So the other day I bought a Body Bugg. It's a small device you wear on your arm. The point of it is that it is [supposedly] measuring body functions and reading calories you take in or burn and general movement/action. It's featured heavily in the Biggest Loser and a couple of other programs. At the very least it's a good psychological deterrent at the worst it's a minor annoyance. Either way it's not doing any harm but hopefully will give some good results.

I have been wearing it for about 4 days. You're supposed to wear it 24/7 with the exception of an hour a day and/or when you're cleaning it. Thus far it's been fine to wear. I haven't had any issues with it. It's fairly discreet. You can sync it to your computer via a USB cable (or a slightly more expensive wirelesss setup). My results have been promising. The very first partial day I wore it - it showed that my daily 'recommended steps' was down. But since then i've raised the activity level (via extended runs and trying to be careful or at least more careful in what I'm eating). So we'll see...

From the technology side of it. This one is interesting. It has quirks but is pretty cool. It's interesting that it at least appears to read something from the body (via a few electrode type pads on the back of the device). Whether it's actually really working or not...I don't know. What I would love is unification of devices. My iPhone killed the need for me to have a small PDA - plus it combined my phone and iPod. Bob suggested an app called 'Runkeeper Pro' which is pretty cool. It keeps GPS information about runs. But it lacks the ability to get actual physical readings. Even an add-on device like the Nike+ for iPod only keeps basic readings and does some simple calculations based on time/distance/etc.

My band has been wrestling with a number of issues recently. But one of them which has come up repeatedly over the past year or three is the issue of vinyl. Specifically, releasing an ACTUAL record.

Now the biggest issue is obviously record players. I have one and a lot of other people do as well but how many others do? There has been a growing trend over the past 5 or so years in the surge of records being released - most larger record companies still do offer their artists releases on vinyl (usually through special order or specialty shops).

On the other hand - I love iTunes and my iPhone and various [older] iPods. Without weighing in on the whole digital vs. non-digital audio question - I can't imagine a world now WITHOUT a digital version of some sort.

In our case - we have a 5 song EP which is pretty much ready to go. It's been done for a bit and we've been sitting on it for a little awhile. Our original plan had been to release a 10" record (3 on side A / 3 on side B) PLUS offer a coupon code for the download of all the tracks as high quality audio files (MP3s and/or some other format). The further plan was to make it available on iTunes soon afterward. The economic reality is that unless you're printing thousands upon thousands of copies or have great connections pressing vinyl records has fairly significant cost - technically probably more than CDs. But it's also more of a niche specialized product.

Records take up more space, are more unwiedly to handle (due typically to size), they have the propensity to warp (sorry David Bowie) or melt (sorry Germs). But CDs suffer from their multitude of issues also - occasional audio differences, scratches, skips, and the like. Digital files also have their issues as well digital pops, audio compression changes and of course the propensity for being lost due to a hard drive crash.

Working within the tech industry it's easy to forego "things of the past" for the latest and greatest technology. I love iTunes but I also love records and it's hard to sometimes quantify the two in the same space. I wonder how many other people are in that boat? For our own sake or maybe as the broader question if a band only put out a record (not a CD) with digital downloads available - how would it sell?

As a sidenote and probably my own answer to this - we've decided to go purely digital. The EP will be available ONLY via iTunes and some of the other larger digital music stores (Napster/etc). The economics for us just don't make sense especially during a time as we're not extremely active.

ONEsite will be introducing what we've codenamed Style 101 very soon. At its most basic level its a basic revamp of the ONEsite platform. The overall goal was to cleanup legacy styles, adjust modules and offer a better and easier way to style for and theme a network. The main issue we've ran into in the past is how to accomplish this without messing with any of our other networks' sites look and feel or other functionality. But we've solved that issue. The Style 101 project is essentially an upgrade we will be able to turn on for a network which will load - a completely new set of base style sheets, a new more robust module structure, various specific module adjustments and cleanup, an updated drag and drop layout system with more features and additional page options, and a brand new theme system which will allow a network to choose from many new themes that go across both network and user pages.

I'll try to go through some of the specifics a little later and give a bit more of a hands-on preview of some of the new items that are coming. We're really excited about this and think that the ONEsite platform will be even better because of it.

The launch of this upgrade is still approximately a month and a half away but we would be interested in having feedback from any of our current networks who would like to beta test it. Please keep in mind that this option will completely erase any pre-existing styling or layouts you have (though it will NOT erase content or users from your network). Please message me if you are interested.

We launched American Idol the other night. They for the most part use our core platform. We've made little additions and changes here and there but it's amongst our clients that use all the base functionality of ONEsite. The biggest addition has only been the importing of content from their previous platform into ours. So millions of messages, blogs, photos, and users later everything has been imported into our system. The American Idol community now has a new home and it seems that people love it.

Anytime, a community launches whether it's a large community or a small community you have to listen to the userbase. They've already made several suggestions which make tremendous sense to add to the core platform - some ideas are more specific towards them but ONEsite tries to listen to ALL clients and we've made many additions and updates to the core platform just based on suggestions from our various clients. We can't implement every single suggestion and must pick and choose what makes sense for the broader view of the entire community but we always listen to and take every suggestion seriously.

A common request is the ability to do rounded modules on ONEsite. There are MANY different ways to do rounded corners each with different advantages/disadvantages. But here is a good global way to accomplish this...

The first part is to decide if you want all the modules to be styled the same or different.

Modules within ONEsite have a unique classname plus a secondary global class. For instance the login module uses: mod_login and module.

This additional classname can be used to target the class module which is used across ALL modules. If you only wanted to target the login module you could simply target mod_login.

In my opinion the best method for rounded corners is the "sliding door" method. Essentially it uses two images (one for the left and one for right). Once these are put together it creates the illusion of rounded corners. The other advantage to this is that these can grow to virtually size and will expand or shrink based on their outer width. So it's a good global solution...

.module .title_container {
height:auto; width:auto; padding: 0 9px 0 0; 
background: url(topRight.gif) top right no-repeat;
}
.module h3.title {
height: 40px !important; 
background: url(topLeft.gif) 0% 0% no-repeat;
}

What it Does:

.module .title_container = this targets the module level title_container. This is the portion that wraps the title at the top of the module. The code is giving just a little padding and then setting the background to appear but be placed at the top right. This will be your wide graphic.

.module h3.title = This has a height of 40px (it could be whatever you need it to be). But then attaches a graphic to the top left of the title class. This is the very small left side 'cap' that will be placed on the end of wider right graphic. It keeps the actual h3 level title in place.

The Pieces and the Result: