Postcards from the Funny Farm

Okay, this is now officially cool. I usually wait awhile before I recommend things here on the blog and this ones time has come. On Yahoo! TV (linked below) you can set up your favorite stations and select quickly the shows to TIVO on any given day (so far I just do the current day but you can do it weeks in advance). There is also a feature I haven’t signed up for yet (emphasize ‘yet’) that allows you to program your TIVO directly from the Yahoo! site. Wow. Yahoo keeps coming up with cool stuff.

Hey! Thanks to Amy at Lives Less Ordinary for giving me the blog treasure award!

I’m supposed to grant this to five other people:
Derek Semmler dot com
The Outboard Brain Of A Geek
Hot Coffee Girl
jonlee.ca
Photo Matt

Lorelle van Fossen has a post asking for your input on “what I want gone from the web” in 200.... I put in my top ten. Some came to mind quite quickly while others took some thought and consulting with the wife. I’m a big fan of the web, but there are some nagging things I’d like to see go. How about you? Head over there and make your list. It’s a cool idea.

Lorelle on WordPress

After a year of blogging I have discovered some secrets of CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). I’ve come a long way from the simple cub-reporter theme I started with nearly one year ago with my first post. CSS is one of the most fun aspects of blogging for me these days. In case you are into CSS or are curious, here’s a full copy/paste of the code I use to style my posts: (more…)

Most people have noticed by now that the new “Blogger” service, recently acquired by Google, has changed their commenting format. Before, a user could put her/his name and linkback to her/his blog into the comments field and in doing so, link their blog in the comment chain. This is and has been the lifeblood of blog networking since it’s inception in the late 90’s. A few people responded to me recently, defending Blogger, that all they did was do away with anonymous commenting … not true. Though it may seem that is what they did, anonymous commenting is still allowed. The catch is, Google will know who you are because you must have a Google/Blogger blog. This is bad for many reasons but here are a few for starters:

What they want to do now is sign up for a Google account which allows you to add your user name to the comment, add a nickname or leave an anonymous comment. But even if you have a Google account it does not allow you to link to your blog url unless you are on Blogger. So, as you can see, it still allows anonymous commenting. Doing away with such commenting is not their true motive.

So what is it then? I am not sure. Here are a few guesses:

• Get more blogs hosted on Blogger, regardless of its many limitations.
• Eliminate all blog-hop traffic to non-Blogger blogs. (this is now in place)
• Eliminate all “back-links” within 6 months from Blogger blogs to non-Blogger blogs that once increased their page rank and Technorati rankings.
• Harm advertising rankings that enable many bloggers to make profit.
• Make Blogger a network to find only new Blogger blogs and prevent discovery of the millions of blogs self-hosted or hosted outside of Blogger, such as mine.

So, whereas before I simply found the comment system cumbersome on Blogger, I now find it meddlesome and non-inclusive of the breadth of bloggers that exist in 2008.

Bad move Blogger. Let them know by digging, stumbling, and otherwise sharing this and any post related to the “new Blogger.” Maybe we can get them to see the errors of this approach to commenting.

Gracias.

Google Lets Down The Bloggers

I’ve been writing about the pitfalls of Blogger/blogspot.com blogs since I started my blog last year. Well, this article clearly lays out how bad it’s become and how bad it is gonna get for blogspot bloggers. My suggestion? Stop being a number and make a name for yourself by using WordPress!

I got my 10 questions in Blogs We Luv!

10 Questions with Riley of Postcards From the Funn...

How is your private world doing? I think of mine like a garden. Sometimes it is well kept, all the weeds are pulled and the soil is fresh and black because I have given it my daily care. Other times it is a mass of thorny weeds and I can’t even see what’s been growing, beautiful or otherwise. One way to order your private world is through journaling. You can do it privately just for yourself, or you can do what I do: journal online.

By keeping a record of your thoughts and dreams, you identify them. When you do that you have a way to get there. Unless you take the time to analyze yourself, you can never really understand why you are great and why you do the things you do. Journaling is like reading a book you wrote in which you are the hero. Sometimes it means being real and showing your darker sides, but mostly it’s a way to show the best in yourself. As you write your thoughts and dreams, you get closer to them. You can look back and see how your paradigms shift through time. If you haven’t written them down, you only have shadows of memories. It’s not always a pleasure to go back and read your thoughts. Sometimes the delete key is your best friend. But if you are like me, you keep the old posts for posterity. Watching your prose mature and reflect the person you are always becoming is a gratifying thing. It will help you order your private world like gardening. And you can do it anytime 24/7. Will you be a gardener by night or day? Either way, I hope you’ll experience the gratification of journaling.

Download XP Service Pack 3 Before Its Official Rel...

Thanks to Samanthon.com and a little technical knowhow, we can use the new Windows Service Pack (3) beta version! Woo Hoo. Exciting. Downloading mine now!