Dog House Dojo

This year’s polar bear plunge was a blast! Our team “Gold’s Gym Karate Club” raised $2,195.00 to help support the Special Olympics of New Jersey (SONJ).

The event was held in Seaside Heights, NJ this year, on Saturday February 24 at 1pm. In previous years, the event was held in Point Pleasant, NJ. Most of the group spent Friday night at the Aztec. If the pre-plunge party and plunge itself weren’t enough, everyong returned to the Aztec after the plunge to party some more. Many people stayed Saturday night too. We had at least six rooms reserved at the Aztec those two nights.

I checked YouTube for sightings of our group this year, but didn’t find anything with us in it. In any event here are some links to videos I found of the Seaside Heights plunge in general, which you may enjoy:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=AI1DYmj1VhQ
http://youtube.com/watch?v=vT9tYkIvE88
http://youtube.com/watch?v=fFPyhEyO63c
http://youtube.com/watch?v=-On6pviSVoc
http://youtube.com/watch?v=GniNMv_-5BE

And as a bonus… While I was looking for Plunge videos, I think I found Tim from 2006 in Point Pleasant. You be the judge! Fast forward to about 30 seconds and watch…
http://youtube.com/watch?v=ZVfgzcCCIbY

Let’s get Gary to give me his video. I’ll convert it to digital and upload it to YouTube for everyone to enjoy.

Click the photo below to see the 2007 Plunge Photo Album:

Can’t wait for next year!

-Forrest

Welcome back to the Dog House Dojo.

Since the first version of the website which was based on PHP Nuke, I’ve been evaluating different content management systems and blogging applications. I’ve finally settled on WordPress which has a very elegant and intuitive interface (supported by different themes). I first found WordPress when 24fightingchickens.com came back online — they use it too. Since then, I’ve noticed more and more sites using it — there is a large community of users blogging with it.

Now, WordPress by itself does not provide us with everything we want on DHD, so I added Gallery2 to manage our photos and integrated it with WordPress using the WPG2 plugin. This makes it much easier to embed photos into blog posts that are already part of our photo gallery. It also provides us with the random image in the sidebar of the main blog page and keeps our user accounts in WordPress synchronized with Gallery2. This is something that was an issue in the past with Coppermine and PHP Nuke.

For those of you who are familiar with RSS, WordPress supports RSS feeds on the articles in the blog and comments. So, you won’t need to regularly visit DHD to see if there’s anything new, you can just continue using your RSS reader and new messages will appear as they are posted on the site. But we’d still like to see you visit once in a while!

The Gallery2 plugin within WordPress allows us to create albums and add photos from within WordPress, but the interface itself is a little cramped because the entire Gallery web application is embedded within a WordPress page. Those who find themselves doing a lot of album viewing or editing may prefer to go directly to the Gallery2 web application: http://doghousedojo.com/gallery/. You will see all the same albums and photos, but won’t go blind trying to read the small print. I also put a link to it in the Blogroll sidebar, labeled “Album”.

Hopefully, folks will find it easy to post messages on the site with WordPress, and we will see more activity, share experiences and stories, and keep in touch more. I’ve already migrated the user accounts from PHP Nuke to WordPress and Gallery. If you find you don’t have enough permissions to do something, send me an email (webmaster@doghousedojo.com) and I’ll adjust accordingly.

I’ve also adjusted the site so it is no longer password-protected. This means our posts are out there for the whole world to come and see (if anyone is looking). If you want to post something that should only be visible to the group, please let me know so I can help you post accordingly.

Thanks and enjoy the site!

-Forrest