To celebrate the anniversary of a friend of mine surviving and recovering from a paralyzing neurological disease, Dave took Brandon and me on his annual "sick day" ride. Dave picked Shotgun Creek in the Cascades, SE of Albany, which was a bit of a drive, but well worth it to ride some new trails that I'd never been on before. I was pretty tired and sore from my crash the previous day at Giles' track, but I couldn't pass up Dave's ride. It was 34 degrees when we got out of the truck and very humid from a lot of recent rain in the area. Still, we bundled up and headed off with Dave as our guide.

Dave rides a Husky TE450, which is technically a dual-sport, but you'd never know that from the way he rides it. Some of the trails were mildly tacky and other trails were downright brownies soaked in chocolate pudding. Hillclimbs were a challenge, but so were steep downhills. It's hard for me to give a good, honest read on the trails since they were so slippery and rutted. I think the place would be a blast in the summer and early fall when it's much drier. Still, it was a great day of riding. We saw some beautiful scenery, including an amazing view from a trail along a cliff. It really walked the line between "wow, this is beautiful" and "holy crap, this is scary".

Toward the end of the day, my bike died on a small hill. At first, I thought I just didn't get enough of a run at it and failed with the clutch, but then the rear end wouldn't roll at all. I dragged the bike the short distance back to the main road (the hill was right off the road) to try to figure out what was wrong with it. With the bike in neutral, I tried to spin the rear wheel, but the chain was locked hard. I could see that the chain was bulging away from it's normal position on the countershaft sprocket. Brandon came back to check on me shortly and he had some tools with him. He pulled my case saver, which gave the chain room to move and I spun the wheel dislodging the rock or stick that was under the chain. The chain had raised up enough that it bit into my case saver and just locked in place. Thanks to Brandon for having tools with him and helping me out!

Throughout the day, we staged some great photos. Dave is an amazing photographer and it was a blast to have him out there with us. (Dave Schelske Photography) You can see some of his photos below the slide show of my pics from the day. At one point, we staged a great photo, but I tipped over right after the awesome shot (see below) and Dave caught me rolling on the ground laughing. It looks like I'm in agony after hitting the tree, but I'm really just laughing at how silly it was to tip over after an awesome shot.

I wore my Leatt Brace all day and fell pretty comfortable with it. I had to adjust the back piece so that I could stand and look far enough up the trail, but that was pretty minor and I needed to do it anyway. I'm still really happy with my Leatt and I definitely feel safer. This was also my first time riding with my new Garmin 60CSX GPS unit and as soon as I figure out how to export the routes, I'll post our morning and afternoon rides here.

It was muddy, slippery, grueling, tiring, and we only went 29 miles in 6 hours…but it was a great day of riding. Thanks, Dave.

Shotgun Creek 2/8/09 Morning

Shotgun Creek 2/8/09 Afternoon

In Wordpress 2.5.1, after you've created additional publishing users, the administrator account can no longer publish posts or pages. Or rather, the administrator can publish, but it appears under another user's name as the administrator's account is not an option in the drop down.

After quite some digging, I found a solution, or rather a work-around, posted by jmrussell on this Wordpress forum:

• Once the error occurs, go to the Users page in the admin section of the site
• Select the checkbox next to the administrator's name
• In the dropdown above, set "Change role to…" to Administrator and then, with the administrator only selected, click Change.

Now your administrator should be able to publish. You can go back and edit each post that may have accidentally been published under another username by modifying the Post Author field and setting it to your administrator's name.

If you're annoyed by the fancy quotes that WordPress replaces your normal quotes with (i.e. “these quotes” rather than "these regular quotes"), there's an easy way to get rid of them. Just use Semiologic's Unfancy Quote Plugin For WordPress and presto chango, your fancy quotes are gone!

I had found some lower-level hacks to WordPress and some crazy-complex Javascript that fixed this, but none of them were as simple and easy to use as Semiologic's solution.

WordPress automagically interjects meta content specifying that the generator of the webpage is WordPress and, specifically, what version it is. Like this:

<meta name="generator" content="WordPress 2.5.1" />

If you want to remove that, there's an easy way to do it. If you don't already have a functions.php file in your theme, create one. Make sure that it starts with <?php and ends with ?> and has NOTHING outside those tags or it will cause your theme to yak.

Now add the following line to your functions.php file:

remove_action('wp_head', 'wp_generator');

And that should do it! Now you can go through all your plugins and remove the comments and other garbage they interject in order to try to hide the fact that you're running WordPress.

Edit:

As Jerry pointed out in the comments, you could still see the generator meta in the RSS feed. I found a solution to this at Bioneural.net.

Simply add this code to your theme's functions.php file.

// Remove WP version info
function hide_wp_vers()
{
    return '';
} // end hide_wp_vers function

add_filter('the_generator','hide_wp_vers');

I know there are a lot of widgets and plugins for WordPress out there for adding a Digg badge to posts (I know, because I tried half a dozen or so of them) but I didn't find any that worked consistently and provided the functionality I wanted. After researching the Digg Tools API and a few other examples online, I've composed this block of code for generating Digg badges.

To add a Digg badge to your WordPress posts or pages, simply add the following code block immediately before or after the PHP block that contains the_content(). For posts, you would want to modify the Main Index Template, Single Post, and Archives theme files. For pages, you simply need to modify the Page Template theme file. Here's the code:

<div class="diggLink">
    <script type="text/javascript">
        digg_url = '<?php the_permalink() ?>';
        digg_title = '<?php the_title(); ?>';
        //digg_topic = 'TOPIC'; // replace TOPIC

        /*
        Use the output buffer to capture the text
        output from the_ID() rather than having
        it rendered to the page.
        */

        digg_bodytext = '<?php
            ob_start();
            the_ID();
            $postID = ob_get_contents();
            ob_end_clean();

            /*
            Get the body of the post, remove HTML,
            remove carriage returns and line feeds,
            escape 's, return only the first 350 char.
            */
            $postObj = get_post($postID, OBJECT);
            $body = strip_tags($postObj->post_content);
            $body = str_replace(chr(10), '', $body);
            $body = str_replace(chr(13), '', $body);
            $body = addslashes($body);
            echo substr($body, 0, 350);
        ?>';
    </script>
    <script src="http://digg.com/tools/diggthis.js"
        type="text/javascript"></script>
</div>

I've also added a class to the wrapping DIV and added it to the stylesheet for my theme to style the positioning of the Digg badge. I place the above code right before the the_content() block and this CSS class is what positions my Digg badge to the right of my posts.

.diggLink
{
    float: right;
    margin-bottom: 4px;
    margin-left: 4px;
}

If you'd like to set your posts to all submit to one particular topic, you can uncomment the line that refers to digg_topic in the code block and then change TOPIC to the topic you'd like to use. You can find the list of topics on the Digg Tools API page.

If you have any questions, feel free to comment and ask me. By the way, this same code block is currently in use at Pac Ten Review.