What’s been up

I’ve been incredibly lax about posting regularly recently.  It’s been crazy since we got back.  I’ve switched shifts, made an offer on a house, had the house inspection, and today, it looks like becuase of the house inspection (garage was about to fall down) we will not be buying the house.    So I am still working on getting the Puerto Rico pics upon the site as well as a couple other things I’ve been working on.  I should be back on schedule later this week

Scheduling Posts in Wordpress

I’ve seen alot of posts about blogging that talk about the benefits of writing posts and then scheduling them, in order to avoid the dreaded post drought. I thought it sounded like a good idea, but it wasn’t obvious in Wordpress how to do it. That and i didn’t really poke around too much.

Recently though, I’ve been trying to get a little more consistent about the blogging and I figured that should figure this out. Turns out, it’s pretty easy to do. All you you need to do is write your post (the hard part) and then set the Post Status to published. Then you set the Post Timestamp to the time you want the post to appear. You will need to remember to check the time on the server, as mine is GMT.

Then you just press the publish button and sit back. Nice.

Buying a house: The house hunt

This weekend we started the actual looking at houses.  After months of searching the internet to get an idea of what we wanted, we called a realtor and set up some showings.  We told the realtor what area we were looking at and a general amount we would like to spend and he sent us a list of properties.  We then narrowed down the list and sent it back.

On Saturday we  met the realtor at his office and he took us to each of the houses we selected.  We saw about 8.  We found a couple we like.  We also saw an open house for Sunday.  We really liked the house we saw on Sunday although it will need some work so we’ve scheduled a walkthrough with our agent for tonight.

Things I’ve learned from the house hunt:

• Have some sort of reference.  After you finish looking at houses they will all sort of blur together. Having a fact sheet, notes or pictures will help.
• Legally your agent cannot tell you some things (ie bias your opinion).  Be sure to ask about the resale issues to get a little more insight into what they think if you are interested.
• House hunting is exhausting.  Don’t plan to do much after you’ve just spent 3 hours  traipsing around strangers houses.

Here’s part one of my house buying experience.

Off to Puerto Rico with Embeddable Google Maps

Monday we are heading to Puerto Rico for some well deserved vacation. I thought that this would be a great time to try out the new embeddable Google Maps. You used to need to use the Google Maps API to put maps on your webpages or blogs. As of last week, Google released the ability to embed maps directly.

The first couple of days we will spend in Old San Juan:

View Larger Map

From there we are heading to Guarnica for some relaxation:

View Larger Map

You can find instructions from Google here. I’ll let you know when I get back.

*UPDATE* : One thing I have noticed is when you post the links into the code section, it seems like the iframe tag plays havoc with the the Wordpress editor. Everything looks fine when you post, so I’ll need to see if I can find out more. So if you use this with Wordpress, make sure you get the post all squared away before you add the links. I’ll post when i find out more.