features that would arguably be better if broken out into separate plugins¹.

During this phase, I switched to using Sublime Text and the Sublime FTP plugin to automatically send my changes up to the web server for previewing. This was definitely better than working right on the server, but made for a slow loop of modify → save → upload → refresh → view → repeat.

Foundation and Bootstrap

Next, I experimented with creating themes using the Bootstrap and Foundation front-end frameworks, which both offer many prepackaged CSS and HTML components. But, they both eventually began to feel too “heavy” for my projects, with lots of default CSS styles going unused and grid systems that get unwieldy.

I finally started using a local development server for these projects, going with a WAMP² variant that let me install and run WordPress on my Windows 8 laptop.

The biggest change from this period was the addition of Sass³ to my workflow. I’m now far more productive and organized in how I create CSS for my projects thanks to the features of this preprocessor.

Underscores + Bourbon/Bitters/Neat

Which brings me to my current setup for creating WordPress themes.

• Sublime Text 3: I’ve been using beta versions of Sublime Text 3 for almost a year, and it has been super stable for me. I don’t know what I’d do without Sublime and its numerous keyboard shortcuts that are now burned into my muscle memory.
• Underscores theme: A starter theme (not a theme framework) by some of the amazing folks at Automattic, underscores provides a theme structure that is up-to-date with WordPress features and standards. It provides almost no styles, but you can generate a version that comes with a bunch of empty Sass files for you to start editing.
• Bourbon: Bourbon is a bunch of Sass tools (called “mixins”) that you can reuse to write less code.
• Neat: Built on top of Bourbon, Neat lets you create simple CSS grids without all of the cruft you find in Bootstrap and Foundation. Once I got used to the different way it worked, this was a game changer for me.
• Bitters: A basic set of project defaults for typography, lists, tables, form elements, and more.
• Autoprefixer: Write CSS/SCSS without worrying about any vendor prefixes and Autoprefixer will automagically add (or remove) necessary ones based on current browser popularity and feature support.
• Prepros: This app handles all of my CSS pre and post processing without me having to mess around with Grunt or Gulp.
• Vagrant: Another tool that feels like magic sometimes, Vagrant lets me quickly create new virtual machines for projects on my laptop that come configured from a template with everything I need to get started. The project files in the Linux VM are accessible by all of my tools in Windows via a shared folder, so I can do all of my development there while running WordPress in an environment similar to its production setup.

The setup is more complex, yes, but I think the end product is better as a result. I can now easily design my themes mobile first, and they’re now faster and easier to understand as well.

I’m looking forward to seeing what changes the next five years bring!

The post Evolution of my WordPress theme development workflow appeared first on berbs.us.

For background, I first used Instacast on my iPhone then switched to Downcast at the end of 2012. I’ve been overwhelmingly satisfied with it since then.

Let me run through some of Overcast’s features, then dig into the changes I’d like to see that would make this my perfect podcast app.

What I Like

Overcast has a lot of features for a 1.0 release, especially when you compare it to other podcast clients that have been in development for years. Marco loves podcasts, and you can tell by the nice touches he has put into his app.

The user interface

The Overcast interface has some nice touches. The Now Playing screen shows a live graphic equalizer over the show artwork.

Scrolling down on the artwork will shrink it and show you the show notes screen, which is easy to read and allows you to star the episode for use in recommendations.

Smart Speed & Voice Boost

I’ve ended up listening to most of my podcasts faster than normal (1x) speed. Most are set to playback at 1.5x in Downcast, while some that I listen to for education/content more than entertainment are set to 2x speed¹. Overcast offers nine different playback speed options, ranging from slower than 1x (about 0.8x) to faster than 2x (2.3x-ish).

Overcast’s Smart Speed feature can work by itself or in addition to faster playback speed settings. It works by intelligently shortening the silences in conversations. The time savings depends on the episode, but you might cut the playing time by around 10% even when listening at normal 1x speed.

Voice Boost is a special EQ setting that makes conversations louder. This setting can be changed per podcast, and is helpful for shows that aren’t produced and edited at a “professional” level.

A “Cloud” back-end

Upon opening it for the first time, Overcast asks you to create an account. This allows you to use the server-based features Marco has built for the app. The biggest of those features is that the servers do all of the checking for new episodes, and sends push notifications to the Overcast app when updates are available. This isn’t unique in itself², but it’s new to me.

The server component also acts as a backup and sync service. So if/when I get a new phone, everything should appear exactly as it was on my old phone as soon as I download Overcast and sign into my account.

Recommendations

If you navigate to the Add Podcast screen, you’re presented with a few different options to find new shows. There’s a search box if you know what you’re looking for, and a listing of categories that each currently each suggest between 5 and 10 different podcasts. I’m not sure if those are hand picked, or if they’re based on popularity, though.

Another option on that screen is to sign into your Twitter account and receive recommendations from people you follow there. It splits the recommendations into episodes (you can give them stars to recommend them) and podcasts.

Improvements I’d like to see

I have no doubt Marco already has a list of fixes and improvements he’s looking to add to 1.x releases of Overcast. Here’s the list of things I’d like to see, as someone who listens to dozens of shows.

Unplayed episodes that are also not downloaded

This is the one feature I need to have before I can make Overcast my one and only podcast app. In version 1.0, if an episode is listed as unplayed, it also means it’s downloaded. That’s probably OK for most people, and it’s also OK for most of my podcasts where I listen to the latest episode as it arrives.

The problem comes from podcasts where I have many unplayed episodes. According to my Downcast statistics, it counts 643 episodes. Of those, I have 79 downloaded, which are using 2.6 GB of space.

Downcast offers the ability to stream episodes instead of downloading them. I rarely stream, but I do have a number of podcasts set to mark new episodes for streaming instead of download. This adds them to my unplayed list without having to download it (and use up storage on my phone). I can later download the episode when I’m ready to listen to it.

Thankfully, it looks like this is going to be addressed sometime in the near future:

Quick FAQ: – Streaming coming soon – No video or password feeds – Twitter auth fails if your password changed since adding to iOS Settings

— Overcast (@OvercastFM) July 16, 2014

I’m hoping this will bring Overcast up to parity with Downcast in this regard. In the mean time, I’ll have to keep using Downcasts to manage podcasts with a old episodes.

Download oldest unplayed episodes

I have several podcasts I’m listening to for educational/professional development content. Some of these have dozens of old episodes that go back years. I’d like to listen to them all, and I’d like to do it in the order they were released.

Ideally, what I’d like to do is create a playlist that contains the oldest unplayed episodes of a selected list of podcasts. Then, when I listen to an episode, it’s marked as played, and the next oldest episode is automatically downloaded for that show. That way, the playlist always contains the oldest unplayed episode for those shows I’ve selected. Or, this could be done at as a podcast setting instead of a playlist one.

I haven’t been able to find a podcast app that offers that as a playlist feature or as a per-show setting. The best example of a similar implementation I can think of is how iTunes handles syncing TV shows. There are a number of sync options, including the ability to sync the 1, 3, 5, or 10 oldest unwatched episodes. So, for example, if you just watched LOST S01E03, the next time you sync it’ll make S01E04 available.

Episode discover and recommendations

The current Twitter recommendations are a good start, but there are a few other ways I’d like to see things I might like.

1. I’d like to see a way to surface the episodes people are liking and listening to the most. That could be based on starring in the episode, global play count, or a combination of the two. If there’s something popular that I’m not already listening to, let me know about it.
2. Recommend episodes featuring guest appearances of people I already listen to. Just thinking about this, it seems like a nightmarish, error-prone task, but maybe there’s a way to accomplish it by searching through show note for names, links, and twitter @ names.

Managing one-off podcast episodes.

Overcast already gives you the ability to download single podcast episodes from the directory without having to subscribe to the entire show. This is awesome. I’d like to see some additional features here, and maybe they’ll be possible with the release of iOS 8 this fall.

I currently use HuffDuffer to create a custom podcast feed for single episodes I hear about from Twitter or blogs. Between the iOS app and the Overcast web interface, I there are multiple opportunities to save these episodes for later listening.

1. In iOS 8, it should be possible to tell an app to send a link to an MP3 file to Overcast. Automatically getting the metadata to go along with the file might be a challenge, but that there’s a good chance it’s already captured in the Overcast database.
2. HuffDuffer uses a JavaScript bookmarklet to allow you to add URLs to MP3 files to your private feed. Between the Overcast web interface and Marco’s knowledge of bookmarklets from making InstaPaper, he could make it possible to add episodes from the browser and have them automatically download in the app.

Looking forward to the future of Overcast

Overcast is great for a 1.0 release, and already surpasses its competitors in many ways. I think it has the potential to be the best iPhone podcast app, and I can’t wait to see what Marco has in store for future updates.

The post Overcast feedback from a podcast power user appeared first on berbs.us.

I’m not going to lie — I haven’t been more excited about an Apple keynote in years. It’s as if Apple has spent years quietly laying the groundwork for massive changes, enduring endless criticism from its biggest fans, only to unleash all of the improvements in one, huge event.

You want inter-app communication? They’re called App Extensions (Safari extensions, too).

Widgets? You can put them in the notification bar.

App Store improvements? How about a bunch¹.

Want a better keyboard? We made one called QuickType that predicts what word you’ll want next. Oh, don’t like it? Use Swype. Or any other one you want. We don’t care.

Voice and video messages? Got it.

Use iCloud like Dropbox? Ok.

A centralized place for all your health and fitness data? It’s called HealthKit.

How about an easy way to communicate with home automation devices. That’s called HomeKit.

Oh, we almost forgot. We made a brand new, modern programming language. We named it Swift. John Siracusa can now check this one off his list and campaign full-time for a replacement to HFS+.

Some of these things might seem unimpressive to outsiders, but developers haven’t been this excited in years. This is Apple on top of its game, and all Mac and iOS users are going to be reaping the benefits for years to come.

Thankfully, I was able to find the perfect animated GIF to summarize my feelings on the day:

2. Strength training

Early last year I wrote about how I had started strength training. I have a follow-up post in my drafts, so I’ll provide more details there, when I manage to get around to finishing it.

I’ll just say this for now. I’m having a blast lifting weights. I’m stronger than I’ve ever been, and I’m continuing to make (slow) progress.

Here are my current 5-rep maximums on my big lifts:

• Low-bar Squat: 170lbs
• Overhead Press: 100lbs
• Bench Press: 145lbs
• Deadlift: 245lbs

3. Marketing

Some call it “growth hacking“. I’m not a big fan of the term. But it does capture something important.

Growth hacking is measurement and leverage. Buzzword fatigue aside, I think it is an even bigger deal than commonly thought.

— Patrick McKenzie (@patio11) October 16, 2012

It’s the set of skills involved that make this type of marketing so fascinating to me:

• Content marketing
• Email marketing
• Search engine optimization and marketing
• Conversion optimization
• A/B testing
• Web Analytics

It’s an interesting combination of creativity and science that’s occupied part of my brain since I investigated the Taguchi methods for the purpose of multivariable website testing while working on my masters thesis a decade ago. I don’t expect it to go away anytime soon.

4. Web development

There are so many new and exciting things happening in web design and development that it hurts my head thinking about it.

The combination of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript running in the web browser has evolved into an ecosystem of thousands of tools (almost all open source) that allow us to create websites and web apps unimaginable even a few years ago.

On the server-side, open source application frameworks like Ruby on Rails, Node.js, Django, Laravel, .NET MVC, and many others, offer developers great foundations to build on. A lot of infrastructure is effectively “free”, allowing developers to build software faster while focusing on solving problems for customers.

Then, when you’re ready to take your thing live, you can deploy it on a nice server for as little as $5 per month. It’s crazy how inexpensive good servers and fast bandwidth are today.

It’s an amazing time to be building stuff for the Web.

5. Podcasts

I knew I had been listening to podcasts for a long time, so I did a search on my blog archive and found a post I wrote about them back in December 2004. A lot has changed since then, and podcasting has since matured and expanded well beyond its geeky origins².

Today, podcasts are, by far, my top source for news, education, and entertainment. They’re always with me in Downcast on my iPhone³ and I can listen to them anytime — while working, driving in the car, doing dishes, mowing the lawn, or helping the 2 year old fall asleep.

Right now I’m subscribed to over 50 different podcasts, which is crazy when I think about it. Many sit dormant for months or more and occasionally offer me a new episode, while others deliver their weekly episodes at the same day and time without exception. It means I’ve always got something to listen to, whenever or wherever I am.

The post Five things I’m excited about right now appeared first on berbs.us.

Mint turned out to be an interesting case. Its homepage promises that “Mint does all the work of organizing and categorizing your spending for you.” Which is true, really. Log in, and it automatically fetches the latest transactions to give you up-to-date balances for all of your accounts.

So for over five years, I dutifully logged in every day, checked my balances, and split and corrected any transactions that required it. But the question it took me too long to ask myself was: Does using Mint change the way Casey and I spend our money?

As it turns out, the answer is no. Mint did so much of the work it meant I didn’t have to pay much attention to our numbers. It gave the feeling I was managing our money when that wasn’t necessarily the case¹. The biggest thing though, is that Mint feels far too reactive with our money when what I want to be is proactive. This article in the New York Times nails the issue:

By automating the tracking process, I miss the opportunity for reflection and awareness. If someone (or something) else enters all my expenses, I miss the chance to put those purchases in context and assess if my budget is realistic or if I need to make some adjustments. Plus, I’m missing the chance to question my decision to spend the money in the first place.
…
Pulling in all our purchases automatically sounds an awful lot like typing notes verbatim. The result is a technically correct reflection of how our spending compares with our budget, but we miss the chance to process what the numbers mean. The act of looking at each receipt and adding those numbers ourselves mimics the act of hearing something and then putting it in our own words. We know where the money went, and, hopefully, we know why.

Baby steps toward a real budget

A couple of years ago, after a month of an unusually large number of periodic expenses, I created a new Google spreadsheet. I wanted to get a better handle on our irregular expenses, so I listed all of the things we pay for that weren’t on a monthly schedule, added them up, and divided by 12 to get the amount we should be saving each month². Then I started depositing that money into a savings account, transferring it back to checking when needed³. Accounting for these periodic expenses went a long way toward evening out our monthly outflows.

Not long after, I created another spreadsheet I called “Safe to spend”. Here I kept a current balance of what was available to spend from our checking account minus all expected expenses for the rest of the month. This, too, helped me keep a realistic view of our day-to-day finances.

You Need a Budget (YNAB)

Fast forward to a couple of weeks ago, when I came across You Need a Budget while reading a bootstrapping start-up blog. I visited their website, read about their method, and realized I was already doing a lot of it with my own system. The big difference, though, is that YNAB is a true zero-based budget. Every dollar gets a job.

So why bother switching to YNAB? The software is amazing, and it handles all of the situations I had encountered, plus many more. At its core it uses the same envelope system of money management as Mvelopes, but its execution is much better. YNAB emphasizes flexibility in your budget, making it easy to reassign money to a category you’ve overspent in.

Add its companion iPhone app to enter transactions away from the computer and the fact it’s a one time purchase instead of a monthly expense, and I quickly upgraded my trial to the paid version.

If you already have a good way of managing your personal finances — awesome. But if you’re still looking for a good solution that works for you, it’s worth taking a look at You Need a Budget. There’s a ton of free educational resources on the site, and you can get a free 34-day trial of the software. That’s plenty of time to see if it’s a good fit for you. And if/when you decide to buy, you can get $6 off YNAB by purchasing through that link.

The post You Need a Budget appeared first on berbs.us.

The Roku 3

Casey and I did a complete overhaul of our family room entertainment system as our Christmas gift to ourselves a few months ago, replacing our old (and heavy) Panasonic CRT TV with a Vizio LED. While I had everything taken apart and unplugged, I took the opportunity to swap out our three year old Roku XDS for the newer and more powerful Roku 3.

To our kids, the new user interface of the Roku 3 is the new TV. Apps are easier to navigate, the larger photos and graphics are nicer to look at, and things just work faster and smoother than the lower powered XDS (which was doomed to run an older version of the Roku software)¹.

But the most significant change for us was when we introduced Plex to our setup. This great channel works with a media server application running on our Mac Mini, where it catalogs the movies and tv shows we have stored there and allow us to stream them to the Roku. After resolving some issues initially setting up the media server, it’s been working largely problem free².

The Amazon Fire TV

I say all of that to get to this point – The Amazon Fire TV looks great. It has a lot more computing power than our Roku 3 (no doubt necessary to run what are essentially Android apps) and offers a somewhat gimmicky voice search feature³, but it’s not compelling enough of an upgrade right now to make me want to ditch the Roku.

If you look at Amazon’s own comparison chart, The Fire TV and Roku 3 are near parity on features. The Fire TV offers Android games, while the Roku 3 has channels for more popular services (notably, HBO Go and Spotify). Otherwise, they’re nearly identical.

Sidenote: Roku may boast of “over 1000 more channels than Amazon Fire TV, Apple TV or Chromecast” on its homepage, but practically speaking, most of them are garbage⁴. I can’t think of any we’d miss if we switched to the Fire TV⁵.

I will say that both the Amazon Instant Video and Plex channels look much better for the Fire TV. Their interfaces look very modern and image-based compared to the Roku versions which are…functional.

Where’s Apple?

Maybe you noticed that the Apple TV was absent from my discussion above. In its current form, the Apple TV is an also-ran. It’s been over two years since Apple released a major update for this self proclaimed “hobby” product, and it shows. The hardware is outdated and its lacking in content and features.

The ability to stream content from a Mac to the TV is the only Apple TV feature that made me consider buying one. But this is a problem now solved by Plex, and apparently well enough that people like Merlin Mann and Dan Benjamin, who already have Apple TVs, prefer using Plex on a Roku 3.

As I’m finishing this post, I started listening to this week’s episode of the Accidental Tech Podcast, and as usual, John Siracusa nails the issue. Quoting him starting at minute 27:

I think the whole reason this box [the Fire TV] and the Roku exist – it’s Apple’s fault for not making Apple TV better fast enough…[but] for these hobby products, Apple TV has stagnated like crazy. It’s ancient hardware, and the software features – it’s worst then iOS 1.0…There’s nothing that Amazon and Roku have done that Apple couldn’t have done years ago. They just didn’t.

Maybe (hopefully) this will change in the near future, and we’ll see the Apple video device that makes Apple TV a first class competitor in the “living room TV puck” product category. Until then, we have two great options in Roku and Fire TV.

The post Amazon Fire TV and the state of streaming video players appeared first on berbs.us.

Unlike current activity trackers like the Fitbit and the Nike Fuelband, which primarily act as passive pedometers, the Moov uses 9-axis sensors (accelerometer, gyroscope, and magnetometer) to track the movement of your arms and/or legs, allowing it to pass you audio instructions on your phone to improve your form and count reps.

I’ve skipped the current trackers like the Fitbit for one big reason – they are really just step trackers. This isn’t a bad thing if you want to motivate yourself to walk more, but it doesn’t do anything for other types of activities. My iPhone 5s already does this courtesy of its M7 motion chip, too, so there’s not much added value.

The real-time nature of the Moov could prove to be useful, though. And it’s shipping with support for running, cycling, swimming, cardio boxing, and bodyweight training¹, so it should immediately be more helpful than current wearables.

The makers are using preorders to fund the first batch of devices, and are offering a very good half-price deal for a limited time. If this sounds interesting to you, too, grab one before the price goes up.

The post The Moov Fitness Tracker appeared first on berbs.us.

Kael — 8 years old

Asa — 6 years old

Jonas — 3 years old

Kellen — 1.5 years old

And thanks to our friend Erin at Soulshine Photography for taking these amazing photos for us.

The post Happy Holidays from the Berberichs (2013) appeared first on berbs.us.

Casey's Invitation

A few months ago, Casey mentioned that she wanted to do an elimination diet for a month, and asked if I'd like to do it with her. We had found out through testing earlier in the year that she has Celiac disease, and because of some symptoms she was having, she though that small amounts of gluten may have started creeping back into her diet. This elimination diet would be an opportunity to “reset” her diet from a clean slate.

I told her I'd do it. Trying to do a restrictive diet on your own can be a huge challenge. Not only is the emotional support essential, the day-to-day logistics are a lot easier with more than one person participating. Trying to do it alone in a house of six would be close to impossible.

So with August approaching, Casey announced what her monthlong reset would look like: The Whole30 Challenge.

What is the Whole30?

The Whole30 is a super restrictive 30 day paleo diet. The idea?

Cut out all the psychologically unhealthy, hormone-unbalancing, gut-disrupting, inflammatory food groups¹ for a full 30 days. Let your body heal and recover from whatever effects those foods may be causing. Push the “reset” button with your metabolism, systemic inflammation, and the downstream effects of the food choices you’ve been making. Learn once and for all how the foods you’ve been eating are actually affecting your day to day life, and your long term health.

That means eating real food:

• meat
• seafood
• eggs
• vegetables
• fruit
• good fats from oils, nuts, and seeds

And not eating or drinking:

• sugar of any kind (real or artificial sweeteners)
• alcohol
• grains (including corn)
• legumes (beans peas, chickpeas, lentils, peanuts, and all forms of soy)
• dairy
• any foods containing carrageenan, MSG, or sulfates
• white potatoes

The authors and creators of the Whole30 repeatedly make the point of the importance of following both the letter and spirit of the program's rules. In other words, instead of recreating junk food with approved ingredients that technically follows the rules, use the 30 days to create a new, better relationship with food by sticking to the spirit of the program.

I've long been dismissive of paleo diets. The idea of
exclusively eating foods just because our prehistoric ancestors did seems like magical thinking to me. But dogma aside, eating a diet based primarily on "real foods" while limiting the empty calories in simple carbohydrates and processed foods not only makes intuitive sense, it's supported by a lot of evidence and science². As a method of weight loss, the paleo diet gets this right, simply because you're eating foods that leave you feeling more satiated per calorie consumed than foods containing carbohydrates.

And let's be honest — a monthlong dietary change is more than doable:

It is not hard. Don’t you dare tell us this is hard. Quitting heroin is hard. Beating cancer is hard. Drinking your coffee black. Is. Not. Hard. You won’t get any coddling, and you won’t get any sympathy for your “struggles”. YOU HAVE NO EXCUSE not to complete the program as written. It’s only thirty days, and it’s for the most important health cause on earth – the only physical body you will ever have in this lifetime.

How it went for me

I'll be honest and say that I was a little grumpy the first day or two of the program. Not because I was going through withdrawal or had huge cravings, but because I had a bad attitude. I already ate pretty well, and I liked the greek yogurt I had everyday for breakfast.

Thankfully, the realization that the whole point of the program is to dramatically change your eating habits "clicked" for me on day two, which empowered me and made the rest of the month go quite smoothly.

We found the biggest thing about doing the Whole30 is that it takes a lot of planning and preparation. Casey does all of the meal planning in our house, so I have no complaints there. I do my share of meal preparation though, and a few times our schedules meant that our planned meal for lunch just didn't get made. This creates a bit of a problem while doing the Whole30, since you can't just make yourself a sandwich or grab some fast food. Pretty much all of that stuff is off limits.

We quickly found a few "go to" foods that we became a part of our routine. Because of this, I have never had so many eggs in my life as I have this month – at least two for breakfast, everyday, plus more for lunch or dinner on several occasions. The same goes for avocados – I've easily eaten more in the last 30 days than in entire life up until August 1st.

Between taco salad, chicken salad, fish taco salad, hamburgers tooped with guacamole, and some very yummy chicken fajitas, we had some great meals for lunch and dinner. We tried a few meals that didn't turn out that well, but Casey was able to consistently find recipes that fit into the Whole30 plan and tasted delicious. So, props to her for that.

I'm pretty sure I had more fruit during the month that the creators of the Whole30 would recommend. Fruit is allowed, but is supposed to be limited because its sugar content could lead to cravings for other sweet foods that are not allowed under the plan. I didn't find this to be the case for me though, and I found what sugar I did get from fruit to be enough to keep me satisfied. Plus, an apple, banana, mango, or fresh peach is better for you than almost any other "snack" food you can buy.

Also, monkey salad makes a great Whole30 desert.

My results

I can't say that I had any dramatic changes to my body because of the Whole30. This didn't surprise me, because I've never had any issues with dairy, gluten, and other food ingredients. I can say that I felt really good though, probably because my blood sugar levels were evened out by cutting sugar and sweeteners out of my diet.

Based on my weigh-in on the first day and today, I lost 6lbs in August. The most impressive thing about that to me is that it was done with zero calorie counting³. That means I ate anything I wanted off the approved foods list during the month, without worrying about my TDEE. No doubt this was helped by the exercise I did every day, but it was nice not having to keep track of every piece of food I put into my mouth.

What I'm taking away from the Whole30

Like I said at the very beginning of this post, I'm glad Casey and I did the Whole30 challenge. I'm sure we'll be doing it again. Until then, I'm hoping to stick with some new eating habits that developed this month.

Gluten: rarely. While Casey has been gluten free since March, I hand't been until this month. So while I have no medical reason to avoid it, food containing it isn't typically all that good for you. So while I might indulge in the occasional Qdoba burrito, I have no plans to eat much bread or pasta.

Sugar: moderately. I'll welcome back the sugar in my daily greek yogurt, but I intend to keep candy and sweets to rare occasions.

Artificial Sweeteners: eliminate. I successfully stopped drinking diet soda for the month of June, and now again during August. There's really no reason I can't continue this indefinitely.

Is the Whole30 for you?

You won't find out unless you try it. It's just a month of your life, and it's not that hard.

Most importantly, taking some time to think about what kind of food you're putting in your body is worth it!

The post The Whole30 Challenge appeared first on berbs.us.

RSS never went mainstream, so Google Reader was always sort of a geeky niche product. But, the people who used it, used it. It was (and is) one of the best way to efficiently scan and consume large amounts of information. If you were the kind of person who still used Reader in the age of Twitter and Facebook, you no doubt depended on it, making the announcement of its closure really sting.

And yet, the end of Google Reader was inevitable. Its user base was tiny in comparison to search and maps, and Google never made an attempt to monetize the product or make use of the massive amount of data it had on users and their subscriptions. Plus, it distracted from the company’s headline social project, Google+.

Life after Google Reader

Google Reader started its life as a web-based feed reader, but over time, its real value became its ability to act as a centralized place that other applications could sync against. Take, for example, the excellent Reeder app for iPhone/iPad. It¹ lets me scan through my feeds quickly wherever I am and allows me to read items or take action on them (“star” it, send it to InstaPaper to read later, save the link to Pinboard for archiving and search). New items and read items are synced across all my linked reader applications and the Google Reader web app, so they’re always consistent.

Despite Google Reader effectively killing off competition in the market, there are other web-based feed readers available, so I think we’ll be fine on that end. In fact, I agree with Marco and think we’re going to enter the golden age of RSS readers:

Now, we’ll be forced to fill the hole that Reader will leave behind, and there’s no immediately obvious alternative. We’re finally likely to see substantial innovation and competition in RSS desktop apps and sync platforms for the first time in almost a decade.

It may suck in the interim before great alternatives mature and become widely supported, but in the long run, trust me: this is excellent news.

What we need going forward, however, is a canonical feed store/sync API to replace what Reader had evolved into. That way, any number of web, mobile, and desktop apps could tie into it and share feed information with each other. That is what made Google Reader so great, and so powerful.

The opportunity for App.net

In episode 13 of Glenn Fleishman’s “The New Disruptors” podcast (now my favorite interview show), Glenn talked to Dalton Caldwell, the creator of App.net (ADN). The big revelation for me was the discussion about what ADN really is. It’s not just the Twitter-like application they’ve built in alpha.app.net. It’s really about the infrastructure and tools they’ve built that allow developers to build other, more innovative applications on top of. As Glenn says, they’re more a Amazon Web Services competitor than a Twitter clone.

ADN already has programming APIs for messaging, file storage, and places. I think a “feed” API would a great addition, and allow for some interesting possibilities with the built-in App.net social features.

In fact, I noticed this morning that I wasn’t the only one with the same insight:

We’ve already made the mistake of entrusting an important piece of infrastructure to a free product. This time around, let’s put it in the hands of someone who’s interests are aligned with customers and developers, and who will charge some money for it. This is the perfect opportunity for ADN, and I hope they take it.

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First, a little history.

Thanks to a few smartphone apps, most recently Weightbot, I’ve been capturing my weight every day for nearly three years. Here’s what that looks like on a trend graph:

A few things worth noting here:

• My weight fluctuated about 5lbs for the last year, between 185 lb and 190 lb.
• I logged my food intake inconsistently throughout the last few years, usually for a few weeks at a time before getting bad about inputting the data.
• In 2010 and the first half of 2011 I was running on a regular basis. I ran a handful of times in January 2012, too.
• I started the 60-day Insanity workout program the last week of September 2011 and ended it the last week of November¹.
• Much of 2012 consisted of inactivity, regular beer drinking, and eating whatever I wanted. I did not exercise on a regular basis.

My Goals

I’m willing to make some big changes in order to get myself into top physical condition. The last time I lost a lot of weight was in 2005, before we had our first baby. I dropped 25-30lbs through brute force — 40+ minutes of cardio every day and lots of salads. Looking back, I can definitely say that I was skinny, but I wasn’t strong.

This time I’m trying sometime different. Because it’s not possible to burn fat and build muscle at the same time, you need to choose. Based on my research, focusing on losing fat first without losing muscle seems to be the best way to go, so that’s my current plan.

This complicates tracking though, because while logging weight is super easy, it doesn’t separate fat loss from muscle loss. BMI, too, is essentially bullshit, and is an unreliable measure of body fat and muscle mass.

The best indicator of progress is body fat percentage, which, it turns out, is also probably the hardest to measure accurately. Based on our Tanita body fat/water scale² and these body fat percentage photos, I’m currently at about 25% body fat. My goal is to get this down to 15% body fat. Based on a simple ideal body weight formula, 15% body fat means a goal weight of 165 lbs.

Phase 1: Diet

As important (and satisfying) as exercise is, the biggest factor by far in losing fat is simply eating less calories than your body burns. Yes, working out will help on the burning calories side of that equation, but when you realize it takes over an hour of running to offset the calories in a typical fast food lunch, it’s just easier not to eat it in the first place.

I’m already eating pretty well on a daily basis, so I don’t need many changes here. I haven’t had a dount for breakfast in over a month, and I’ve done well in avoiding candy and chips for snacks. We rarely eat out, and almost all of our meals are homemade with lots of fresh fruits and vegetables. I’m not following a specific diet plan, but I guess you could call it low-carb. I avoid breads and pastas as much as possible and try my best to stick to whole grains if I do eat them.

I am also back to using MyFitnessPal for calorie tracking. While I’ve developed a good intuition for the “cost” of a food from my previous episodes of tracking, I’ve found it difficult to keep a running total for the day without recording it somewhere. Yes, it can be a pain — especially at dinner time when we make something from scratch that isn’t in the MyFitnessPal database. But, it gets results, so it’s worth doing.

The areas where I need to focus are:

1. Watch my portion sizes. The things I eat are good and healthy, but I need to pay attention to how much I’m consuming. Instead of going for seconds on the main course, have some extra vegetables, etc.
2. Minimize evening snacking. We don’t keep much junk food in the house anymore, so this has gotten better, but I still need to watch what I eat after the kids are in bed. I feel ok indulging in a big bowl of popcorn once a week, but otherwise I need to stick to fruits, veggies, and nuts.

Phase 2: Fitness

In my adult life, fitness for me has always meant cardio. First the elliptical machine, then, after I overcame my longtime mental barrier towards it, running. I never once considered weightlifting. That entire part of the gym was alien to me, and, to be honest, free weights intimidated the hell out of me.

But recently, I read a few things that changed my mind and made me decide to give weight training a serious try. The first was a 2011 article from Men’s Journal titled “Everything You Know About Fitness is a Lie” that really hit home. From the introduction:

Too many of us drift into health clubs with only the vaguest of notions about why we’re actually there — notions like maybe losing a little weight, somehow looking like the young Brad Pitt in Fight Club, or just heeding a doctor’s orders. Vague goals beget vague methods; the unfocused mind is the vulnerable mind, deeply susceptible to bullshit. So we sign our sorry names on the elliptical-machine waiting list — starting with a little “cardio,” like somebody said you’re supposed to — and then spend our allotted 30 minutes in front of a TV mounted a regulation seven to 10 feet away, because lawyers have told gym owners that seven to 10 feet minimizes the likelihood that we’ll crane our necks, lose our balance, and face-plant on the apparatus. After that, if we’ve got any remaining willpower, we lie flat on the floor, contract a few stomach muscles with tragic optimism, and then we “work each body part” before hitting the shower.

That sounds…a little too familiar. What did he discover was the most effective workout? Plain, boring barbell exercises.

Regardless of which aptitude you choose [strength, power, muscle mass, and muscle endurance], you’ll start by focusing on a few basic exercises – the squat, the dead lift, and the bench press. Those old sessions you’ve been doing, of eight or 10 different single-muscle exercises, that’s over. Every serious strength-and-conditioning coach sticks to the basic barbell movements, because our bodies don’t operate as single muscles – they operate as a whole. Even in 2010, picking up heavy things, throwing heavy things up over our heads, and pulling heavy things remain the very best ways to replicate our foundational movement patterns.

This article and the fitness subreddit on Reddit both highly recommend the book Starting Strength: Basic Barbell Training by Mark Rippetoe. It’s considered by many to be the best book ever written on the subject of strength training. If you have zero knowledge of weightlifting like I did, this book is required reading.

In the three weeks since I started strength training, I’ve already made these gains:

• Squat: 65 lbs to 120 lbs
• Bench Press: 95 lbs to 110 lbs
• Press (overhead press): 65 lbs to 75 lbs
• Deadlift: 95 lbs to 170 lbs

I’m planning on taking a brief break from adding weight during every session in order to work on my form. I don’t want to keep making increases, only to hit a plateau or get hurt because of bad form. The great part is that at my gym, I’ve never had to wait to use the deadlift mat or the power rack for squats and presses, so I can spend as much time working on these as I want. There just aren’t that many people doing these boring (but effective) barbell exercises.

If I’m not able to make it to the gym for barbell exercises, I use the You Are Your Own Gym iPhone app to get a good bodyweight workout done at home. Even the beginner workout is tough, but some of the advanced exercises are downright tough. There’s really no excuse I can’t get three good strength workouts in per week.

Progress

I’m happy with and excited by the progress I’ve made in January alone. I’ve already lost five pounds, and I’ve made big improvements in my strength. I’m looking forward to where I’ll be later this year, and will be sure to follow-up!

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