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Archive for August, 2010

Are you fan of running, biking and swimming? Good news, today is the the running of the annual Chicago Triathlon. Chicago Triathlon is the events 28th year and seems to be the largest event of its kind.

It began at 6:00 AM this morning, and will commence at 3:00 PM with the award ceremony.

The event, like all triathlons consists of running, biking, and swimming. There will be a 1.5K swim in Monrow Street Harbor. Swimmers will then exit the water and proceed to run 450 yards. The athletes will then get on their bicycles, for a 40K ride beginning down Lake Shore Drive. They will then get off of their bikes and begin running just south of Randolph at the grass reserve for 5K or 10K, depending on their level of skill.

It’s been a hectic week here at Plus Runner, and I wanted to post a few last minute thoughts before the weekend begins.

First, if you’re doing Chicago this weekend, good luck. If I’m the only nutcase out there, I’d be surprised. The weather looks good (low humidity, warm day), but things should be okay.

We have assembled an athlete information packet in pdf format which is now available using this link. excerpt from web

The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society is the Official Charity of the Chicago Triathlon. Founded in 1949, the Society is the largest national volunteer health agency dedicated to curing.

An intriguing story about ultra secretive Trader Joe’s has been posted by Fortune magazine today, revealing some insider dirt on the ultra-secretive Trader Joe’s. If you want to look for Trader Joes Locations, see below.

Finally Fortune offers an unauthorized look at the uber-hip Trader Joe’s market that owned by the Albrecht family of Germany.

The story is quite interesting if you understand the chain’s fly-under-the-radar reputation.

Below, I’ve highlighted some of the more interesting revelations from the Fortune piece.

* The privately held company’s sales last year were roughly $8 billion, the same size as Whole Foods’.
* It is opening just five more locations this year. The company selects relatively small stores with a carefully curated selection of items. (Typical grocery stores can carry 50,000 stock-keeping units, or SKUs; Trader Joe’s sells about 4,000 SKUs, and about 80% of the stock bears the Trader Joe’s brand.) The result: Its stores sell an estimated $1,750 in merchandise per square foot, more than double Whole Foods’. The company has no debt and funds all growth from its own coffers. Read the rest of this entry »

In this article I will be speaking to you regarding what you can do with RSS feeds in order to get your website seen by the search engines. You are probably already aware of what the RSS feed is for, and if you have already made a WordPress site, you would have configured the RSS feed, but just in case you aren’t familiar with what it is for, it is just a way for people to receive notice of updates that happen on your site by giving them a brief summary of your most recent activity. People can then ‘subscribe’ to your site’s RSS feed by clicking on it, and then making a selection from the available choices and clicking on the ‘Subscribe Now’ button.

The RSS feed button is very often located in your web browser’s title box, along with the website name and will be there if you are using WordPress. Generally the button is an orange square with two curving white lines and a dot in the corner.

If your site was made at a website building sites, you will only have a feed on your blog page, and it will be either in the sidebar or down at the bottom of the page.

If you click on this button, it will bring up a box which shows your ‘feed’ URL – get a copy of this whole URL as you will need it a little bit further down the track.

Burning Your RSS Feed:

A Feed Burner is a tool which increases the functionality of your RSS feed so that you can -

• See the stats of your site as it is being read
• Configure the style of your feed so that it is suitable for any readers and all directories
• Add things such as advertisements to your feed to customize it
• Show your Feedburner stats and also your subscription count with a widget

But probably the most important thing a Feed Burner does is that it SERVES your RSS feed, so that no matter how many people or applications are subscribed and reading your feeds, YOUR server is not slowed down by it.

FeedBurner now belongs to Google, so it is a fair bet that they will be paying attention to the feeds that run through it. The more ways you can get attention from Google, the better.

• Go to the FeedBurner site, www.feedburner.com and type your site feed into the box in the ‘Start FeedBurning Now’ area.
• Create a Username and Password
• Make a copy of your Feedburner feed address and check out the options on Page 2; if you don’t wish to choose any of these, select ‘Skip directly to feed management’

On the next page, click on the link appropriate for your site, e.g. ‘Self-hosted WordPress’. If none of the links are appropriate for your site, simply sign out. If you do have a WordPress site, when you click on the link, you will be taken to another page which will have a link for a Zip file containing the FeedBurner plug-in files which you will upload to your WordPress site. Full instructions on how to do this will be provided by Google, all on the same page, so make sure you print it off to make it easier for you as you work. Read the rest of this entry »

Renee Gork, an Hog Sports Radio’s employee, had the gall of wearing a Florida Gators hat on Saturday. She had worn it in an Arkansas Razorback press conference. Renee Gork said that it was raining outside so that she worn that hat.

Are you from a provincial SEC town? If so, you know how the end of the story. Renee Gork was fired after her “disloyalty” prompted online searches that uncovered — wait for it — she really is a Florida Gators fan. Oh my God! If radio employees are fans of other sports teams in Arkansas you know what comes next, right? Gay marriage (and maybe not back-to-back Liberty Bowls).

After all, Gork could be a secret agent planted by the duplicitous Urban Meyer. It’s the perfect disguise! Who would ever think that a person wearing a Florida hat would actually be a Florida fan? Bobby Petrino, the multi-millionaire head coach who set the Internet rabble aflame by commenting after answering Gork’s question on Saturday, “And that will be the last question I answer with that hat on,” should be ashamed. For that matter, so should Arkansas fans who called the Hogs when Petrino walked out on his NFL team to slum it in Fayetteville with the SEC’s eighth-best football program. A sojourn in the Ozarks that will last until, you guessed it, he gets a better job offer and bolts town faster than the Wal-Mart heirs built mansions on the coasts. Read the rest of this entry »