Paper Killed Rock

Wildcats Hockey

James Fleeting — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 22:00:31 +0000

Hockey? Seriously? I honestly wouldn’t have imagined myself becoming a hockey fan. However, it now looks like we might have a family of fans. I was invited to a game by John several weeks back. I had never really watched hockey but had wanted to attend a local game for the Wildcats for awhile, just never got around to it. Watching a live game is pretty awesome. Plus having somebody there to explain a few of the rules of the game helped a lot.The moment the first game was over I was dead set on getting tickets to the next game. Thats what we did. The following weekend I took my wife and two kids to a Wildcats game. We all enjoyed it. So much so that the next weekend I took Melissa to a Friday night game which was very interesting. Had a few fights between players which was nice. Plus the Wildcats won the game. However, since we can’t get enough of the games, the following night we took the kids to the Saturday game which was just as great. Although a little cold as we had seats against the glass, which is pretty nice even with the cold.

In a 3 week period we managed to go to 4 Wildcat Hockey games and had a great time. Too bad they have away games until the end of the month. We are looking forward to going to the next home game after Thanksgiving.

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A Night Of Spook

James Fleeting — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 22:44:08 +0000

Its the night that only comes once a year (as opposed to every other night?). A night full of pumpkins, ghosts, ghouls, candy and kids. Thats right, a night full of spook. What kind of horror did we face this year? Was there a knife wielding maniac in my neighborhood? Did we come across an audio tape of ‘The Book of The Dead’ and awoke evil spirits that made for one gruesome night? Or worse of all, did my mother-in-law come into town?Whew! My mother-in-law did not come into town so I guess the night wasn’t as spooky as it could have been. We ended up spending a little time in Burk Saturday afternoon with my Grandma and had a pretty lazy day before getting the kids dressed up in their costumes. Chase went as Boba Fett (minus the vett) and Rachael as a cheerleader. This year we wanted to change things up and instead of going to a safe house first and then door to door, we headed straight to the neighborhoods looking for candy. We went around an area by MSU and Kell and within the first hour and a few blocks the kids were getting a full bucket. The area had several houses decorated which was nice and a few with fog machines and strobes for that extra touch.

We then headed over to an area off Southwest Parkway for the next hour. There were cars everywhere and took us driving 2-3 blocks to find a parking spot. There were plenty of houses passing out candy and decorated, the problem was they were pretty spread out. So, the kids were getting tired of walking and carrying a full bucket of candy. At a few minutes before 8pm we stopped trick or treating and headed to McDonalds for dinner. Overall it was a nice Halloween with the kids and they had lots of fun and plenty of candy.

Thrill Rides? Not for me.

Thrill Rides? Not for me.

James Fleeting — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 14:29:57 +0000

This past Friday I learned whether or not roller coasters are for me. To say the least, they are not. I had only been to an amusement park one other time and that was several years ago back in school. We didn’t do much as it started to storm and they closed the rides. However, last week John invited me to go on Friday. I jumped at the chance to go having never really done thrill rides. I ended up riding one roller coaster for the night.

The whole night wasn’t a bust though. We left shortly after work on Friday for the drive to DFW. The park was open from 6pm to 11pm and after eating dinner at 3rd Base Sports Bar across the street from Six Flags, we finally got in the park about 7pm and headed towards the first ride of the night. They ended up selecting The Titan. Just to get it out of the way, I have a height problem as well. Although I was nervous I forced myself to get on the ride. I had been given a free ticket and really didn’t want to waste it or ruin the night for the others. To be honest, the ride itself wasn’t that bad and pretty short. I kinda enjoyed it. Not sure if I enjoyed it enough to go on it again or not. However after we got off it was down hill. I started feeling pretty sick but enough I was going to ride another. Waiting in line for Batman The Ride and I started to sweat a lot. It was like 50F outside and I was just dripping in sweat. Not sure if I was really getting sick or if I was so nervous that I psyched myself out.

Either way, I didn’t ride Batman or any other rides for the night. Instead since it was Six Flags Fright Fest we hit the 4 haunted houses that they had. They were some decent houses. Only one really made you jump a few times but they all had some kick ass artwork on the walls and decorations and awesome costumes. So, despite the fact that I didn’t do the rides, I enjoyed the night. However, I did feel bad for being a downer for the other guys for not be able to do those damn rides. The upside? Now I’m determined to go back and ride Superman.

A Night Of Spook

Work Awesome – New Job

James Fleeting — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 15:34:47 +0000

Middle of last year I had the opportunity to leave the freelance world and work for a development company, DigiMedia.com. I wasn’t actively looking to leave freelance but was approached for the job. This turned out to be great. Took a little while to get into the swing of working in an office and set hours but what I gained from working with a development team was awesome. However, working at DigiMedia in the long run turned out not to be for me and I began thinking about looking for another company or going back to freelance.

Freelance is a little difficult for me right now because my wife is a full-time student at Midwestern State University for nursing, so being on salary is nice instead of waiting for clients to pay up. I ended up finding another great opportunity in a local advertising agency. So, after just over a year of being at DigiMedia, October 1st I started at Crane|West Advertising Agency. This is a great chance to further my web career and have the chance to work on a wide range of projects and clients. This is a big change but a good one. I Joined the Crane|West team at the same time as 2 other guys from DigiMedia. So, still have amazing talent around me.

I’m most excited about working with clients again and the future of the company. The company along with web design and development does TV, print and radio advertising. Its a chance for me to be around a lot more then just web work. This also means I am now working downtown instead of in the Chase Tower (I’ll miss the 8th floor view). I hope to be more active in blogging and videos at the new job as its more of a public company.

The Epic PKR Story – Chapter 2

James Fleeting — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 19:29:36 +0000

The time has come at least. This new chapter of paperkilledrock.com has been about a year in the making. This design has been trashed so many times that I think I’ve got about 3 completed layouts sitting on my mbp. However, I couldn’t wait any longer and needed to get the new design online. Behind the scenes is html5 and plenty of CSS3.

Not The Only Change

Lots of things going on in my life the past few months so I felt like a new design was needed. One that would focus more on the content of the site. Of course right now there is very little. I used to blog and post videos fairly often. Then for about a year I barely updated and did small videos of the kids. So my hope is this change will get me excited and start pumping out some more content. I also recently started working for a new company (a post on this coming next) so this is bringing about some changes and should give me more aspects of my life to post about including a lot more work related stuff.

Lets Do It In Phases

I was in a hurry to get this design launched. There are still several tweaks to be made and several areas to develop out including ‘Designs’, which will serve as my portfolio. I have plans for this area so just gotta get time to get on it. I also have a few IE7/8 issues to fix and I’ll get to them.

Feature Release to WP-TwitterSearch

James Fleeting — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 19:50:59 +0000

This is a long overdue update to WP-TwitterSearch. However, I believe this version is worth it and has lots of new features. I’ve gotten some amazing feedback and emails the past several weeks with lots of suggestions and this release includes several of them. I’m actually wanting to put together a little list of sites using the plugin so if your using it please let me know.

You can see the new version in action on the Jerky.com Jerky Spotlight site. That is actually one of our sites at DigiMedia that I’m working on thats powered by WordPress.

and now the changes…

This release features one of the most requested which is avatar (profile pic) support. This is actually something I should have included in the first release and didn’t. You now have the option to display a persons profile pic with their tweet.

You now have several options when adding the plugin to your theme. You could use a widget before but it had no options. Now with the widget you can set the title, search terms and limit to vary from the main settings. All other options (avatar, date format, etc) are pulled from the main settings. You can also use the new short code to add the search to any post or page passing through search terms, limit, and language. The short code looks like: [wpts terms=twittersearch limit=5 lang=en]. Of course you can still use the template tag as before.

Another requested option was to be able to control the date format. Now you can using php date() params to have whatever format you want. If a date is shown it will now be linked to the tweets permalink as well. Language support was added to let you limit what language it searches for tweets in.

The last new option lets you control whether the twitter username or display name is shown. Before it was always the display name and some didn’t like this. Display name is still the default but now you can change it to username if you want.

what are you waiting for?

v1.5.1 was been pushed to the WP Plugin Repo and is available for download now. For those who already have it installed can do an automatic update from the WordPress Admin. Of course if you find any bugs please let me know here or in the wordpress forums.

#wcdfw09

James Fleeting — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 03:33:15 +0000

Last weekend I attended WordCamp Dallas 2009 with a few guys I work with. After using WordPress for several years I felt it was time to go to my first WordCamp. It ended up being an awesome time. Heard from some great speakers and learned some interesting things. Although this WordCamp seemed to be a little more focused on the blogging/community side of WordPress there was a few good technical speakers. It was also nice to hear about the community aspect as its something I’m not familiar with enough. I fully look forward to next year.

Being at a conference always makes you want to design or code. Its just something about the environment and WordCamp was no different. Out of a need to want to code something came wcdfwFeed. Basically we did a small site that aggregated all the tweets and flickr images with the #wcdfw09 hashtag. Within an hour Blaine Bowers knocked out the design, I bought the domain and along with John Hoover coded the wcdfw09 twitter stream and had it online. Later I was able to add the flickr feed as well. So much more could have been done with the site to be a better aggregator but it was a fun little project that took very little time while at WordCamp. This should be the first of many projects to come from us, if we ever get around to it.

As I’m attempting to attend more conferences this year, I plan to attend the CodeWorks 2009 Conference in Dallas, Texas on September 27.

Dallas WordCamp ‘09

James Fleeting — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 14:05:21 +0000

The Dallas WordCamp is fast approaching (June 27-28) and this year will be my first at any WordCamp. I’ve used WordPress exclusively for several years now and its about time that I get more involved in the community. I have a few plugins in the works along with 2 themes to be released soon and figured its the perfect time to attend WordCamp. Although the schedule hasn’t been finalized they did post a list of confirmed speakers. There are currently over 100 people registered but still plenty of room and time to get yourself registered and for only $30 you have no reason. I’ll be there with a few of the guys here at DigiMedia so it should be a good event.

WP-TwitterSearch v1.2.1 Bug Fix

James Fleeting — Wed, 27 May 2009 23:49:24 +0000

Today I pushed out an update to WP-TwitterSearch that fixed a few bugs that were reported to me by email. The tweet date was not displaying correctly before has now been fixed. I do plan to allow you to format the date however you wish and will be included in the next release. You can also search hashtags now using the #hashtag format. Before this would cause problems. I still plan to implement all of Twitter’s Advanced Search options which include an actual hashtag query. Also fixed was errors with a tweet had quotes.

I’m working on v1.5 right now which includes adding profile pictures, the advanced search options and formating the date. I’m not sure if this release will have support for multiple widgets/template tags or not but its on my list next as its been requested a few times. Feel free to leave a comment with suggestions or if you’ve found a bug.

Drive To Work

James Fleeting — Wed, 13 May 2009 23:02:33 +0000

Drive To Work from James Fleeting on Vimeo.

Dropping my son off at school and heading to work.

Tumblr

James Fleeting — Wed, 13 May 2009 02:14:57 +0000

I used to use Tumblr a lot more a year or so ago mostly as an excuse not to blog as it was easier. However I saw myself using it less and less as I stopped blogging. Now that the new site is launched and I’m back to blogging and working on shooting videos (yes, I really am), I figured Tumblr would once again be useful for something. Mostly I post random findings to my tumblr. Could be photos, links, or just comments. Most are design or programming related. Basically things that are worth sharing beyond delicious. We will see how things go getting back into blogging. After spending all day on twitter I normally don’t have much to say and when I do have stuff to say its work related and I’m limited on what I’m allowed to share via twitter and blog (NDA’s are the worst thing ever).

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WP-TwitterSearch Released

James Fleeting — Tue, 05 May 2009 01:28:41 +0000

Recently I was working on a project at work where I needed to display search results from twitter on a WordPress site. Although there are a ton of great plugins for displaying your own twitter feed there was none that did what I needed for search. So, I started looking around at other rss wordpress plugins but that still didn’t render exactly what I needed. So, I started working on my own plugin just for twitter search. The plugin is available for download now from the WordPress Plugin Repo.

The Now

I released the first version over the weekend and an update shortly after. It currently works as a widget or a template code to allow you to use it anywhere. The options page lets you set what keywords to search twitter for as well as how many tweets are shown. You are also able to specify a username to limit the search to. I’m not sure how handy the username is right now but its there for a future feature (read below). The plugin displays an unordered list of the tweets returned leaving you to style however you wish. This plugin came about from a project that I needed it for so it may not be what your looking for.

The Future

The first feature I would like to add is the ability to tie it into your posts via The Loop. Basically you would add the template tag to your post loop and it would do a search for tweets you have made that include the tags you set for that post automatically. So, for example if you have a blog post about SXSW with the tags ‘austin sxsw’, it would do a twitter search with your username for those two tags and return any tweets you’ve made that match those. Kinda like a ‘tweets related to this post’ feature.

Another item on my to do list is to let you exclude tweets. For example being able to exclude @replies or ReTweets or tweets that were automatically posted (for example via twitterfeed, facebook, etc). I would also like to add the ability to let you include several search feeds in your template (if that would be useful to anybody). You would specify the options in the template tag or in the widget itself instead of an options page in that case.

Problems?

If your having problems with WP-TwitterSearch or would like to suggest a feature then you can either leave a comment here, email me on the contact page or post on the WordPress.org forums as I’m always hanging around there. You can also comment just to let me know how useless this plugin is or in the rare case that its what you were looking for.

But Where Was Scissors?

James Fleeting — Sat, 02 May 2009 15:20:16 +0000

I have finally launched the new domain and my redesign. After about a year and starting over multiple times I have finally put something online. This domain will now be the home to my blog (instead of twofivethreetwo.com). The blog will include personal posts, work posts, and random design/project related ones. This will also be where all my projects and wordpress themes will be hosted. The first of which, my first wordpress plugin, WP-TwitterSearch is now available for download from the projects page and through the WordPress.org Plugin Directory.

This design was one of about six layouts I did and although I like this one enough to put it up, it isn’t complete. I figured if I waited until I thought it was perfect I would never get it launched. Instead this will be a ‘phases’ project. I already have some changes in mind for the home page and designs page.

Not all posts have images attached yet (and I’m only going to go back so far) so don’t mind a few broken images here and there, I’m still uploading them. Things to look forward to? I just released my first wordpress plugin and next up is a wordpress theme. Will actually be using one of the designs I did for here but never used. Perfect chance to finally get one released. Expect more posts and more videos as well.

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SXSWi 2009

James Fleeting — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 21:46:15 +0000

I’ve been making plans to attend this years SXSW for awhile and its just around the corner. This will mark my first year attending and I expect it to be amazing. I’m not fully sure what to expect as my first year but plan to get the most out of it. Tons of great speakers and panels, too many to see all, and lots of chances to do some much needed networking. I’ve got a stack of Moo mini-cards and business cards and am coming prepared.

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Me Right Now [01.28.09]

James Fleeting — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 03:38:22 +0000

Let the blogging and videos resume.

Paper Killed Rock

Wildcats Hockey

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A Night Of Spook

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Thrill Rides? Not for me.

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Work Awesome – New Job

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The Epic PKR Story – Chapter 2

Not The Only Change

Lets Do It In Phases

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Feature Release to WP-TwitterSearch

and now the changes…

what are you waiting for?

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#wcdfw09

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Dallas WordCamp ‘09

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Drive To Work

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Tumblr

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The Now

The Future

Problems?

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But Where Was Scissors?

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SXSWi 2009

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