I’m seeing a bit of a traffic spike from the news coverage on KOMO so I just wanted to say hello! This is my personal/professional blog where I write about my experiences and insights about parkour and chronolog my various stunt trips. Feel free to explore around, and check out the articles and videos. I’m on a bit of a blogging break right now working on a few websites and DVDs, but things will be picking up again around March with the possibility of two parkour tours and another commercial. To be updated when that stuff starts happening you can either subscribe to my feed, or receive emails when I update.

Interested in learning?

If you are interested in getting into parkour (which you totally should), my suggestion would be to check out the great community we’ve built over at http://washingtonparkour.com and introduce yourself in the forums. There you can find people to train with, and browse all the different resources we’ve made available.

Classes?

If you are interested more in learning through classes, we’re working on it! The group shown in the broadcast was from a volunteer class I run through the Puget Sound Community School, which is an amazing independent highschool that has embraced parkour as a great activity for their students’ development. The only other classes currently running are the monthly gym jams through gymnasiums in Auburn and Bellingham (we rent out the place for 3 hours and teach parkour workshops). More classes are on their way through the work of the Pacific Northwest Parkour Association, a nonprofit corporation set up to get this stuff out there in the best possible way.

Videos?

If you’re here just to see more crazy parkour stuff, then that’s ok too. I got a new video -here- and will have a lot more coming thanks to Underscore Films.

Oh and my last name (Cecka) is not pronounced seeka, it’s “checka”. My family is just nuts and doesn’t like “h”s. -Tyson Cecka

Hey all I just wanted to pop in and say that I’m in (and have been for awhile) the process of adding a front-end to the site for a “professional” section and won’t be updating much for the next month. Having this blog be half personal and half professional is starting to make me not post as much as I want to. Having separate sections will allow me to update this blog more often with things I wouldn’t normally share.

To be notified when I have the time to make updates you can always subscribe to my RSS feed or receive new updates by email. In the meantime, read the -article and advice section- watch the -videos- and get training!

It’s Better!

Now this is pretty much the same as what I had before, but with a few key differences. All the information in the lightbox is pulled directly from Flickr automatically, it’s cached for speed, and it updates dynamically (meaning changes I make to the metadata on Flickr migrates here). It also includes a link to Flickr so you can download larger images, comment on the photo, or add them to your favorites. But the best part is that all I need to do to pull in an image is include: [flickr]photo:1364872177[/flickr] anywhere in the post. I can also use tags or usernames to pull in photos.

The Benefit

The major benefit to that besides just the time that it takes to write these posts, is that I can continue to improve the system without having to edit all of my old posts. If I want to say, make the lightbox image depend on the viewers screen resolution, all I have to do is edit some backend code rather than a hundred posts. And if the viewer doesn’t have javascript enabled, or is reading my post in a feed reader, the link should take them directly to the flickr page (rather than hotlinking the image like most lightboxes do). I’ve gone back and converted all of my old posts to the new format, so take another look at my photo category if you haven’t seen it already, all the links now work again!

The Code

Of course I still suck at coding something entirely myself, so this all runs off of heavily modified versions of Flickr Tag for WP and Slimbox 1.4.1. It’s a bit on the ugly side, but if anyone is interested in seeing how I did it I could release the code. I’ve only been able to do limited testing, please let me know if there are any problems in the comments!

I want to make this blog as welcoming as it can be for people to visit and to post. So these latest few updates have focused on the commenting system.

• You can now edit a comment you’ve previously submitted thanks to Edit Comments XT.
• You can now reply to specific people’s comments by indicating the comment with the drop-down menu or by clicking -Reply- next to their name, thanks to YATCP.
• You can now subscribe to comments through email on a post per post basis, meaning you can get emails whenever someone else also comments on a specific post, thanks to “Subscribe to Comments”.

I’ve also been meddling with Videobox and the new Mediabox to improve video playback. If you have the latest Flash installed you should now be able to go fullscreen on any of the Revver videos on this site by clicking the expanding square icon.

And maybe with new features I should go over current bugs I’m struggling with I have the strangest bug ever currently on this site involving the All in One SEO Pack. Currently, whatever the 5th oldest post’s title is set to, every other post’s title on the site is set to the same (the html title). It makes no sense and I’m stumped. Fixed! Some strange server buffering error, I fixed it by creating a local cache of WP’s global $post variable before starting the buffering process. Hopefully the plugin author will adopt the fix.

Feel free to play with any of the new comment madness on this post.

That’s right, I install new things for my blog! You can navigate between them using your left-right keys or by clicking on the left or right area of the photo as well. It also works on videos as you can see by the videos in the sidebar or just click here.

Edit: I originally took those pictures because I thought I looked like that guy from Street Fighter, well two people have now told me I look like Guile! Pretty funny, maybe I should dye my hair blond and wear militay pants everywhere…

The previous post and next post links above the title are also new.

Tech Stuff:

To get this to work I’m currently using two hacked versions of Slimbox and Videobox. I modified Videobox to work with Revver videos and allow links in descriptions, and I modified Slimbox to automatically add Flickr links in the description properly. I’m working on simply combining both of them so they run faster but I’m new at this and am still learning. And if anyone can tell me why the combination of SWFObject and mootools breaks youtube and google autoplay functionality as well as fullscreen I’d greatly appreciate it.

Oh and I’m now using a different method of fetching my recent Revver videos in the sidebar. Originally I was using the Revver Widget, but it was slow and offsite. I learned a bit of PHP to code my own little widget and I now fetch directly from the Revver API. Man I really need to get outside…this is sad.