blog.noetech.com

Domain change & others

I recently received an offer for my noetech.com domain, one that was too large to refuse. So, starting in January my weblog will be located at a new domain.

I went shopping for a new domain tonight and bought the following:

bug-a-lot.com
editschedule.com
endofproduction.com
postcable.com
posthumor.com
posttales.com
tommikkelsen.com
wow-post.com

Plus one secret one.

At this moment, I'm not sure which I'll actually promote as mine, but all will point to my weblog (along with greekok.com). While I'm switching domains, I'm also moving this blog over to my Typepad account. Even with all the recent trouble they've had, it will be nice to just have one thing going on.

So, for those of you who have a blog on my server / domain, you'll need to move to another service. My apologies for the inconvenience, but like I said, the money was good. If you need help, let me know and I'll be glad to move you.

Starting today, all my posts will be at my Typepad account. Get there now at greekok.com. Looking for votes for which of the above domains to use.

Hosting

My hosting company, Lunar Pages, has cut off my comments. Actually they did it a month or so ago, but I've been busy. Anyway, because I was being hit by a particularly bad spam attack and there was a bug with MT, there was a lot of extra load put onto the server. Too much for Lunar Pages. Until recently they have been the best host I've ever worked with, and I've worked with a lot. But recently, over the last year or so, they have become more hard lined, running PHP as a cgi, annoying, turning on PHP safe mode, even more annoying, etc.

At this point, I'm not sure it's worth hosting MT myself anymore. I'm thinking of using my Typepad account to host it all. Of course, the couple other weblogs hosted with my install would have to find a new place to live as well.

The only issue with moving to TP is loosing my Gallery install. I like it, and I'm not sure Typepad's photo galleries really replaces it. To be fair I haven't used it much, so maybe it's improved recently.

Then there's Flickr, which is all the rage.

Been Busy

I've been neglecting this site lately, sorry about that. I had some problems with my Movable Type install, and I didn't have the time to fix it until today. Turns out it's something with the Atom index template, which is now turned off until I can figure out what exactly it is.

WOW Report

Is mentioned in the NY Post today. To bad we had to remove the post.

Comment Spam

I have been being spammed for two days straight now. You would think this guy would notice that none of his posts make it to the site. Ug.

Lawsuit over Comments?

A women named Pola Muzyka has threatened legal action against me if I don't remove a comment she left on an entry I made about Caligola last year. Here's the correspondence so far, via email:

Pola:

Is this your site? I need to delete a comment I made a few months ago. How do I do that? Do I have to contact an attorney, do you know who owns this site, or will you be able to delete it?

Blessings,
Pola

Pola Muzyka, MTD
Christian Media News (Alliance)
Web: www.christianmediaalliance.com
Web: www.christianmediaalliance.org
E-mail: info@christianmediaalliance.com

Pola Muzyka, MTD
Christian Media News (Alliance)

Me:

Where did you leave the comment, what post and what name was it under?

--
Tom Wolf
tnoe@mac.com
http://blog.noetech.com
http://www.greekok.com
http://worldofwonder.net

Then she sent me copies of the comments

Me:

I'm going to leave those comments on my site, I don't see any reason to remove them.

Pola:

Well, then it looks like I'll have to have them legally removed. Sorry. I'm a writer and there are many typo's there. I don't know who wrote that and why but I'll get to the bottom of it and I believe that forgery is illegal even over the internet.

Me:

In your first email, you claimed your wrote it. You have no legal standing to have it removed, but have fun trying.

Notice how she at first claims to have written the comment, but now claims it was written by someone else and that it is a forgery.

I guess the easiest thing to do is to remove the comment, but I don't like being told to change something on my site, especially by someone who wrote it and posted it knowingly. If she had claimed that it was someone acting as her in the first place, then I may have removed it or added to the post mentioning it, but that's not what she did. She only mentioned the forgery after I told her I didn't see a reason to remove the comments. If anyone has any experience with something like this, I would love to hear it.

*Update* A few more emails

Pola

I didn't write it. It was a comment I made to a private party. Not a comment to be published on your site or any one else's site. It was not an interview. It was just a comment I made to someone. Who put this on your site?

I don't know who you are and my grief is not with you, unless you don't remove my personal information immediately. Whoever put that comment on your site had no business to do so. They made it look as though I did it and it includes multiple errors.

Let it be known that I am insisting that you remove my personal information immediately, this day August 5th, 2004.

Me

Well, if you did say it, then it is not a forgery, it's a quote, correctly attributed I might add.

I have no way of knowing who posted that comment.

Pola

I said the comment but not to you, and I said it in private. It was written incorrectly and quoted incorrectly. It is not accurate, as I said before. Whoever put it there, had no business putting my name to it. The fact that you are continuing to hold incorrect information on your site even after you've been told to remove it by the person it slanders, makes it wrong. Check your provider rules.

While now the comment is slander...not sure how that works as she admits to having said it. Anyway, I'm done, I don't care. If they want to sick a lawyer on me fine, then I'll just remove the fucking thing. Until then, it stays. But she can leave a comment saying she didn't write the others, really I don't know why she just doesn't do that?

Site Fixes

I have a hard time getting motivated to work on my site, after all the time I spend on the WOW report, I just don't want to come home and look at any more html or php. But I finally had some time to make some long overdue fixes. I've updated to MT 3.01D and fixed the TypeKey registration, I had broken it awhile back when I tried to do something, can't remember what.

While I was at it I finally fixed my Gallery installation, no more 500 errors. My hosting company changed the PHP installation to run as a cgi for security reasons and in the process it broke my Gallery install. A few additions to php.ini later, and all is better.

The WOW Report

The WOW Report has a new look. Remember to refresh. Much better and cleaner, if I do say so myself. While you're at it, check out yesterday's time-lapse video. At 6:14:36 PM you can see Angelyne's signature pink Corvette, but it's in just one frame. Get it while you can, it's only up to midnight pacific time.

Mobile Blog

My mobile blog is up and running now thanks to my T616. You can find it at www.greekok.com. Now to just added it to my side bar here, along with albums from my Gallery install.

One of these days...

Mobile Blog

I received my Sony Ericsson T616 today, and so far I love it. I have stumbled upon one problem though, I can't get it to work with my TypePad account. When I send an email from the phone, it never gets posted even though it works from my desktop.

Not that I really need a mobile blog (refuse to call it moblogging), but I do have a TypePad account I might as well use.

Comment Registration

I've upgraded my templates to work with TypeKey, but it doesn't work at the moment. My MT install is hosted on a different domain than my weblog here and apparently there's some work that you need to do:

If you sign in to TypeKey from a comment page and are not recognized when you return, you may need to enable the DynamicComments option in your mt.cfg file. This applies to you if your Movable Type application is accessed under a different domain from your weblog. For example, if you access Movable Type at http://www.somehosting.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt.cgi but your weblog is viewed at http://www.myweblog.com/, then you will have the problem described above. In this case, you should simply add the line:

DynamicComments 1

to your mt.cfg configuration file. Note that you may also need to make changes to your default templates for this mode to be successfuly.

The key part here is the possible changes to the default templates. They don't tell you what they are, just letting you know they may need to be done. Nice. I'm sure I can find out the details in the forums, but they really should have the info here.

*UPDATE*

That was quick, it's fixed now. Just need to add plain old noetech.com to my TypeKey domain setup.

MT 3.0

Because of the 50% discount for beta testers I decided to upgrade to MT 3.0. Nothing too exciting, new interface and more commenting options. I'll be adding the ability to sign on using Typekey soon, but I still leave the comments open to unregistered users. I don't get many comments anyway. Unless you count my Overhaulin' post.

Color Change

Thanks to bordem, I bring you a small color change to the site. I'm not that happy with it, but I'm tired and don't want to fiddle any more.

You may have to refresh to see the changes, especially if you're using Safari.

Gallery

I'm in love with Gallery, especially since I found iPhotoToGallery. It' couldn't be simpler to upload an Album now. Now I really need to get off my ass and figure out how to integrate into MT so I can list them here in the sidebar.

Here's my newest album, even if the pics where taken last summer.

Mena's Request

In response to Mena's "How are you using the tool?" request.

On my personal site, noetech.com, I use 8 weblogs and six users. I have three weblogs for my sisters, three for friends, though two of those haven't been updated in a long time, and I have two. One of which is private and used read only by me.

The $129 cost is too high for what I use it for. I would pay $60 but the features are just not there for much more. And of course I'm not going to kick my family off their blogs :-)

Visiting Friends

I installed Gallery at Lee's suggestion. I had used it awhile ago for a project, but I totally forgot about. This maybe the solution I'm looking for.

I through up an album of pics of this weekend with my friends visiting from Chicago. I wonder if there is a way for me to rig it so there is a side column with recent albums. I know I can do it by hand but rigging up a second blog and including it...

Weblog Options

So I'm really trying to decide what to do for my future blogging needs. What I really want is an easy way to do photo albums. I've contemplated building a photo blog with MT, but that's not what I'm really looking for. I want albums, the ability to upload multiple images at a a time and all that. I was hoping MT 3.0 would offer that, along with Typelists as well, but no such luck.

I did get a free copy of Expression Engine, and although feature rich, it's too much for my needs and the others that have blogs on my MT install. I will consider using it for future commercial projects though. It would have been great for the WOW Report. With MT's lack of sub-categories and I to use 11 weblogs to build the site.

But I digress, what to do for this site? So here's an option. TypePad. I'm resistant for several reasons, I already have a hosting account that I pay for and I use subdomains for the other weblogs on the system. If I made the switch it would only be for my weblog and it would need another domain, because I'm not going to use thomas.typepad.com and I can't move noetech. Now that's not such a bad thing, I don't like noetech.com, but all my permalinks will change. On the other hand, TypePad is making a lot of progress feature-wise.

So this is what I'm going to do, I'm going to activate my TypePad account, I get 3 months free anyway for being a beta tester, and start really playing with it. I'll see if I can live without the few plugins I use and no Kung-Tunes. If I decide that I like and can live with the limitations, I'll move this blog over. I'll leave the other hosted here though.

Using TypePad just for the photo albums is always a option too.

Movable Type 3.0

Six Apart has updated their licensing to help calm it down. They took care of some of the big things, but left one that will still keep me from using it, the price. With the new terms, the cost to run my setup did drop, but it's still going to cost $150, or $120 introductory price. This is still way too much for a blog tool with that many limits. It's just not competitive.

And $100 bucks to go from the free version to the lowest paid one? I also don't think their post was forthcoming enough, nor did it make it clear that they understand what the problems are.

MT 3.0

To tell you the truth, I feel lied to. When they said that Movable Type 3.0 would remain free and that there always would be a free version, I just assumed that I would be able to continue to use MT like I have been. I guess I did assume, but they really should have let everyone know that the free version would have major limits. Maybe I was naive, but I thought for sure they would keep the scheme where commercial pays, personal is free.

It's not like I'm cheap, I'll gladly pay a fair price for software I use, but this is too much. I can't even try out MT 3 on my machine without paying for it, or paying for a second database (well I guess I could use Berkley DB) because I'm over the limits in the free version.

To suddenly start charging this much with only adding one major feature? I just don't know what they were thinking. There is now way I'm going to pay $150 to keep using MT as I have been, with the only noticable improvements being comment management. And that's for my personal site.

For my company's site the cost just went from $150 to $600 minimum. In reality it probably would be more, as we have an internal blog with more than 20 users. You have to ask for a quote if you have more than 20 authors and 15 weblogs. Even though most people only have that many weblogs in order to work around missing features in MT, which version 3.0 didn't add.

The developer contest seems like a weak attempt to get real features in MT before the final release.

Of course Typepad is an option, but I hate using hosted services. I want complete control over my content. Not to mention my domain name and subdomains. I would also need an account for each of my friends and family that currently host on my domain. And I'm not so sure how much I trust Six Apart anymore.

Expression Engine is looking better everyday. At least they are adding features people are looking for. And if MT 3 is $150, what the hell are they going to charge for MT Pro if it ever makes it out?

UPDATE:

I read a comment on MT 3's new pricing structure somwhere, I can't remember where now, comparing it to when Blogger released Blogger Pro. It's not anywhere close to the same. When Blogger Pro came out, they added features to make it Pro, they didn't suddenly add limitations on to Blogger. Six Apart has taken their product and stripped off really important features to make the free version. They should have done what Blogger did, and add new features that are only available on the paid version... oh yeah, isn't that what MT Pro was supposed to be? What are they thinking?

And another thing, they say that they won't charge again until the next major upgrade. The problem is that they consider MT 3 a major upgrade even though it's missing almost every feature that I've heard people requesting for the last year, so who's to say what they'll charge for.

B-list Celebs getting beat

The WOW Report had quite the exclusive today. If you like watching B-list celebs getting their ass kicked, this is the video for you.

It was such a popular video that the Drudge Report linked to us, but within minutes of listed there our site took a big dump. Turns out that our hosting provider wasn't ready for the traffic that a link like that would generate. After talking with them, it turns not to be the bandwidth or the server load, rather it was the concurrent connections. It seems that they build Apache for only 200 or so concurrent connections. After the link we were getting about 500 to 600. Not good apparently. So they rebuilt Apache so it can handle 500. Unfortunately, we didn't get to test it because the Drudge Report pulled the link.

Too bad really.

TypeKey and Movable Type 3.0

Honestly, I don't know what all the hubbub is about. Something has definitely changed in the weblog community. People just don't seem to trust Six Apart anymore. They offer a for profit product and suddenly they're Microsoft? Not that questioning the service is bad, questions are always good, but it seemed to get out of hand over the weekend (give 'em a break, let them have their freakin' weekend). You would think, or at least I would, that people would wait until the service was released before condemning it to hell.

I don't see myself using TypeKey anyway (though I reserve the right to change my mind). In my small town blog world I don't get many comments, and MT 2.661's throttle feature takes care of most of my spam. Combine that with MT 3.0's improved comment management, and I think I'll be fine.

It does seem that Six Apart, or Mena at least, is getting a little snippy. Good for them/ her.

World of Wonder

World of Wonder's new site is up and going now. Stephen Saban, from Details fame, is writing a weblog about WOW, pop culture, and the bizarre. I'm just glad the whole thing is done. It's taken a surprising amount of my time over the last few months.

We've been doing it internally for a while now. In fact the first entry was on February 2nd. Anyway, check it out if you're so inclined.

And if someone can tell me why the search field is unclickable in Safari, but not any other browser, I would kiss them.

A Friend Returns

Rob has finally returned to the blog world. Though he could use an updated style sheet.

CSS Goodness

Did you know you can set minimum and maximum width in CSS? I didn't. Learning something new each and everyday. It comes just in time for a work in progress. Now I'm guessing that the javascript is needed because IE/Win doesn't follow the min-width attribute? It would be nice if you didn't have to resort to scripts, but still it's a pretty elegant way around the problem.

A Great Lunch

It came up at work today that I haven't been posting here that much. When asked why I said that there just hasn't been that much for me to talk about. I was then corrected and told that I tell them all kinds of stories. So to rectify, here is the lunch I had the other day that was so good I couldn't stop smiling all afternoon.

Now that I live so close to work, I often go home to eat. On the first day I went home I had a PB&J, apple sauce and chips. I know it doesn't sound like much, but it was so good. I felt like I was in grade school again, and that's the best feeling you can have. I wish I always felt that good and stress free.

Internet Access

Finally I can stop using the dial-up here at home. My only complaint is that the DSL is PPPoE, even though I was told it wasn't. I hate PPPoE, for no good reason, but still, I hate it.

With my broadband connection up you will notice a few things come back to life on this site. Mostly the web-cam pic and recent music. It's nice to be back on my own computer. The laptop is nice and all, but I need some screen to stretch out on. I do miss the keyboard though.

New Toys

My boss received a T-Mobile Sidekick as a Christmas present. As the tech guy, I''m setting it up for him. I want one, I want one, I want one! If for nothing else than the spinning screen. With the data only plan only costing $30 a month, I may just have to get it. I live by my email and how great would it be to be able to get it anywhere.

I do have one question about it though. When it grabs your email, does it leave a copy on there server? This is a must, I don't want my email spread all over the place. I would just play with it and find out, but I'm still waiting for it to "Activate". How long does this take? I need to play with the toy.

I'm also curious about using it to blog. I wonder if I can view the Movable Type application with it? I know some people have set up email blogging with MT, but I'm not sure I have the time to do something like that.

Lacking, in almost everything

I just went to my site (just took look at it, I know I'm vain) and it was a sad, sad site. Blank, just nothing.

I just haven't had the energy to write anything lately. I have been a little overwhelmed with work for the last couple of weeks and my person life has taken a back seat. Which is probably good, I would just get depressed anyway.

Time to Change

I haven't really been updating this site too much lately. I think a redesign might get me back into it again. Nothing much, just a a few color changes.

I'm thinking blue and yellow. Just for Josh.

In Town

At long last I have arrived in LA. The trip was rather uneventful. I took it nice and slow, driving about 10 hours a day. I'm now in lots of pain. My back and knees are killing me.

I stayed in Tulsa, then Albuquerque, and finally Las Vegas. Coming in to Las Vegas you drive over the Hover Dam. That was probably the most exciting thing on the whole trip.

I'm staying in West Hollywood with a friend of the family. It's nice to have my own room, with a computer in it no less. Even if it's a Gateway.

Now I'm off to look for a place to live. I'm hoping to find something quick. I don't want to impose to long on my gracious host.

TypePad Goes Public

Now that Six Apart has started talking about TypePad I'm free to do the same. I'm not going to go over all the major features, you can read about them on their site, but I have a few things to say (my Typepad blog).

It's good to be a baby, or a beta tester.

TypePad is going to be a new weblog tool from Six Apart, the makers of the great and godly MovableType.

Being the lucky man that I am, I was chosen as a beta tester of the new service. You can find my TypePad weblog here, but it's pretty much just like this one, even the content for now. I may use it for something else, but I'm not entirely sure yet. We shall see.

Weird Site Activity

For the past two nights I've been getting a lot of hits from one address, some where around 700 page views in less than an half hour. The user agent is listed as "Microsoft URL Control -6.00.8862".

Anyone have any clue what this is?

Charitable Thomas

Ollie and Etan are both talking about the ads that Google's Adsense program would run on their sites. Ollie will sell you Apple Computers and services, and Etan a NY Times subscription as well as blog software.

Me? I'd be selling the Peace Corps, Habitat for Humanity, Donating to Charity, American Cancer Society and the National PTA. Well I guess selling isn't the right word, maybe fund raising.

I'm a little surprised, and I think the National PTA would be to. Apparently I have incredibly generous readers :-)

Find out what Google would place for you here.

Slow, Busy

Not too long ago Etan wrote about how everyone's sites were quiet and how his comments had vanished. I noticed it as well. The amount of people coming to my site definitely dropped around then. That is until last friday when I got six times the amount page views than the day before. And it's still staying high.

Just thought that was kinda weird.

A Redesign

With all the redesigning going on recently I just couldn't resist. I've wanted to have a fixed size layout for awhile and I was never very happy with the three column layout. I also wanted to add a little color. Hopefully they look dull and grayed out like they do on my monitor. I've never been a big fan of bright colors. I need to do something with the titles to get them to stick out more.

So far I really like the look, but it seems a little standard to me. I may have to do some work to make it more my own.

The layout has only been test with Safari, Camino and IE for Mac.

I have to give credit were credit is do. Erik and Jeremy Hedley's sites gave me the idea for a fixed size. You know I couldn't have thought of it :-)

Blogroll

Thanks to Rick Klau I have a new way to mangage my blogroll. Instead of using blogrolling, I can now use Movabletype itself. I no longer have to depend on another service that may go down. Hopefully this will keep load times down as well for people who have slower connections.

My Brain

I'm so frustrated! I changed my badge area a little last night and for some reason I can't figure out why the top two badges are pushed to the right more than the others. It must be something really simple that I'm just missing. If someone knows why I will love you forever and ever.

Update: Thanks to Walker all is fixed. I will love you forever and ever, don't you worry :-)

Cleaning Up

A little house cleaning was in order for my link collection. I prefer to link only to sites I read everyday or close to it. I can't read sites that haven't been updated, so everyone that hasn't updated recently was removed. To my friends who have lost their not so important space, put something up and you shall return.

RSS

I just changed my RSS 1.0 feed to include the full body of my posts (excluding extended entry). The 2.0 RSS will still be just the excerpt for those that prefer it. This probably has caused my entries to show up as new in your readers, sorry about that. If I find some time, I'll make a 1.0 and a 2.0 for each type. I'm not sure that it matters though.

Applescript fun

Can I just say how much I love Applescript?

Problem: My hosting provider, although great, has a problem with their stats. They never seem to be run with any consistency. Sometimes it can be days in between updates. Plus their copy of Webalizer isn't setup to my liking. It doesn't filter out my site, so of course, my pages are always the top referrers. They do offer raw log files though...

Solution: A very simple applescript that uses Transmit to download the log file into the appropriate folder. It than runs a shell script that runs Webalizer with my settings. The script than opens up the stats page in Safari for me.

Now this is simple and people do much more impressive things with it, but it turns a multiple step process into one quick one for me.

Searches

While looking through the list of search terms people used to reach my site, I came across this one: partial birth abortion; pics. When you look at the other searches including pics you (or maybe it's just me) get a very sick image in your head.

Some other fun ones:
Bike Porn
pumpkin christina ricci nipples
noe pics nipples - who wants pics of my nipples :)

Layout

The three columns have grown on me a little so for the now they will stay. I was hoping that I would be able to help Etan by figuring out how to make the columns percentages, but alas, I failed. Web development has never been my strong suit. If anyone has a suggestion, please suggest away.

New Layout

Well I was right, I couldn't resist adding another column. I don't think I like it though. Actually I'm almost postive I don't. I will let it stay for a few days to see if it grows on me.

Archives

I changed where my archives are stored to give it some order. If you have linked to a post of mine it would be great if you could update them. A quick search of the title will give you the new link. I'll leave the old pages up for awhile so links don't break. Sorry for any inconvience. I just had to completely ignore the advice that Erick Barzeski gives about not changing your archives.

_blank

Because of this, I am going to stop having my links open in new windows. He is right, advanced users know how to open new windows when clicking links, and the rest know who to use the back button. I will have to through all my pages and remove the _blank target. Boring, but it is something to-do.

New Style

I whipped up a new style for the site tonight. You can see it being tested here. I'm not sure I like it, kinda boring. I will have to sleep on it. Let me know what you think. I'm sure I will tinker with it some more in the next few days.

Oh yeah, not every page will look right, take a look at the comments for example. If I decide to use this new style I will fix it of course.

MovableType

I just upgraded to version 2.6 of MovableType. All seems to have gone well. I basically replaced some files. Very easy. I was a little nervous. No need to be. Not sure if there is an particular feature that I wanted, but it is always fun to be an early adopter.

Search terms

I was just taking a look at the stats for this site and one of the terms used to get here was "joe millionaire bj". That is funny. What is even funnier is that my site is on the 5th page for that search.

Why and How I moved

Now that I finished the move to MovableType, I thought I would tell you why and how I made the move.

Archives

I just noticed that Blogger lost all my post before September of this year. Now there were only a few, but still that blows.

Change Over

As you can see, I changed the site again. I know, I know. I moved to a new publishing system, MoveableType. This gives me a lot of new features including comments. I decided to move it over before finishing the layout to match the old site. I'll be working on that this week and should have it completed by the end of the weekend.

*update*
Turns out I spent most of the night updating the style sheet, so it looks right now. Just need to do the multiple styles.

Internet Explorer:Mac

So I know the new site doesn't look right in IE/Mac. It just doesn't get CSS right. It looks perfect in either Mozilla/Netscape 6+ and Safari. You should be using one of those anyway. On the PC side, I don't know what it looks like. Mozzilla will look fine, but let me know if IE looks bad.

Site additions

Several new site additions today. First, a re-branding. No longer csene.com (who really new what that meant anyway), now blog.noetech.com. Plus two new blogs. One for movies that I've seen, the other for the books I've read. Just thought it would be nice to keep a documented list of the books I've read and the movies I've seen. Plus what I thought of them at the time. I got the idea from Ev. These new sites also fit into the new branding, movies.noetech.com and books.noetech.com.


PS I'll keep pointing csene.com here for the foreseeable future.

The site

Last changes to the site were made tonight. I added the color style for those who want to spice it up a bit. Just adds a color background. The other change is bringing the archives to the front page. Much nicer I think. The only problem is that for some reason I can't get it to move down and line up with the start of the first post, where it would look best. Isn't CSS supposed to make this easy? I tell you. I do plan on doing one more style just for fun. I promise not to post about it though. And there will be slight changes to the color schemes. But like I said, last major changes.

CSS playtime

Well I've changed the layout a lot today. I kept the same color scheme and basic placement. I mostly did this so I could have a clean start with my style sheets. There are now two different styles to choose from on the top; Dark and Lighter. They need some refinement as far as color goes though. Anyway have fun switching between. The site now rights a small cookie to your computer so it remembers which style you prefer. Neat right? Anyway, remember to check them now and again as I'm sure they will be updated. I may even add one with some color.

RSS

Just added a RSS feed for the site. You can pick it up here. In order to do this, I had to add a title to my posts. I don't really like them. Right now it's the light grey above and to the left. I will have to work on the layout to make it look better. This afternoon maybe.

New color

The new color scheme is up. Much better. Although I can hear it already, "it's to boring". I'm chatting away with Heidi....chat chat chat.

My iTunes

You will notice that I started again with listing the currently playing song. This time it's automatic. I have a program running on my local machine which checks to see what song is playing. If it changes it writes the name and artist to a plain text file and uploads that to my server. Then using a simple include, the text is entered into the site. Yeah!

Stay tuned for a complete redo of the site. To many people have complained of the colors. Now I don't like them.

The site

Well I did my first update to my website. Very small. Instead of the long list of links on the left, I made some popup menus. I hope they look and work better. I looked at the site for the first time on a PC the other day and noticed that the text of my entries is justified to the right. At least it does in IE on XP. I'll look into it in the next few weeks.

Up?

You may or may not be able to access my site over the holidays. My work said they were going to shutdown the power to our building. This of course would shutdown our webserver. It is still up today so I think we talked them out of it. We shall see.

Viewers

I just received my first email from someone who reads this site. It is nice to know that it gets read outside the family. It is also nice to receive good advice.

So I wrote my dad back yesterday. I hope that it starts an open communication. I do wish that he had his own email address, it is hard enough to write, even harder to know what I say isn't private. Dad, if you would let me, I would be happy to setup a online email account for you on hotmail.

Site

I have now updated the blog to include direct links to posts. Soon I'll actually have something to say.

New Server

If your reading this post then you are on my new server. I moved my website to a server running Mac OS X Server I set up at work. It gives me better control, plus Blogger was having a problem posting to my old setup. Hopefuly this will be problem free, but let me know if you have problems accessing the site.

Blogger Pro

I just finished upgraded to Blogger Pro which allowed me to add my old posts and give them the correct date and time. So if you use the archives link on the top of the page it will lead you to all my posts since July.

CSS

Changed it some more. I'm using CSS now for some borders. This would be the first time I've ever used them so bare with me while I try to make it actually look good. God that calendar needs serious help.

Updated

The site has been updated for the first time now. Just a couple additions. I took a look at some people's blogs and got a idea of the "standard" way they work. More to come.

The Start

I built my site today. It will have to do for now. Certainly needs a lot of work, but it's a start. I'm to tired today to think of the things that I like so the link list is very short. I also need a logo I think. Now I already have a Filemaker datebase journal that I will have to get to export to this template. That will allow me not to have to dup my writings. If anyone has any suggestions for this email me and let me know. I'll be adding some other sections soon. Probably just a pics sec. at first. We shall see what else. Just wanted to mention my new favorite band at the moment, The Faint. Great 80's revival?