Not that anyone was really asking, but I want to tell the few of you who aren't search engines and spiders, what I have been up to recently (and hey if the spiders are amused, all the better). It has been a very busy year so far for me and I have realized that too many of the posts on Alt Text recently, have been links to other sites, posts, and videos and a lot less of me. I'm not contending that people think I am all that interesting, but a side-effect of not talking about myself is that I have not been talking about things I am doing and things I care about, and this is perhaps effecting how much passion I have had for blogging. How can I ask you, the reader, to care about what I am writing here, if I have been less than passionate? The answer is, I can't. So I am hoping to start some more off-the-cuff style posts - perhaps putting less research into some topics, but also adding more of my own personality.
So what have I been up to? As I was saying it has been a very busy, but also a very fulfilling and, in many ways, extraordinary year so far. The first thing to note is that I co-founded a company with my friends, Scott and Jesse. My work as part of Refactr has been rewarding and fun. We have developed a product that we plan on releasing soon and we are working with a medical startup company to help them develop their flagship product. In addition to working in a very agile way we are leading the way in the Groovy/Grails development community by building a large application using this new language/framework.
To help foster community here at home in Minnesota, we have started the Groovy(and Grails) Users of Minnesota. Meetings are the 2nd Tuesday of each month. In late April, minnebar, the (un)conference I help to put on was a huge success with over 330 people spending a Saturday indoors geeking out. By all accounts, it was the second largest barcamp event in the world and the largest outside of India.
In addition to work and community related stuff, I have been playing volleyball and kickball this winter and spring. Jena and I threw a Cinco de Mayo party with her sister and husband that was quite fun and then my loving wife gt me a Wii for my birthday so I have been busy playing Wii sports like golf, tennis and bowling, as well as trying my luck with Super Paper Mario, Zelda, and Call of Duty 3.
I have had to turn comments off for the entire site for the time being. When I get back in town I plan to come up with a solution to the comment spam problem that has been plauguing the Alt Text server for a while now.
Nobody has taken me up on the offer of an "Alt Text Prize Pack"* and helped me to fix the dis-play of the accordion menu on the home page among others. I mentioned it in this post. Basically, the post explorer menu, is using part of the Script.acul.us/Prototype javascript library and should work just fine - I just can't figure it out why it isn't. Anyone see anything glaring in my CSS or the source of the page (that last link is Firefox only; IE users should just view source via normal methods) that I should fix?
Also I hope you have noticed less spelling errors lately as I have taken to using the built-in spellcheck that comes with the Google toolbar.
* Contents of the prize pack have not yet been determined but there will at least be an Alt Text t-shirt and a few other things.
Some of the quiet around here lately can be attributed to the fact that I have been trying to launch this new design before I decide that I hate it. I usually hate a design about a month or two after I create it and since this one was created more than 3 or 4 months ago I was running that risk. Fortunately, I think I still kinda like it. There are still numerous things to do but it more or less validates to the Strict XHTML 1.0 spec unless I do something dumb and add a post that screws it up. I plan on adding a couple more RSS feeds, and a couple more ways to explore posts (including by tag but I think I will wait for an upgrade to my Movable Type install to 3.3 for that.)
The one thing that has been killing me for a week is the accordion navigation menu, at right (middle column) in IE. It should work. It is part of the Script.acul.us/Prototype javascript library stuff and I have pulled it apart and tried it every which way, including seemingly exactly as it is implemented elsewhere and I just can't figure it out. That is why I am calling on the collaborative powers (and fresh eyes) of the internet to help me out. If anyone can see what the problem is with that, please let me know. There's an "Alt Text Prize Pack"* in it for you.
If you see anything else acting strangely (especially on Mac) please let me know. Oh, and if you use IE, stop it.
* Contents of the prize pack have not yet been determined but there will at least be an Alt Text t-shirt and a few other things.
Tonight was the 2nd meeting of what some* are terming the Twin Cities Social Capital Collective (SCC) and I want to give props to Jake Saba for getting this ball rolling. Between minnebar, SCC, and minnedemo, in September my little web and business communities in Minneapolis and Saint Paul are alive and brimming with excitement.
*Ok I was brainstorming ideas, and this was one of the ideas that came out of my brain but it was one of many :)
I have a feeling many good things are going to be coming out of these events and opportunities and am glad to see them growing. If you are interested in any of these events let me know in the comments and I will post more and/or write privately.
A couple housekeeping notes to clear up: 1) I temporarily launched a new version of Alt Text but then rolled it back when there was some bad mojo with IE. Stupid IE! 2) Some colleagues and I have put up refactr.com - a site devoted to the discussion and encouragement of the Agile method. That's a good little Agile method. Yes you are! I hope to start actively promoting the site soon, as soon, that is, as we fux some broke ass shit that's still there.
3) We have our fence up now at the house and are looking to get a 2nd dog any day now. Just trying to find the right pup on PetFinder.com. My preference would be a dog that is mid-to-large sized, scruffy and doesn't shed much.
Signing Statement: As producer of this weblog, I reserve the right to make shit up, ignore your requests for features and reports of bugs, treat you like children, make an ass of myself, and basically do any damn thing I please. I also reserve the right to drink while posting up in this bitch.
At the minnēbar conference in May I presented a session titled Agile Design (slides) and a great discussion ensued. The talk centered around the concepts and ideas of the Agile Method, but, you guessed it, as it related to information and visual design. I have had a great opportunity in my current role to help to define and evolve our process and practices surrounding software design and development. I love the team I work with and hope to continue breaking new ground with them.
I also wanted to post a bit about some ongoing and upcoming projects I am involved in so you know what I have been up to and what to expect.
First, I am planning to launch a new site with some peers of mine that will be focused on the agile method and particularly how it pertains to the development of "web 2.0" apps. You might think of it as a Signal vs. Noise type blog with less of a marketing spin.
I am also helping to plan OpenBar for the fall of 2006. OpenBar will pick up where minnēbar left off but its entire focus will be on open source software, using open source in your business, and is aimed at developing, enriching, and bringing together Minnesota's large but disjointed open source community.
I also have a Minnesota blog aggregation site brewing slowly, but my decision to write in Ruby and on the Rails framework (as my first foray into such technologies) is retarding my progress. Hopefully, I will post more on this soon.
Lastly, this site is on the verge of another facelift. I really like the new visual design a lot, but am more excited by some of the ways the new site will be organized as well as some of the additional features and content I will be adding. Not sure when this will happen, but I am hoping for a June launch.
Prefab homes are still garnering a lot of interest, especially amongst designers and like-minded folks. In fact, a designer friend of mine, Pete is building a home using Hive Modular (not to be confused with Hive Designs). The Flat Pak House is another firm I have covered here before but alas I cannot link to them because their site sucks and tries to control my browser and make it display full screen. Perhaps that is why "flat pak" is currently the largest search term leading people to Alt Text and why the Alt Text page is Google's first result as well. And there are several more variations that bring in a lot of traffic to my site (flat+pack+house+minneapolis and flat+pak+house). Not surprisingly, I think that the chronicling of my home building experience [posts and photo gallery] is giving me more credibility to Google and other search engines.
In a move that surely indicates boredom and a disregard for original thought, area blogger, Ben Edwards, blatantly rips off the new CNN International style. The style change could also have been said to have influences from Magnetbox.com and adhesive label tape. News at 11.
I have finally overtaken an obituary listing in Google searches for Ben Edwards. There ain't no stopping me now.
I have made some significant progress on some changes that have been long overdue for this site. First, as previously mentioned I have had a hard time with the "one-post" home screen design I implemented a while back and I realized that it, along with the fact that I did not have a good way of posting simple links to things, was really deterring me from posting. I felt I didn't want to knock a "good post" "off the front page" for simply a bunch of links, but then when I finally got around to posting the links they were past due and no longer as relevant or fresh as they could have been.
The changes I have put in place are probably not going to be as exciting to you as they are to me but they do allow me to post to any of 3 separate weblogs (alt text main, media consumption, and links) each with their own fields and stylings and have a post to any of these rebuild the indexes for all 3. This is going to improve a lot of the key-wording for entries and pave the way for another feature coming later this month to Alt Text concerning tagging. I can't be more specific right now...seriously I really can't.
The last two features I really want to add to improve my posting life immensely are: 1) setting up a scheduled posting service to run on the server and 2) and adding a new spell-checking plugin, MTSpeling (which I have done) that also requires a module be installed on our server to allow access to Ispell (which I need).
I finally succumbed and put all the recent posts "inline" here on the homepage of Alt Text. While I work through some more kinks regarding how to best post one off links and such (like the one below, feel free to check out some of my latest ratings of some media I have consumed (at right).
I love Defective Yeti and can relate to an entry like this.
I am having a bit of a tough time with this site lately. Its not just the lack of posts - which is correlated. Due to the format of the site (one-post showing at a time - unless you use the alternate version) I tend to leave posts up for a longer period of time so "all my visitors" get a chance to see it; not knowing if they will scroll down or navigate back to past posts. Additionally, I would like to post links to stories with little or brief commentary on them individually (that is not as a post of a larger "link post". This too, I am finding difficult with this design.
These reasons alone should be enough to convince me to rethink how the site is designed but I still "like" the aesthetics and some other aspects of this 1-post front page. I must figure something out soon, however. Each day that goes buy is a day (potentially) with more mis-categorized content (conglomerate link posts) and I am already dealing with more than 450 of those posts categorized as general because they are prior to when the categories were implemented. I hope to work through about 10 of those a day getting ready for another improvement to Alt Text regarding keywords and categorization that I hope to unveil at the start of '06.
Alt Text just had a birthday and I didn't do anything for it. I am a real bad daddy. I thought the least I could do then, is to devote a post to Alt Text, as sort of a belated birthday gift. Here are some figures that represent important milestones and/or bogus stats regarding the site I have called my home on the web for quite some time now:
1: Number of steps to Jason "I knew him when 0sil8 was alive" Kottke (very similar to the Kevin Bacon game) I used to work with him in Minneapolis.
2: Times Alt Text or ancestor site has been written up in print.
3: Separate "blogs" that make up Alt Text (Main posts, lists, and media consumption).
3: Also the number of jobs I have had during Alt Text's tenure.
4: Servers on which the site has been hosted. Oddly Alt Text has never been hosted on a "commercial server" and has always been a part of hosting co-ops where friends banded together to provide for one another.
7: Years Alt Text has been around (Domain was registered October 1st, 1998); Previous incarnations and ghost sites that are now "rolled into" Alt Text: BenOnFilm.com, aberro.com, and abberratum.com (all previously snatched up when they expired - now I have BenOnFilm.com back!). For you forward thinking domain snatchers out there AltText.com expires on September 30th, 2012 - mark your calendars.
10: Prior versions of this site (the first couple incarnations were from the aforementioned sites that were "folded into" this site).
77: Current number of draft posts stored up
496: Posts categorized as "general" to which I still need to apply categories.
1,152: Total number of posts
2,553: Unique visitors in January of 2001
40,915: Unique visitors in September of 2005 (though I suspect the greatly increased spider and bot traffic to be a main contributor to that figure).
Due to infrequent posts as of late I wanted to mention some of the things that have been keeping me away from the web lately. Living in Minnesota means taking advantage of god weather when you can get it and the end of the summer signals to me that it has been time to do something I have been holding off on doing. First came the landscaping, yard work and planting. Jena and I have built a stone fire pit and patio this summer, planted 40 or so plants here and there around the house, and had contractors come in to pour a new patio and re-grade a couple areas (prompting more rock moving and grass planting etc.). I still have some more projects too (ugh!): complete the wiring of some columns in the front of the house, attach rock/faux rock to said columns, and clean up from the previous projects.
In addition to yard work we have found time to take a couple trips. We just returned from 4 days in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area, which was great and over Labor Day Weekend we drove across South Dakota to the Black Hills and the Badlands for some camping and sight seeing.
Add to these things a major product release at work and a couple kickball leagues (yeah I said kickball) and there is precious little time to surf and post. Rest assured, however that as the weather here in Minnesota gets worse the posting frequency will increase as I am quite excited about the web and Alt Text lately.
Per yesterday's admission that there are some flaws with the new Alt Text design, I have made some tweaks to the interface — some of which were planned for some time — and some that are new.
First the new: I have added an alternate index link just below the tabbed navigation at the top of the page to accommodate some folks who would prefer the old style of full-text postings displayed chronologically all on a single page. In addition to this I have added a previous ad next post link on all individual post archive pages — something that was planed but to lazy to add.
Unrelated: I also brought back the link preferences setting where you can determine if external links open in the same window or a new window as well as the rudimentary rss feed that still needs to be cleaned it up (a lot).
I am hoping these changes satisfy some folks for a time — unfortunately they won't satisfy me as most of the same issues I posted about yesterday still apply.
I must admit that the new design of Alt Text is a bit limiting to me, especially, when considering the way I want to post. I am trying to figure out some ways to get around it, but right now Alt Text just isn't set up for the type of linking to interesting things that I have been doing lately. Of course, I knew this while I was designing and implementing the new design but I thought that I would just expand on a link here and there and turn them into real (single) posts (rather than in bunches). Then a strange thing happened. I wanted to post more often than once per day, introducing yet another drawback of this design...it is harder to browse backwards through entries, as well. I am going to make it easier on the archive pages and so on, but I need to figure out a more global solution, and soon.
Here are some posts I have been holding back on because I wanted to have at least 3-5 for aesthetics:
The more astute visitors of Alt Text may have noticed a small redesign of the site, both visually and structurally. There are a number of ways in which I think this new version works better for readers - among these ways are:
I rushed this out a bit which seems like an odd statement considering I had this underway since well before March but I redesigned it several times until I was happy - then redesigned a couple months later when I no longer was. There is still much left to do, many of the finer points that really go 80% or the way towards making a site like this great. If you want to read about some of the upcoming features to be added you may continue reading...
Continue reading "Redesign"I had meant to announce (with much fanfare) my 1000th post here on Alt Text, however due to the great number of draft posts I have under the hood, I lost track. So here it is....the 1001st post since I have been keeping track (1999).
Coinciding, coincidentally (by the way how can there be two spellings of this word: coincidentally and coincidently) with the May 1st Reboot I am planning on overhauling a couple key aspects of Alt Text. Here are some things I am planning:
As always if you have any suggestions on any ways to improve the site or have specific recommendations regarding how I might implement some of the above changes, let me know by leaving comments.
Thanks to Mark I am set up with a nice new photo gallery and annotation tools. Now it is up to me to customize the look of the new photo gallery. Perhaps it will coincide with a slight update to the look of the site.
The annotation tool would have made all those homebuilding posts and images (which are incidentally the most searched for content on this site) that much more interesting. Hopefully I can make use of this in the near future.
I have a few posts in the wings but haven't had time to get to them. Many aren't even about politics. I have a post about a video game, 3 or more movie reviews (including reviews of I Heart Huckabees, and The Motorcycle Diaries) and even a few book reviews). I won't leave politics out entirely - I have a few half written posts about loving America and one about changes that need to happen to the election and voting practices in this county.
For now I leave you only with this: AIGA Get Out the Vote posters exhibit.
Extreme busy-ness is nothing new and it is certainly no excuse for the significant lack of content here at Alt Text. I have been making changes to the site and reorganizing stuff.
I have also been busy on my yard, what with retaining walls, railings, and columns to build and plants, trees, and grass to grow.
Finally, I have changed jobs — today is actually my first day in my new role as Information Architect for small but rapidly growing online application company aimed at improving the people and companies who use their products.
I will post more soon (and more about the upcoming site changes) and I vow to post more consistently and make better quality posts that contribute to the general public discourse. Thanks for visiting Alt text.
Jason has posted some thoughts in the past about "conversations via comments on his site (or any site for that matter regarding who "owns" them. By far the most commented on post here at Alt Text was one from August of last year about how the emo/indy/sweet band Modest Mouse could be "selling out" via, of all things, a minivan commercial.
There are nearly 50 comments on this thread (paling in comparison to Jason's Matrix thread but impressive nonetheless) with the last one being from yesterday. Like Jason I feel that the comments and ensuing discussion have been of a pretty high level and I am fascinated that people keep finding this post and find it interesting.
Now the question of course is do I think Modest mouse sold out? No — we all would have done the same thing in their shoes. Why can't a band be great and make some money? Why can't I get paid for what I do and love it? Well there are some things standing in the way but I am working on it.
New trip photos have been posted in the Europe '04 gallery here on Alt Text. I am just adding them as I get time so check back.
I plan on retouching many of these photos and creating a seperate album of "good ones". So if you don't care to browse all the photos in the galleries with me looking stupid standing in front of stuff you can wait a couple days.
I am back from a great European vacation that took me through Holland, Belgium, and France seeing lovely, quaint towns and beautiful sites with my lovely and beautiful wife. Now I am back and reenergized. I didn't even mind getting up at 6 this morning to come into work. I'll post some photos this afternoon.
There is still much left to do on the site. I was just so sick of looking at the old one.
There are many features yet to be added — as I mostly just changed the style sheets and structure somewhat around all the old content. If I wasn't so lazy/impatient I would be much better at making sure that all the CSS was perfect and all, but as this is my personal site, I decided not to care too much.
The site isn't even how I want it to look quite yet but I thought it would be nice to update the look anyway.
You will likely notice a few style sheet bugs here and there and I will be cleaning them up in the next couple days. If you notice anything funky (especially on a Mac) please drop me a note.
I have a couple special surprises coming up. Hopefully I can give one to you this weekend - though that one won't be as special. The second, coming in a couple weeks, will be better.
I love surprises, don't you?
This draft post is actually a running list that I would keep moving each month so I would remember some issues and links to post about for that month. It would seem I stopped moving it late last June but some of these items are much older than that. New comments are found in ()
Affirmative Action - still needed
House (presumably mine)
War - Means to a Noble End? (could be but not likely very often)
Food? (was I questioning the need for food? was I simply hungry?)
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www.kuro5hin.org (must have wanted to link to this site as it is pretty good)
Very pessimistic view of the advertising industry
(one that I was inclined to believe a few quarters ago - though things look to be picking up)
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New Zealand's Mixed Member Proportional electoral system
The evolution of democracy. (The lionk above spurred me to want to start a thread about th evolution of democracy but ralized I would nee dto research much more. This idea however resonates with a recent desire of mine to read the Bill of Rights and the Constitution of the United States. I am both amazed and appalled at myself for never having done so — though I am most assuradly not alone. Oh yeah, and I was still very bitter about W "winning" the election)
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blogs to add to the list:
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SCiNet · The World Trade System
Miniplants (Mini-plants could be built in mobile containers and shipped anywhere in the world — especially to developing countries. "The mini-plant system is designed in such a way that all the production machinery is fixed on the platform of the container, with all wiring, piping, and installation parts" built in.)
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http://www.frontoff.host.sk/adrift/index.php (so long ago had I meant to post about this blog that the domain has changed)
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I am a little late to the party perhaps (in fact so late that I can't even comment on his weblog, but cut me some slack I have been on vacation.) but I need to give Jason props on his continual (or maybe it's herky-jerky) evolution of Kottke.org. Once again Jason blazes a trail (can snails blaze?) that makes it easier for the rest of us to follow. While I do think the movie banners are a bit overbearing I love the fact that Jason is separating types of posts in the main blog area. The inability (or at least the prohibitive difficultly) to aggregate different types of posts with different types of data is one thing that has been holding me up for a couple years now. I would have loved to bring over my movie reviews from BenOnFilm.com (no longer affiliated with me - RIP) and write more but I really wanted the data to be presented differently than a regular post. I too have several blogs (Links, Lists, etc) aimed at segregating data of different types but have not tried too hard to bring them all together as Jason has.
One of the things I have been meaning to do for the past couple years (wow am I lazy) is to post a bit more stuff about myself - perhaps in an "About Alt Text" section. y thinking that visitors to Alt Text may feel that they do not know a lot about the author besides the fact that he is lazy and needs to post more.
Am I wrong in thinking this? Do people not even care? My mom and dad don't even visit my site - so perhaps people do not care too much about the man behind the curtain- but rather just want links to cool/funny/important shit.
So I am letting the people decide - because as we all know Alt Text subscribes to the tenants of democracy.
I am presenting up the first Q & A session with the creator of Alt Text - yours truly. I will attempt to answer every question posted to the comments of this post. People have been posting comments lately so don't let me down. Please be sure to also include whether or not you think an "About" section is warranted. Thanks.
An overwhelming majority of the visitors to Alt Text find the site via search engines. It would also seem that the vast majority are pretty disappointed.
Most people are looking for home building info - perhaps I will publish a pitfall avoidance guide. Here are some of the other search terms from July/August that I am most proud of.
anal bum cover (I love that)
who would jesus bomb t-shirt
michael jackson songs text
starwars figures
you want it all but you can't have it
apple iigs porn (what would that even look like?)
bears prefer masturbation over sex
nimble vagrant
photos of kobe bryant's wife (I am not sure where that came from)
geeky quotes
karate chop
And for some reason people want to find information about the iPod and million dollar ideas (which they definitely will not find here).
While I continue to tweak the display templates for the subpages of the site and develop the content for a couple more sections, I thought I would offer up a small (unfinished) sample from the upcoming About section: Lists.
I don't know why but I always feel the need to make lists of things. Usually these are my favorite things and they usually get forgotten in a pocket on a small scrap of paper or never written down. So now for my amusement and in an effort to save these things for posterity I plan on making short little lists and saving them to Alt Text. The first 5 are up now - more are on the way, as is a good way of archiving them.
In a startling turn of events Alt Text had some attention paid to it by its owner/operator (whom I just realized has more or less been operating anonymously) that resulted in some minor and medium changes to the way the site works and looks.
Though far from a redesign, I think the new changes will hold off my boredom with the look of the site for a while longer. Those images up at the top are supposed to be random but I haven't got that part working yet. The design has also been applied uniformly (well almost) across all pages within the site, including, after much more time than was warranted, the photo galleries. Hopefully my work will make it easier to change once a true redesign happens, but who knows when that will be.
Other changes include the new links area on the right hand side - this area will hold links that I want to point to but not necessarily comment on. Also added were some navigational improvements and a new creative commons license.
In the coming soon column are new content for the misc, resources, and (if I am lucky) the episodes sections of the site, a new about section, updated RSS feeds, and more photos for the galleries.
I am going to be freshening up the site a bit in the next several days. Cleaning up here and there, getting everything managable via Movable Type, tying up loose ends and whatnot. Please let me know if you experience any weirdness.
Also, I will be in the Los Angeles area this coming week and into the weekend. Give me a holla (or email me) and let me know if there is anything that shouldn't be missed - aside from games 3 and 4 of the Lakers/Wolves series of course.
ArtContext reminds me of what Alt Text started out as. Sometime I wish I would have pushed it in that direction more.
Alt Text's current valuation of a paltry $338 on the BlogShares Index is pretty pathetic. It says I have only 4 incoming links which is completely untrue - I have 5. Seriously I have many more than that - the number is only in the hundred's but still.
<Pathetic grovel="Please Help"> I need all you bloggers out there who enjoy my site to help me out. Help me get to the $1000 threshold for going public. If you currently link to me from your site. Visit BlogShares and make sure your site is registered. If your site isn't showing up be sure to have your site pinged by Weblogs.com</Pathetic>
Side note: How can Blogger's valuation be so high: $212437? Is Google goodwill that strong out there?
From Jish before he disappeared: Reinvingorate is a neat stat tracking package that I too am trying out for a while. I think the real time tracking is a nice feature - it sounds when someone visits your site. I have my own stats program installed on the server of course, but these are nice and would be a great alternative for folks who’s ISP's stats are poor or non-existent.
If I get any time tomorrow, I plan on working on some new features for the site. I plan on standardizing everything a bit more in terms of how it is presented and where it is stored, and then I plan to update and add content here and there, as well as, redesign the look. Any suggestions?
The archive page is now up. I am still going back through and classifying all the older posts, however.
You should notice a few changes to Alt Text this morning. The biggest of these is that the site is now managed by Movable Type. Alt Text posts still have the trusty (though slightly redesigned permalink 
and now there are several new ways in which users can quickly and easily communicate with me and with the site. These are: comments 
, e-mail 
, and TrackBack 
. The last of these, TrackBack, is a *neat* way to increase the interconnectivity between various weblogs posting about similar things. Development is constantly underway creating many ways in which TrackBack can be extended and become even more useful and nifty.
For more info on TrackBack check out this site and particularly this post.
I have also brought the search feature back and added in the ability for users to select how links open for them 
(see check box at right).
There are plenty of updates, revisions, and fixes I need to make in the coming days - chief among them is getting rid of that redirect you had coming in (should be done tomorrow), updating the secondary pages, improvements to some stylesheet elements, importing of pre-2003 data (without breaking previous linkages to those posts), and a new interface at some point.
If you want to ask me some questions about my experiences installing and running Movable Type (MT) feel free. I do plan on posting a synopsis of this portion of the site's overhaul soon, and there are more changes/enhancements to come.
I am going to be making some large-scale revisions to this site in the coming months - mostly to make it more informative and useful to me and others. My recent period of relative inactivity has scared some away, but I have been updating frequently and if I have something good to say people will come back.
One of the major behind the scenes changes will be that I am going to be switching (at least I am almost positive that I will be) from the homegrown posting tool I currently use, to something a little more full featured. Some of my goals with this switch include:
One thing I surely plan on doing is a feature about the process of setting up a blog (still hate the term and feel dirty for using it). I hope to give some insight to this process for both uninitiated and veteran bloggers alike.
I have been doing some housekeeping on the site recently - updating links and such. I can expect more in the coming weeks. Especially if our house ever gets done.
| What: | Official Memorial Service |
| When: | Tuesday, October 29, 6:30 PM |
| Where: | Williams Arena University of MN (Minneapolis Campus) 1925 University Ave SE Minneapolis |
Just when all the hype surrounding the Danza/WHAT was reaching its crescendo, 0sil8 Heavy Industries gives us the Megway TH - just in time for the holiday gift buying season. Although no details were given as to how much it will cost I have already purchased several hundred of these things for my office and town from Amazon. I sure hope they run less than $4.99.
A side note to the Megway TH hysteria is that the server that serves Alt Text has been extremely slow lately (it is sitting right next to the server for 0sil8 Heavy Industries after all).
