Recently in Blog Category

So Jimmy's blogging from the lift on the Right...correct?

(please excuse my cell phone camera pic)

I'm going through my paper sack collection to find just the right look for Saturday/Sunday's big event. Maybe I'll ask Walsingham for some advice, because left to my own devices I'll probably just show up in an H-E-B sack.

I have known many residents and staff at Fair Havens from my time volunteering in Singles Ministry and their service to women and children is exceptional. I look forward to helping out with this fundraiser.

Since Jimmy the "P" has set fundraising goals for all the guest bloggers, I'm considering taking the giver of the largest donation ($50 minimum) during my stint on the lift to lunch at Bob's Better Burger, which means they will learn my true identity!

I don't know what I was thinking, but after making the bold move of actually showing up in public to give a donation to Jimmy the "P"'s Blogging for Fairhavens...I can't believe I actually agreed to guest blog at the event this year.

It's not like I am totally anonymous, but there are some who firmly believe that the writers at Jessica's Well are the same person, one with multiple-conservative-personality-disorder.

I can firmly say that there are multiple writers at Jessica's Well...and it is a real secretive club.

In formatting MT posts, in the old versions there were only a couple of options, convert line breaks, and don’t convert line breaks.

Now there is this little drop down list with formats like “Markdown” and “Markdown wth SmartPants”.

Seems like I’m gonna have to do a bit of reading.

I have now updated to MoveableType V4.01rc1. "rc" means it is a beta for the 4.01 upgrade.

The author screens shure have gotten a face lift and all the sudden there are lots more widgets and buttons for publishing!

• New colors
• New Formatting Button
• Fun Stuff

WOW It seems the blockqute style has changed up a bit from the default.

I really don't know why I take the time to keep my MT installation up to date, it's not like I blog here a lot anyway. However, it shows me what I'm missing (especially the SPAM tools) at the Well.

I am not a graphics designer.
I am not a professional computer programmer.
I know enough about coding to be dangerous.

Because of this I may never do a whole lot more to improve the look of my blog. Yeah I can understand all the syntax of HTML/PHP and such, but in the last several years I have never had the will (or time) to dive into the various web programming languages.

I taught myself BASIC on a TI99/4A, learned PASCAL in high school and did enough FORTRAN programming to write a simple finite element analysis program for a senior level structural design class. I self taught myself the ins and outs of a certain database program and wrote a pretty decent membership database.

The thing that changed was getting married. It really cut down on my extra curricular learning in the afternoon and evenings...and now there are toddlers in our house... and now all time and learning new programming languages and web customization are gone for a while to come.

That is unless I can make more money fooling with computers than I can as an Engineer....umm no I don't think so...well, not right now.

MovableType is a nice thing. You can set how many old posts show up based on number, date or any one of numerous settings. At first I had this set at monthly hoping I would be so prolific as to write at least once per month here. Then, I set it to 45 days hoping all six of my visitors a months would at least see two posts.

So while Theocritus is seeding the search engines for me, I notice I have slipped past 45 days and effectively created "The Blog that Wasn't There!"

So here's a post to keep my home-page happy!

Yep. It is time for my monthly blog post to keep the Archive's nice and warm.

Now that I have had this domain for a while, and my blog for over a year, I ponder why I have it.

I was looking at my stats, and if you discount the bots, I have about 10 hits a month. I'm really burning up the bandwidth with that. I love the search terms "Personal Blogs Nobody Reads" and "what to do when pulled over and smoking marijuana" that led people to my blog.

(BTW that last one refers to a story where a really uppity local deputy decided I was smoking dope on my way to Austin to meet with various state agencies..I wasn't.)

So if I spend all of my time contributing to Jessica's Well and putting my two cents in at MyOpenForum.com, why keep a personal blog?

Well having a domain is kind of nice. I get to play with MoveableType in a way that I don't get to as a contributor. I also get to try out all kinds of different web tools and programs like Gallery2, PHPSurvey and Calendar. It lets me decide if I want to suggest these tools for some web sites I help maintain on a volunteer basis.

Yeah, I don't post all that personal stuff, but who really cares?

OK, I don't normally take or post these online quizes, but I must admit the name for my accent was....well.....

OK Folks, here we go again with the upgrading. Now I'm migrating to MySQL 5 because that is what my hosting company has and is doing. Let's see how it works shall we!

Hmmm... I finally noticed that one of my modules got clipped when I did the MT upgrade. Now that I have my sidebar back, my blog doesn't want to display any posts from last month. Talk about forcing you to post. Of course I could always fix the display so it displays a certan number of posts instead of just the current month.....naa too much work.

I'm impressed. The Upgrade to MoveableType 3.31 went pretty smooth. There are a few different things in the interface, but all in all not to bad.

I have recently been asked to be on the Editorial Board of Jessica's Well. Jessica's Well is a well established local blog that mostly comments on Midland and Permian Basin politics and civic issues, but from time to time it reaches out into national and global issues with it's West Texas flavor.

Come see if I'm worthy.

Ok, so where do I spend all of my online time. It obviously isn't blogging.

I spend most of my time debating local issues at MyOpenForum.com.

Check it out. It is demented.

Personal blogs are interesting things.

I have an old pastor friend (I guess it is former pastor now) who runs a blog called ourgreenroom. I also have a cousin that runs a blog or two and many a friend from College who do the same.

So what is my observation? For the tech savvy, blogs have replaced the "Christmas Card Family Newsletter." When I get the feeling to troll the blogs of my friends and family (for those without RSS feeds) I generally learn something new, provided they actually took the time to blog.

Now some may say that personal blogging is the domain of MySpace, but MySpace is a sensory overloaded kitschy Jr. High romper-room. Full of advertisment laden "My sexual animal is X blog profile polls" and tricked out animated gifs that are cool the first hundred times you see them, but not the subsequent 10,000. And for heaven's sake, a flashing black background with cartruse text makes normal people sick as they try and read your entries.

In the advertising world this is known as all package and no substance.

Leave the gimmicks for the carnival rip-off games, create with style, grace, form and function... not noise.

They say that a good Blog is generally about one theme or subject. While this may be true for the really big political types and the folks looking to generate specific traffic, I tend to like the blogs that have a little variety.

I tend to think that limiting your content to a few themes is better than just one. TBIFOC, one of my regular reads, could be summed up into Cats, Israel/Arab Issues, Cats, Houston Sports/Culture/Politics/Government, Cats, Technical Support, Cats, Grilling/Food, Cats, and Riding the Bus (Metro).

Granted, this is kind of a big list, but if Lair was to strip away the other weird projects his overactive imagination sends him on (Abraham Lincoln), I'd still read his bog for those items.

Yeah Yeah.. I know "can't you do anything other than the default templates?"

At least it's not a Blogger Account.

Take a look around, there isn't much to see, unless you are really interested in the costs of public transportation in Midland, Texas. (I don't even want to look at the figures for METRO)

I got this blog moved to its own hosting site today and all of the default templates seem to be working.

I still have to install Gallery and so some more customization of the layout, but at least it is working again.

Since nobody reads this blog, I guess it doesn't matter that it is taking me months at a time to fix things.