Category: Blogging & Internet

Well, mail seems to be (finally) flowing once again. My nose, on the other hand, has reduced its (over)flowing. So my life should return to normal as of tomorrow. Huzzah.

My mail is most distinctly down. I’ve set up the new accounts on Averdata properly, as far as I can tell. Trying to access mail produces no error. Mails I send to that address (dave@hill-kleerup.org) don’t bounce. It all falls into a black hole …

This, of course, comes at the extremely convenient moment when I’m feeling like crap, and when Margie needs to get the mails that are forwarded from her office to her hill-kleerup address. Timing is all.

I have an e-mail (from my davehill47@earthlink.net account) in to Averdata, but haven’t heard back from them. There’s no phone number on the page to contact them directly (grrrr). I’ll see what happens.

Anyway, anyone who reads this who actually wants to contact me should try the Earthlink addy. That seems to be working. For the moment ….

Okay, maybe that was a bit labored ….

I’ve evidently relearned enough HTML to be able to program up the template I’m now using. Not that HTML is anything special to write home about. And therein lies the problem.

See, it’s clear that if I’m going to do some really cool stuff, I’ll have to do something more sophisticated. I’ll have to use (cue drum roll) Cascading Style Sheets (cue crash of thunder and ominous brass chords).

I’ve done a little peeking around at other blogs. And, frankly, these guys (and gals) scare me, ’cause they’re a lot better at this than I’ll ever be. Of course, a lot of them do it for a living. And a lot of others have No Life and are willing to stay up until the crack of dawn screwing around with this stuff.

Still, it’s a little humbling.

On the other hand …

… is what I have functional? Yeah. Does it look nice? I’d like to think so. Is there anything I want to do with it that I can’t do now? Well, aside from loading in under 15 seconds, no. (And part of that is that I’ve been posting so much and keeping at least two weeks online.)

So do I really have to go to a multimedia extravaganza?

Probably not.

But it would be nice to think I could.

The archive stuff is magically working again. I suspect (given the debugging I did, before giving up and using another method) that it was my fault, not some strange, arcane, Blogger problem.

Anyway, the cool Java drop-down menu (along with other, more “normal” options) can be found here, courtesy of Phil Ringnalda, with discussion on the general topic of reformatting archive files into a more aesthetic form to be found here.

And now for something completely different (thank God) …

Okay. Mostly my bad.

Clearly the template editing processes is doing some interpreting or compling of the template as it is saved. So, for example, you cannot save a template that does not have a [Blogger] or [/Blogger] tag, or lacks that section altogether. Which is what was happening (I left off the closing tag).

Only mostly my fault because, well, jeez, folks, interpreters/compilers have been giving meaningful error messages for, well, decades now. You don’t just say, “Huh, doesn’t fit the format, so lah-dee-dah, we’ll just pretend he never hit save.”

Now I just have to keep tweaking it so that it all fits on the screen and so that it loads in something less than five minutes. I have to do something about my nested tables, clearly.

Took the opportunity of the Broncos being on Monday Night Football to update my Blogger template.

Looks really neat.

Alas, for some reason I seem to be unable to update my existing template to the New, Improved, Very Green Thing.

I open up the Edit Template window, copy in the text from my text editor, all looks well, and, hey presto, publish … and back to the old version. Open up the template editor, and the old template is still there.

I’m not sure if I’m doing something stupid, if Blogger is doing something stupid, or what. If anyone has any immediate hints, let me know. Meantime, I’ll give it a try in the morning.

My archive listing code has broken, for reasons unknown to me. Please stand by.

I took down the links to my home page(s), largely because they really aren’t finished yet, and I don’t want folks to be wandering in until I’ve picked up the toys from the floor and done the dishes stacked in the sink.

Or maybe we will if the “Mail me” code below works. It’s not real comments (and won’t be, until I move my ISP), but it will at least allow folks who think I’m really keen (or full of crap) to let me know that.

Rey has a blog.

I’ve put a picture of me and Katherine at the top of the page. It’s so cute I could scream. It’s main (and glaring) flaw is that it ignores my Better Half. If I can get an equally fun one of Margie and me (or even the three of us together), I’ll put that up instead.

I am a cheapskate. At least when it comes to the Net. I hate to spend any money that I don’t have to for a “hobby.”

So the next thing on my Blogger wish list is a way to get comments. A few reasons. I want to know that somebody is reading this stuff. And I want the opportunity to explore some of the topics further.

Big problem: so far all the commentary stuff I’ve seen requires server-side services, and, being a damned cheapskate, I’m on the cheapest, barest-bones hosting plan I can get. So no SSI, no PHP, no ASP. So far, I seem to be SOL.

Doyce says he has another cheap host in mind. Of course, he said he’d e-mail me about it, too, so …

Blogvision

An expansion of the theme below (i.e., from earlier today) on how having a blog has an impact on things.

I was driving off to my golf game on Saturday, and I noticed myself … noticing things. Hmmm. Light rail — that’s neat. Gotta write about that. Oh, look, folks queued up at the light rail station to go to the game. Hah — idiots! Y’know, they don’t have gravel igloos like CDOT has here back in Southern California — I remember how amused I was when I first saw them. I should share that. Gotta talk about my ring finger some time, too. And so forth.

They say that the best way to learn to write is to write. When you are going to write, it makes you think about writing. When you’re going to be blogging observations about the world about oneself, it makes you observe said world.

Perhaps we need to encourage more politicians to blog.

So a man walks into a blog …

(That wasn’t meaningful, but the phrase occured to me, and I wanted to use it).

Doyce raised the issue over in his blog of why those who write blogs do it. Rather than simply comment over there, I’ll comment here — since I have this damned page and can do with it as I like.

On one level the reasons are probably as varied as there are people doing it, if not moreso. But for myself, the following come to mind:

Narcissism. There’s something terribly self-important about the idea of writing one’s personal opinions and experiences and posting them out there in the Internet for the entire frickin’ global community to read. I mean, what an ego-boost. And what presumption, that one’s inner thoughts (edited to whatever degree one does) are actually worthy and entertaining enough to be so posted.

(Digression. One day when I was in 6th Grade, we got back our little packet of school pictures — the individual kind. They came, of course, with a flimsy little cardboard frame. I noticed some folks putting their 5×8 self-portrait into their frame and putting it on their desk. I thought this was amusing, so I went them one better, and put my sheet of wallet-sized shots into the frame, so that, Andy Warhol/Op-Art-like, there were several shots of me gazing outward sedately. One of the neighboring 6th Grade teachers, Mrs. Snyder, who was something of a wag and who knew me because of my zany intellectual hi-jinx with one of her students, happened to spot this and dubbed me Narcissus on the spot. She even clipped a New Yorker cartoon of Narcissus gazing into the pool, while his girlfriend asks, “Narcissus, is there someone else?” and gave it to me. Today, of course, she’d be be sued, fired, and probably tarred and feathered. At the time, it was a useful, if odd, lesson for me, not to mention an anecdote for my future blogging.)

On a more innocuous plane, it’s push communication. I could write a lot of this stuff (“How I Spent My Labor Day”) in e-mails to people. It’s simpler, in some ways, to blog it. Of course, I don’t really know if anyone (aside from a very few people) actually read this, so it may not be being pushed very far.

It’s journaling. In other words, it doesn’t matter who’s reading it, as much as that I am writing it. There’s probably some of that, but I could do it a lot more simply in another format, and without worries of who might be reading it restraining me from commentary on certain items. (It occured to me, as we were going through our Buffyfest this weekend, that Dawn ought to be journaling in a blog, with appropriate hilarity ensuing.)

Perhaps, in the long run (as Meery Berry implied in her comments to Doyce), there’s not much different between what drives one to write a blog, and what drives one to write. All of the above could apply to writing a novel, a textbook, or a poem. Or, for that matter, in a more abstract fashion, sculpting, painting, or spraying oneself with Cheeze Whiz and reading the phone book naked (made possible by a grant from the NEA). There’s the (necessary) Narcissism of believing one has something to say that is worth hearing. There’s the desire to promulgate information that can’t be sent out any other way. And there’s an element of self-therapy in working through thoughts and beliefs and ideals in another venue that offers its own opportunities (and pitfalls).

It’s worth more thought, one of these days.