I was importing some old blog entries this evening (something I do from time to time when I get bored–even though I jumped over to Moveable Type years ago, I still haven’t converted all my old entries. I still have about 9 months worth to import) and I came across a few interesting entries:
Hard Work Comes Crashing Down – The subtext of this post (I did this a lot back then, talking about something but not really talking about it) was that the company I spent a summer working for was going under and none of my work would see the light of day. But I speculated it wouldn’t be for nothing–that God might have an ace up his sleeve. It turns out the relationships I made that summer are still helping me today. Thanks Brad.
The Six Billionth Person – We passed that milestone back in 1999, and I think we’re pushing 6.5 billion now.
Sedgewick: Threeministories featuring one of my favorite characters who went on to star in his own novel.
I spent some time tweaking the site yesterday (again). I realized I didn’t have much of a description anywhere so I added one to the top. Maybe that will help explain what this place is to the newbies. And fill in a few of you old timers in case you forgot.
I also added an e-mail subscription box to the sidebar. I mentioned this before, but the sign-up box is new. Basically if you want to get my blog updates delivered to your e-mail inbox (in full text, no less!), you can sign up there. Entries are delivered once a day. That’s the only thing the list is used for (I couldn’t spam you if I wanted to–not that I want to) and you can unsubscribe at any time.
I’ve also been using a tracking service to see where people click on my homepage. It’s fascinating stuff, but the biggest thing I’m noticing is that a few people don’t use bookmarks. You come to my site to use the Flickr or Blogroll links at the top, instead of just bookmarking those sites (my Mom does it, but I’m sure she’s not the only one).
After much tinkering, false starts, failed attempts and rabbit holes I finally have a new movie and book review system going. Each item gets a fancy 1-5 star rating (half stars are allowed) and an image pulled in from Amazon. Pretty swanky, huh?
You can see the initial results in the sidebar, with the latest movie and book reviewed. I’m not thrilled with the layout yet, but we’ll see what happens.
I just added a new FeedBurner RSS feed and the ability to subscribe to this blog via e-mail. Nobody was begging me for either option, but I’m testing them out to see how they work and if they’re worth using. The e-mail subscription option seems pretty nice, especially for those unfamiliar with RSS (like the mom contingent that reads my blog).
I think Movable Type has an e-mail notification system, but I’ve never bothered to set it up. Plus it seems easier to let someone else handle it.
I’m not sure how helpful the extra RSS feed is, but it comes with the e-mail subscription service. Plus it has a lot of fun extras that might be nice. FeedBurner recommends condensing all your RSS feeds into a single feed–theirs. Of course they want me to do all my RSSing through them. I’m not sure if that’s a good idea yet. It seems smart, but I don’t know. We’ll see.
Whether or not it works out, when it comes to my clients it’ll make me smarter. And I like having work as an excuse to play on the Internet.
I’ve spent a fair amount of time lately trying to redesign my blog, both the front end look and the back end guts. One of the projects that has yet to see the light of day is redoing my reviews blog. This blog was initially conceived of as a place to store my reviews and not have them clogging up this blog.
But reviewing stuff was too much work. I rarely did it.
I’ve been trying to find a way to make my review blog fun and useful again. One of my ideas was to take [yet another] page from kottke.org and add the functionality to rate each item being reviewed. So now a review could simply be the title and my rating. Fun and easy, assuming you can do cool stuff like sort by rating.
I redesigned my Archives page so it lists the months by year instead of a ridiculously long list using the MTArchivesDateHeader plugin (layout inspired by kottke.org). I might tweak it a bit more. I’d love to list the years in reverse chronological order (latest first) and the months in chronological order (Jan. to Dec.), but I haven’t figured that out yet. I bet I could with MTSQL, but it makes my poor brain hurt. Contrary to all this blog tweaking, I’m not a techie.
I’m also trying to add some pagination to the homepage using the Paged Archives plugin (I’ve been a bit plugin crazy lately). But it doesn’t work yet (sorry). One of my pet peeves with blogs is when you get to the bottom of the homepage and there aren’t any options to keep reading. It’s such a pain to have to scroll back up, find the archives, then scroll through all the entries you just saw to find your place again. Hassle. WordPress nicely offers pagination by default so you can just go to the next page. That’s what I hope to offer if I can get it to work.
Update: After some help from Alden Bates, the creator of the Paged Archives plugin, the pagination is back in business. Thanks Alden!
Part of communicating effectively about yourself is responding to criticism. Of course you need to do it in appropriate ways. Another pet peeve of mine (And I do tend to have a lot of them, don’t I? Sorry, blogging is just a nice way to get them out of my system. It means my wife doesn’t have to listen to me complain as much.) is when organizations respond to criticism effectively, but don’t use all the tools at their disposal.
JetBlue was the example I gave yesterday with their massive delays and response that didn’t quite filter through all their channels.
Another good example is (Product) Red. Last week a critical Ad Age article tore into (Product) Red the same time as a critical protest site was launched. Not a good week. And Red certainly responded. Bobby Shriver responded on the Red web site. He’s also been talking to the media.
But what’s the word on the official (Product) Red blog? Not much.
I just installed a new comment plugin which should eliminate spam and do away with the need for authentication with TypeKey (famous last words). It asks you to type in a word when you submit your comment to confirm that you’re a person and not some spamming robot bastard. We recently installed it on Church Marketing Sucks with amazing results, so I thought I’d give it a try here.
Let me know if you notice any errors or funkiness. My biggest pet peeve so far is that when you tab through the entry fields it skips the challenge question field. I’ll see if I can find a way to fix that.
You may notice other funkiness around the blog. I’ve been trying for weeks to get my category archives to rebuild without an error. I finally did it (by switching to dynamic category archives), but now I’m having dynamic publishing issues. If it’s not one thing it’s another. Since I am working on cobbled together templates, I’m tempted to just blow everything up and start over with new templates where everything is up to snuff. We’ll see.
Next on the blog redesign hitlist is the ever-expanding list of blogs I write for. I’d love to find a convenient and easy way to incorporate that stuff here. I imagine it involves something with RSS feeds, but I’m a writer and not a techie so we’ll see what works.
Until that happens, let’s hit some of the big numbers…
Well, I started redesiging my blog today. It’s actually less of a redesign and more of a ‘throw it at the wall and see what sticks.’ I added a new plug-in to show Flickr photos in the header (yes, we say goodbye to the fun, randomally loading pictures. It was too much work to add new ones) and tested that a bit to make sure it worked, but this morning I just went nuts and threw a few things together to mess with the layout.
It’s not a drastic change, but the header is vastly different and you can say goodbye to the left sidebar (I added it primarly for ad space, but I don’t need it and that location wasn’t that effective, so it went). I’m still toying with some ideas, but for the moment I’m finished. So if you see anything goofy, please speak up. I’m not exactly doing error-checking or taking a look on multiple browsers. This is my personal blog and I’m just too busy to care about that stuff.
We’ll see if the name ‘thoughts’ still sticks, or if gravity and the churn of time slowly peel it from the wall. I was thinking of maybe calling it Frank.
A work-at-home dad wrestles with faith, social justice & story.