Chrispian H. Burks

I follow a ton of local stuff on Twitter, Facebook and blogs. I’m always looking for other local people interested in pretty much anything to do with technology. Especially programming, development, social media and blogging. That’s where I live, so to speak. So tonight I saw a tweet that Huntsville has a Beer and Blog. I missed the event tonight but I’m still thrilled to find that it exists and plan on checking it out the next meeting, which is next Tuesday.

On the BNB site it looks like they are using the Ignite style of presentations, which I think will be excellent. Something I think would be a pretty cool thing to try at the local web developers meetup which has had a very strong attendence since Brian and the gang at Dealnews took over the meetup.

Anyone know of any other meetups of the more geeky/technical kind in the Huntsville area?

This past weekend I made my yearly pilgrimage to Las Vegas to join thousands of other social souls in our crazy business to talk about all manner of geekery and I loved every second of it. Even the part where I was worried the room was going to start spinning. Thankfully, it just sort of wobbled a little.

If you haven’t heard of it, Blogworld and New Media Expo is in it’s 3rd year and is a conference for professionals and hobbyists of all skill levels. The topics covered include Business, Social Media, Technical Skills, Podcasting/Video, Blogging, Montetazation, SEO and the list goes on. While I find quite a few panels to attend and learn a great deal, my passion at these events is meeting people. It’s hard not to feed on the energy at a show like this. I rarely get to see anyone other than technical developers and at BWE I got to meet people in all areas of this crazy online business.

This year my boss Mark came along and I think he had a much fun as I did and it was a blast having him along. Mark is also a very social guy and will talk to just about anybody. As usual, I met up with my pals Brandon, Patrick and Stephan. It was great hanging out and catching up. I didn’t get to go to SXSW this past time and missed hanging out. I also got a chance to hang a bit with Jeremy Wright and Darren Rowse who I tend to bump into more often than not. Also ran into Wendy Piersall, who I think might remember my name now ;) To top things off, when I ran into Muhammad Saleem I also got to drool all over his stunning Saddleback bag. OMG! I can haz bag?

I also made some great new friends including: Courtenay Bird, Paul Stamatiou (Stammy), Kerwin, Lisa Grimm, Wayne Sutton, Ricardo Bueno (ribeezie), Claudio Saucedo, Eduardo Merille, Sarah Evans, Amber Naslund, Taryn Pisaneschi, Tony Saucier, Nathan T. Wright, Stephan Spencer, and Wade Kwon. I’m so sure I’m forgetting plenty of people, but my brain is still totally fried from information overload. If I forget to mention you, I still truly enjoyed meeting you!

Some of my favorite moments: Talking about just about everything with Mark, Brandon and Stephan at the Bellagio. Hanging with Darren, Mark and Brandon at Jet and Lavo. Hanging out at the Hilton after with Lisa (who posted this Twitpic of one of my tats), Nathan (The Lemurs!) and Tony. Hanging out with Mark, Courtenay, Stammy, Stephan and Kerwin at the BBQ.

I also got to do some video work. I took video for Patrick’s panel and stayed after to help Ribeezie shoot some video of Robert Scoble on the new Twitter Lists feature. Also videoed Patrick and Brandon’s book signing as well as Patrick’s Skimlinks Q&A. I’ll post links once these are all up. It was also great to hang with Wade Kwon finally, as he lives pretty close by and I love meeting other locals. Speaking of, I was very impressed with the huge, huge showing of southern developers at this event. The keynotes were pretty good this year, but the closing keynote was insane and out of control and I loved it.

There were plenty of familiar faces I saw but didn’t really get to talk to. Alas, ran out of time. I’m sure we’ll bump into each other at SXSW. I’m already excited. Blog World Expo 2009 was, for me at least, a complete success. Hope to see you there next year.

In just a short couple of hours I’ll be boarding a plane heading for Las Vegas and the Blog World Expo conference. This will be my second BWE and my 3rd conference in Vegas. I’m looking forward to catching up with everyone and meeting new folks.

We’ll be touching down at 5PM Vegas time and I can’t wait to get there and start mixing it up. I hope to get a chance to hit the mall once while I’m there. That place is huge!

Posts and updates likely via twitter while I’m going. Follow me @chrispian.

Warning: This post is long and mostly personal. I won’t blame you if you decide to go check Facebook instead.

This post is a long time coming. I really got the wind knocked out of me. Thing is, I didn’t even know it at the time. I’m stubborn like that. I’ve been working online full time for about 14 years. Either as a web developer, sysadmin, publisher, co-owner, development manager, blogger, consultant, pretty much anything and everything web related. Even before that I worked with computers, fixing, upgrading, networking, that whole deal. You may notice a trend. I love this stuff. I’m about to celebrate my 10 year anniversary with Aeryn, and we are also about to celebrate another anniversary: 5 years without cancer. See, Aeryn was diagnosed with Cancer almost 5 years ago. It took months to diagnose and then another several months of operations, treatments and the side effects. I worked through it all, and took off as often as I could to be with her. As medical bills mounted, family had already been helping out… I had to do something and so I sold all my personal sites. I didn’t make a dime. Every bit of it went to medical bills, but it got us out of debt and let me spend more time with her. Totally worth it and I’d do it again in a heart beat.

That’s where things really went wrong, and only recently have I started to get over this. Without my own sites, I got out of the practice of working on things daily. Sure, my skills kept sharp by doing it at work, where it’s also my full time day job. But at night, I just couldn’t get on the computer. I was afraid, no, terrified that if I left her side that, God forbid, I might come back and find her… I can’t even say it.

To make matters worse, my step mom was also battling Acute Myeloid Leukemia. I was donating Plasma once or twice a month. My mom died just a few years earlier and I was afraid I was about to lose my second mom too. And to add injury to the insult, I developed a mystery back problem. Tests, MRIs, Physical Therapy and lots of docs and no one could figure it out. They started treating me for pain, which meant regular steroid injections + oral steroids and pain pills. The steroid treatments gave me about a weeks worth of relief and it was sweet. The pain pills caused more problems than they helped so I gave up on those. I could barely move without severe pain, I’d say about an 7-8 out of 10 pain. Some days I had to walk with a cane and sitting at my computer all day was not going to happen. I couldn’t even sleep in my bed, I had to sleep on the couch, something about it really helped my back. This lasted over a year. One day, I woke up and it was finally gone. I’m not ashamed to say, I cried. Nothing ever felt so good.

To complicate matters worse, I wasn’t just taking care of me and Aeryn, but helping out my family. A couple of them, one with kids, was even living with me. It’s hard enough starting your own family, I did’t realize how much harder helping out others would make that. Not that I expected the helping to last as long as it did either. I’ve always felt a huge obligation, or maybe guilt and felt like I’ve always had to help out. I sometimes forget that if it’s hurting me, I’m not really helping anyone at all. Something I had to change, and now we’ve been living alone for almost a year, like we did the first few years of our marriage.

I tried to get back to my life several times, but I guess I wasn’t ready. I ended up failing, miserably. It seemed like every time I’d start, something bad would happen. It happened enough that I was pretty gun shy about trying again. I let people down and I didn’t communicate just how bad things were because frankly, I didn’t know myself. I stopped working out and stopped doing pretty much anything other than go to work. Even there I struggled. I was emotionally a wreck and mentally burned out. Only a few close friends might have known something was wrong. A couple years ago I went to my doctor and got on Paxil. And it worked, sorta. It helped me just not worry about all my problems. I could care less that work and bills were piling up. Or about much for that matter. It was a nice break, and one I think my mind needed. But it went on too long, and it didn’t help with the one thing I wanted it to the most, getting back to my normal life. Working out, creating cool things, interacting with friends and generally, enjoying life. So I consulted my doc, weened myself off them over several weeks as directed and I felt pretty good.

Then it was time for repairs. Lots of damage has been done. It’s taken almost a year to really understand what was wrong, what I was afraid of and except it and move on. Or, I should say, moving on. I’m still working through it, but I feel much more like myself. I’m getting creative and motivated again, and I just feel excited about life. There’s still plenty to stress about, but we’ll deal with it because we know it’ll pass. It has to, right? Everything does.

Now I’m starting over, in almost every way. All my sites are gone, or withered and faded away. But that’s also a good thing. I’m excited about a fresh start. I’ve been doing a little bit of WordPress consulting, like installs, plugin installs, theme installs, tweaks, etc. I so want to do the code/work on a huge multi-user blog. I’d like to do some more consulting. I love working with people in the online space. I’ve also been working on a project for my friend Patrick, which I’m way behind on. Luckily, I’ve been on a roll and I’m making up for lost time. I’m getting close to 40% done and I’m building up speed. And it’s pretty cool, I think and I can’t wait to see it in action.

Next up is trying to figure out where to go from here. I really want to put together a couple of nice sites, and I’m very interested in partnering up with people, doing some guest blogging and just networking and reconnecting with friends. That’s what I really love about doing all this anyway. I’m just stoked, and it’s been a while.

If you made it this far, thanks. I don’t usually do these kinds of posts, but I thought anyone who might be interested deserved to know, and if it helps someone else out there who might have gone through this sort of thing, even better. Thanks again.

-Chris

I updated to WordPress 2.7 last night and other than my own screw up uploading the files everything went pretty smoothly.

WordPress tried to change the admin screen a couple of versions ago but it just seemed like a design change for the sake of change. I’m actually pretty impressed with the updated admin area. It takes a few minutes to get used to coming from the previous versions, but it’s very well put together. The left nav needs… something. I can’t put my finger on it but when I do I’ll make sure to update this post.

The front end didn’t have all that many changes with threaded comments being the biggest in my mind. I’m not sure how I feel about threaded comments. On the one hand, it makes more sense to do it that way. On the other, I can’t stand reading threaded messages. Too fragmented. Luckily, they way it works is pretty easy to follow no matter which way you prefer so I’m sure I’ll get used to the idea. Then again, I’ve had the option for threaded display since before the web when I ran my own BBS so it’s not like I’m going to just accept threading off hand.

The one thing I’ve been looking for I can’t find. I had read or heard somewhere that WP-Cache or WP-SuperCache was going to become a standard part of WP. I need to look into that more though. In order for any CMS, WordPress included, to handle a high volume of traffic caching is essential.

I still have 2-3 sites to upgrade and I’m looking forward to having all my sites running this shiny new version of WordPress. Go upgrade and enjoy the new toys.

I’m pretty excited right now. My wife Aeryn has an idea for her first site. She’s often helped me out on mine and we’ve tried a few small ideas together but never built her own from idea to launch. She found a topic she wants to cover and I think it will do well. I’m looking forward to working with her on it. We’ll be using WordPress, naturally and I’ll do the template for it. It’s one of the two sites I’ll be part of launching for 2009.

One of the things we decided to do was try to capture the process for launching our sites so that whatever we learn we can share with everyone. I think we may use a WP to chronicle that journey but not publish it to the public. We’ll then take all that info and then release it as a free ebook, including the mistakes and mishaps along the way. Give people a real look at what it takes to get a site going. Maybe do some video diaries along the way, that sort of thing. We haven’t ironed out exactly how to do this part yet, but we have already decided it’ll be free for whoever wants it. I’m just excited to be working with my wife on this.

Over the last few years I’ve got to work with and finally meet Muhammad Saleem. He’s a seasoned veteran in the social networking scene and he was nice enough to give me a heads up on his latest project which launched this morning. Tip’d is “A community for financial news, ideas and tips” and works very much like Digg.com where users can vote up (tip it) or vote down (topple) stories the same way you can digg and bury stories at Digg.com. Unlike Digg, Tip’d is focused on stories related to finances, which I’ve recently become obsesses with personally. With all the turmoil in the economy I can’t help be keep my eyes glued to what’s happening and how it is going to effect me, my family and my work.

Digg clones typically don’t do all that great but over the last year or so I’ve seen some notable exceptions like Sphinn. I think Tip’d is going to be one of those sites that breaks away from the shadow of being just another social bookmarking site and be truly useful to the niche it serves. Compelling content, highly topical and expertly managed, Tip’d is poised to do well.