Nerd Trivia is an interactive trivia game that is played over Twitter. The questions specifically target nerd/geek content such as movies, TV shows, and games. Nerd Trivia is a side project by work colleague and friend Laura Massey (@lauralollipop). Throughout the day, trivia questions are asked via @NerdTrivia and followers have a certain amount of time to answer the question to earn points and achievements. You can find out more about Nerd Trivia at the Nerd Trivia website that recently launched with the current season. I think this is a really cool concept and I am helping Laura with supplying nerdy questions for people to answer which is exciting! I have endless amounts of Star Trek trivia and lot’s more of completely random nerdy movies and TV shows. Special thanks to Laura for letting me take part in this really cool project of hers.

So all you nerds and geeks out there – follow @NerdTrivia and start answering the trivia questions! Let’s see what you got!

Visiting my blog today you wouldn’t have guessed I’ve actually been blogging since late 2005. As I sit here thinking about it – a lot of hard work and hours of writing has gone down the drain. And it’s upsetting and of course my fault.

So here I am to provide some tips after learning my lesson here so that you don’t have to.

Always keep a offline backup of your blog (or website). Don’t rely on just your hosting provider to do backups. Do your own and keep it stored offline someplace safe (e.g. external hard drive, USB stick, etc.). For me, I keep a local backup of my blog on a second hard drive on my PC at home which is backed up every night to a Windows Home Server. So I have multiple places where my blog’s backup exists even if my PC or Windows Home Server decides to stop working.

If someone else is managing your blog (or website), double check with them if they are doing backups. I know quite a few bloggers out there who rely on someone else to manage their blog for them such as doing all the “behind-the-scenes” stuff. It is important to make sure they are doing backups of your blog. You should make sure they regularly provide you with a physical copy of the backups for your blog in some fashion. If you aren’t a technical person, it might be a good idea to get the backup and run it by someone else you know who might be technical. A second opinion is always good especially when dealing with your online content. The last thing you want is to be under the impression the person managing your site has been taking care of you only to lose everything you’ve posted.

A backup of your blog doesn’t just include backing up all the files – backup the database too. Many blogs today such as WordPress write a lot of content to a database. You NEED backups of your database to restore your blog. A theme can be reconstructed through files you backup separately but if you lose your database, much of your content could be gone. WordPress specifically offers several good database backup plugins you can use that make backing up your database super easy.

Hopefully you don’t have to make the same mistake I did to learn a lesson on backing up your blog. If you have any other tips regarding keeping your blog or website backed up, leave a comment below.

Today, I decided to hit Highway 12 starting from just south of Napavine and headed east toward Yakima.

Let me tell you, the Cowlitz River Valley is incredible. And when you get over through White Pass it continues to offer up amazing sights of the Cascades.

While the road trip was amazing, unfortunately the battery to my camera was completely dead. To quote American Dad’s Steve Smith: “I guess I just picked a whole bouquet of oopsie-daisies.”

In short – always carry a backup battery for your camera that’s fully charged!

I did however take this shot of Mt. Rainier from my Windows Phone:

Not too shabby.

I fully intend to take the drive again – this time with my camera full charged and ready to go!

I updated my theme a bit. The theme is a work-in-progress. I actually built it from scratch learning from code examples and other themes on how to construct a basic theme. Going forward, you can expect the theme to grow as I continue to learn to make it better. Although, it’s about the content not how the site looks, right? I am hoping to eventually do some things with HTML5. Keep in mind, I designed the site with IE9 in mind but I’ve tested it out with the latest Chrome release and have seen no issues there. I play to add pinning and Jump List support for my site with IE9 in the very near future.

Another thing I did this evening was I added Disqus to the site for managing comments. You can now sign-in with a variety of services to leave a comment. I see this as an interesting experiment although I know a lot of folks using Disqus are quite happy with the service.

More to come!

Posted from WordPress for Windows Phone

When I was investigating using Posterous for my blog, Posterous’s CEO Sachin Agarwal had tweeted about taking in bug feedback. I jokingly replied to him that I thought not supporting Windows Live Writer was a bug (although I was being serious in that they should support Writer). His response to me on what I considered some valid and honest feedback was that he considers using Windows “a bug”. That kind of put me off a bit. Granted, I’m a bit biased. I know Sachin worked at Apple, supports their products 100% (just like I do with Microsoft), and is “inspired” by Apple and has never owned a PC according to his Twitter profile. But seriously… what kind of response was that? So Posterous is going to ignore the huge customer base that uses Windows today (it looks like Posterous doesn’t support IE8 either)? On Windows – Windows Live Writer is simply the best blogging tool available. It would be a huge benefit to Posterous to support it in my opinion and create additional value to people looking to move to Posterous. Perhaps he misunderstood my initial reply as being a bit snarky and if that’s the case – I do apologize. But if Sachin considers using Windows a bug – I take that as a heavy sign Posterous will likely not be doing anything special like supporting Windows Live Writer for Posterous – at least officially. Scott Lovegrove has made a plugin for Windows Live Writer that enables using Writer to post to Posterous blogs. Scott’s plugin works well. But I was looking for official support. It looks like Posterous is also focused on competing with the likes of Twitpic anyway. I wish them luck.

So in short – I’m sticking to WordPress as the blog platform of choice for my personal blog.

For me, I have a hard time not believing that this acquisition is only just the beginning for Twitter in terms of developing and or owning their own official Twitter clients on multiple platforms. I predict that in the coming months, we’ll hear more about Twitter doing official clients for the PC, Mac, Android, Windows Phone 7, etc. Twitter previously announced Twitter for Blackberry. Will Twitter look to acquire someone like TweetDeck next?

So what does this mean for third party developers and their apps?

Will Twitter use their official client apps to take advantage of exclusive features they develop that no third party app can utilize?

It will be interesting to see what happens in this space in the next few months.

Through gdgt, you can share lists of gadgets you currently have, gadgets you want, and gadgets you used to have. You can also contribute by adding reviews of gadgets or even adding new gadgets to the gdgt “network”. For you gadget geeks out there (such as myself), this site is a fantastic site to belong to. I encourage you to sign-up and give it a go and starting your own gdgt list.

You can check out my gdgt list here.

Download: Seesmic for Windows 0.5.2

If you have Seesmic for Windows already installed, you can update it by clicking the download link above.

Seesmic announced that they are moving to the Windows Platform (essentially Seesmic for Windows is a “WPF app”) at PDC in November. You can read my blog post from The Windows Blog on Seesmic’s announcement and the first release of Seesmic for Windows.

Loic tells me that in early January, we can expect another release of Seesmic for Windows with new features and further improvements. I can’t wait!