Showing posts with label meta. Show all posts
Showing posts with label meta. Show all posts
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
still alive and kicking
I'm still here, really. I've been working 100 hour weeks for the last couple of months, and have hardly spent any time at all on the internet (my email inbox is a nightmare). I'm still writing the AI 101 series - part 3 has been in about 6 rough draft forms, and parts 4,5,and 6 are in various stages of completion. I anticipate that regular posting should resume at the end of August or the beginning of September.
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
I'm back
I've kept pretty silent over the course of the US and Canadian federal elections. Often I've thought of something that would make a great blog post, but just didn't sit down to do it for one reason or another. Time has been a factor, of course, but so has my frustration - I didn't want to sit down and write anything about the American election in particular, for it was obvious what was going to happen, and no amount of reason or logic would change the result.
At any rate, I'm back now and will be posting regularly again.
At any rate, I'm back now and will be posting regularly again.
Sunday, March 30, 2008
i'm still here
Yeah, I'm still kicking about. I've just been super busy this last month; it's been all I can do to post a space video of the day every day at Space Feeds. Hopefully I'll start blogging regularly again soon.
Monday, December 17, 2007
Space Video of the Day is moving
Over the last half a year I have posted a space video of the day on most days. At the same time, my actual blogging here has shriveled away to nearly nothing. So, I'm going to move the space video of the day off this blog entirely, and starting tomorrow will be posting it instead at Space Feeds; that site is a more natural location for the space video of the day anyhow. I'll still be posting things here, but rather than daily space videos it will be more conventional blogging, like I did for the first four years on Robot Guy.
Saturday, December 15, 2007
comments
I have decided to allow comments throuh the Blogger system in addition to the Haloscan comments. Previously I did not moderate comments that came through Blogger, but I had a lot of problems with spam, so now the comments that go through Blogger will be moderated.
Thursday, November 08, 2007
New Comments
A persistent spammer has forced me to shut down the Blogger comments, as there was no way to filter that person out using Blogger. However, I still want legitimate comments, so I have added Haloscan commenting to the blog. I have kept the Blogger comments in my blog template, so people searching through the archives can still read those; however, I am the only one who can post new comments via the Blogger commenting system. Anyone can use the Haloscan comments, but if I get spammers in the future then at least I can filter them out via their IP address. We'll see how it goes.
Monday, November 05, 2007
no more anonymous comments
A spammer from http://www.boxsweeper.com has been leaving a whole bunch of comments on my last few posts. I suspect that it is either a person with way too much time on their hands or else a spambot has found a way around the Captcha system. Well, I had enough of that BS; from now on, only registered users can leave comments on the blog. If anyone wants to leave me a comment without registering with Blogger/Google, then they can find my email address in the sidebar. Note that clicking on the badge in the sidebar doesn't bring up my email address - you actually have to read it and copy it yourself. Die spambots, die.
Update: That spammer from boxsweeper is one persistent expletive deleted. I have disabled all comments for now, at least until I can come up with a new commenting system that will block this spammer.
Update: That spammer from boxsweeper is one persistent expletive deleted. I have disabled all comments for now, at least until I can come up with a new commenting system that will block this spammer.
Wednesday, October 10, 2007
hiatus
Something has come up this week, and it's going to keep me busy all week; I may or may not get a chance to post this week, but I'll be back for sure on Monday.
Monday, September 03, 2007
just a little bit longer...
OK, so my hiatus from blogging lasted a little longer than I thought it would. Regular blogging should resume tomorrow with yet another Space Video of the Day.
Tuesday, August 28, 2007
hiatus
Things are just crazy busy here right now, so I'm going to take a short break from blogging. Blogging will resume on Saturday.
Wednesday, July 25, 2007
a milestone
This is the 1000th post on this blog. Hopefully it won't take me as long to reach 2000. :)
Tuesday, July 03, 2007
ch-ch-ch-changes
Over the last several years, I have continuously been adding things to this blog: cartoons, puzzles, games, all sorts of stuff. I like being entertained, what can I say? Anyhow, as fun as all that stuff is, it makes this blog take too long to load. So, I finally took all of that stuff off of Robot Guy. Now, I know that quite a few people come here to play PacMan or Tetris or Sudoku, and I like those things too. So, I made up a new page that has just the comics and fun stuff. There's a button linking to the new Comics and Fun Stuff page in the sidebar.
Monday, May 14, 2007
bye bye sitemeter
I had noticed recently a strange URL showing up in the status bar when I tried viewing this blog, from specificclick.net, a few weeks ago. It would show up during the loading of the page, and I knew for a fact that such a URL was not in my blog template anywhere. I didn't know what it was all about until I read this:
I cannot for the life of me figure out why Sitemeter would shoot themselves in the foot like this. Not only are people going to drop them like a hot potato, they have probably irrevocably destroyed their brand name as well. This is basically going to completely destroy their business, all for a few dollars (which they aren't going to be getting paid for very long, as I don't see how their business can survive a body blow like the one that's coming over the next few weeks, as more and more people find out about this). What a waste.
(hat tip to Transterrestrial Musings)
Update: There has been some question as to what the precise problem is here, so some further explanation is necessary. Specificclick.net is a daughter company of Specific Media, part of the Realplayer borg collective. They are putting tracking cookies on the computer of everyone who visits a site with sitemeter, and tracking that user's browsing habits. Basically, they are putting a small piece of code on user's computers, allowing the user's own computer to spy on their browsing. Then the resulting information is sold to other companies. In other words, Sitemeter is putting spyware onto people's computers.
It’s so sad for me to hear that SiteMeter, a well-known web stats providers, is pushing specificclick tracking and advertising cookies on to visitors of sites using their service.Well I happen to think that a stunt like that is total BS. Sitemeter wants to put cookies on the computer of everyone who visits my blog? Well to heck with that noise. I'm giving Sitemeter the heave-ho, and using Statcounter instead.
I cannot for the life of me figure out why Sitemeter would shoot themselves in the foot like this. Not only are people going to drop them like a hot potato, they have probably irrevocably destroyed their brand name as well. This is basically going to completely destroy their business, all for a few dollars (which they aren't going to be getting paid for very long, as I don't see how their business can survive a body blow like the one that's coming over the next few weeks, as more and more people find out about this). What a waste.
(hat tip to Transterrestrial Musings)
Update: There has been some question as to what the precise problem is here, so some further explanation is necessary. Specificclick.net is a daughter company of Specific Media, part of the Realplayer borg collective. They are putting tracking cookies on the computer of everyone who visits a site with sitemeter, and tracking that user's browsing habits. Basically, they are putting a small piece of code on user's computers, allowing the user's own computer to spy on their browsing. Then the resulting information is sold to other companies. In other words, Sitemeter is putting spyware onto people's computers.
Thursday, May 10, 2007
OK, I'm back
I know I've been pretty silent these last couple of weeks. For a few days there my internet was out, and then I've spent the last week or so refurbishing the Space Feeds site. I'm quite a bit happier with the look of that site now, although I expect I shall be tweaking it a bit more over the next few days. Go ahead, check it out.
I expect that I shall be blogging more now, hopefully every day or so.
I expect that I shall be blogging more now, hopefully every day or so.
Tuesday, April 17, 2007
four years
Today is the fourth anniversary of the this blog. Over the last couple of days you've probably noticed some changes - most notably, that row of navigation buttons above, where Day by Day used to be. Don't worry, I haven't gotten rid of Day by Day, I just moved it down with the rest of the comics.
I'm always looking to make this blog more fun, constantly experimenting with the template. Seeing as how it is the start of the fifth year that I've been doing this, I figured I'd do something special. If you click on the Arcade button above, you'll see that I have added three classic arcade games to the blog: Pacman, Asteroids, and Tetris. (Man oh man, the amount of quarters I went through as a kid playing these games...) I've also updated the Sudoku game, and added another puzzle (Flood It!) at the bottom of the page. And although it still needs some work, I have managed to improve the chess game rather a lot. All in all, I'm fairly satisfied with the changes (which all work for me in IE6, Firefox, and Opera, though your mileage may vary).
Does that mean I'm done tinkering around with the look of the blog? Not bloody likely. Expect to see more little changes here and there over the next couple of months, as I approach my 1000th blog post.
I'm always looking to make this blog more fun, constantly experimenting with the template. Seeing as how it is the start of the fifth year that I've been doing this, I figured I'd do something special. If you click on the Arcade button above, you'll see that I have added three classic arcade games to the blog: Pacman, Asteroids, and Tetris. (Man oh man, the amount of quarters I went through as a kid playing these games...) I've also updated the Sudoku game, and added another puzzle (Flood It!) at the bottom of the page. And although it still needs some work, I have managed to improve the chess game rather a lot. All in all, I'm fairly satisfied with the changes (which all work for me in IE6, Firefox, and Opera, though your mileage may vary).
Does that mean I'm done tinkering around with the look of the blog? Not bloody likely. Expect to see more little changes here and there over the next couple of months, as I approach my 1000th blog post.
Friday, March 16, 2007
Elastic Images
I've been working on a new blog template over the last few days.
Other than the Space Blogroll, I have removed most of the space-related things from the sidebar. They are all still available on the Space Feeds aggregator, so I figured they were redundant here. I have removed quite a few buttons from the sidebar, and added a couple buttons (Blogburst, AddThis, and the Darkgate Comic Slurper) as well. I have also removed some cartoons that haven't updated in a while.
Early on in my blogging days, I was messing around with the template and I accidentally erased the portion of the template that displays post titles. Ever since then I have made do by repeating the title of the post in boldface at the top of every post. I finally decided to fix that, giving a nice large blue title to each blog post. Of course, now that means I am going to have to go back through over 900 blog posts and eliminate the boldface-repeated-title from each one, as I have already done for the posts you see here on the main page. I figure that is probably going to be about five or six hours of work, yay.
But, these sorts of things are a trivial change here. I've done a number of such changes over the years.
The biggest change is probably not immediately apparent. Oh, sure, you've probably already noticed that I have changed the title section to an image. But there is something special about this image.
Resize your browser.
Pretty nifty, huh? The image stretches or contracts according to however wide you have set your browser. You will notice that the text in blog posts also stretches to fit, and if you look down the page and keep resizing, you'll see that the Sudoku puzzle area and the Station V3 comic also resize according to browser width.
I haven't checked it on all browsers, but it works in Opera 9.02, Firefox 2.0.0.2, and Internet Explorer 6. I have no idea if it works on other browsers, so if anyone reading this is on a Mac or using some other browser, please leave a comment telling me if this works for you.
The technique is called Elastic Design. I have long wanted to do this. Some people have much larger displays than others, and some are still using 800x600 displays. If someone has, say, a 1280x800 display, and the a website has a fixed width slightly smaller than 800 pixels (to allow for an 800x600 display with a vertical scrollbar on the right), then there is a lot of white space on the right hand side of the display for users with larger screens. However, if one wants to design the website so that it is viewable to almost all users without using horizontal scrolling, and one is stuck with a fixed-width website, then that whitespace must simply be accepted.
Elastic design allows us to get around this problem. With elastic design, it doesn't matter what size display the user has, or whether the user resizes their browser - the page simply adapts to fit the browser window.
Now, I did a lot of Googling over the last few days, trying to find out how to do this. Although the elastic text part was pretty easy, it was damn near impossible to find out how to do elastic images. I probably would have given up too - most sites that talked about this topic either had some very difficult code to implement, involving lots of javascript tricks and storage of multiple copies of the desired image, or else simply said that this was impossible - however, the Station V3 cartoon pretty much pushed me to keep trying.
The image for Station V3 is set at 750 pixels wide. My sidebar has a width of 160 pixels, with padding of five pixels on the left and ten more on the right, so if I wanted to show Station V3 at full size, my blog would need to be at least 925 pixels wide. My display is only 1024 pixels wide, so that would mean that I couldn't have my Favorites list up in IE6 without having a horizontal scroll bar on the page. Up until now, my solution was to have the width of the Station V3 image set at 630 pixels. This was not an optimal solution though, as the text in the comic was at times difficult to read, and it meant that anyone using an 800x600 screen was still stuck with a horizontal scrollbar.
So I kept plugging away and plugging away at it. Sometimes I would think I had found the solution, only to try it in another browser and see that nope, it didn't work. I also noticed in my searches on how to do this that quite a few other people had been looking for the same thing. So, now that I finally have something that works in several browsers, I figured I'd share the technique with the world. Hopefully anyone else who wants to do Elastic Design on their blog will find this right away and won't have to go through hours and hours of fruitless searching.
The basic template for this blog is the Minima design by Douglas Bowman of Stopdesign. The formatting in the text areas below has been altered - I have removed all the line breaks that Douglas Bowman had in there. In the template itself the line breaks are necessary for readability, but if I copied the code straight into the text areas there would be all sorts of < br> tags that shouldn't be there. One can cut and paste the following code straight into one's blog template, but line breaks should be reinserted as necessary to increase readability.
The first modification was in the Style section of the template (between the <style> and </style> tags):
The width:* commands in this style section allow the elastic sizing of the text in blog posts; these basically set the width to "whatever is available". The #content part is for the entire blog, and the #main part is for the section with all the blog posts and title and so on. The top:35px for the #main and #sidebar sections allow room for the Blogger Navbar at the top of the page.
Next, I had to make up a new division tag, also in the Style section:
I'll explain this in a minute.
Normally on the Minima blog template, there is a "header" section immediately after the body tag:
I wanted to replace this header section, which normally just had plain text, with my fancy new image. To do that I had to get rid of that entire <div id="header"> ... </div> section. Then, immediately following the main and main2 <div> tags, in the main content part of the blog, I inserted the following:
The first thing to note here is the <div id="variablewidthimage"> tag. This is the tag that I defined above in the Style section, which set the width at 75%. This sets the width of the division at 75% of the browser width. I figured that the minimum size browser screen would be 750 pixels wide, for an 800x600 display with a vertical scrollbar on the right. I knew that my sidebar plus padding would take up 175 pixels, which is a little over 23% of the width of a 750 pixel wide display, so that 75% wide division is wide enough to take up the rest of the width of the display without running over the sidebar, and also gives just a little bit of padding on the outside. If my sidebar took up 250 pixels including padding, and I was again assuming a minimum browser width of 750 pixels, then in the Style section I would have set the width of the variablewidthimage division tag to some percentage slightly smaller than 66%, probably somewhere from 60% to 65%.
The next thing to note is that I used the <center> tag both inside and outside the <div> tags. The center tag on the outside centers the division within the main section of the blog, and the center tag on the inside of the division centers the image within the division.
I did the same thing with Station V3:
Both my title image and the Station V3 image have a width="100%" command inside the <img> tags. This tells the browser to display the image at 100% of the division width, not 100% of the original image size.
The original image width for my title graphic is 625 pixels, and the original image width for Station V3 is 750 pixels. Both of these images are displayed at the same size on the blog though, whatever corresponds to 75% of the width of the browser window. It doesn't matter if the available area is smaller or bigger than either original image; they are both either shrunken or stretched to fit. Figuring this out was a huge headache - and hence this lengthy blog post so nobody else has to go through that same headache.
Stretching the Sudoku puzzle section was quite a bit easier. The Sudoku puzzle is in a table, and rather than having a set width to the table like I used to (i.e. <table width="650">) I simply left the width part out (ie <table>). The table expanded to fit the width of the main part of the blog, as defined in the Style section above.
That's it, that's all there is to it. I hope you like it.
If this is your first time here - maybe you came here via a Google search looking for how to do elastic images or elastic design - then you might also be interested in the method used to do the scrolling blogrolls in the sidebar. You can find the necessary code for that here.
Update: whoops, for some bizarre reason, comments and backlinks were turned off for this post. Fixed now.
Update 2: OK, now this is bizarre. I was looking through this code months later and I noticed something strange. Immediately prior to the #variablewidthimage declaration in my style section, there was an extra closing brace } all by itself, with no corresponding opening brace; that is an html error. When I took that brace out, the elastic images no longer worked in all browsers. You read that right: I had to introduce an html error to get this to work in all browsers. That freaked me out. It shouldn't work at all! But it does. I did this a little differently - without html errors - in my Space Feeds aggregator; that method uses tables though. If you want to see how I do it there, just click on over and View Source.
Other than the Space Blogroll, I have removed most of the space-related things from the sidebar. They are all still available on the Space Feeds aggregator, so I figured they were redundant here. I have removed quite a few buttons from the sidebar, and added a couple buttons (Blogburst, AddThis, and the Darkgate Comic Slurper) as well. I have also removed some cartoons that haven't updated in a while.
Early on in my blogging days, I was messing around with the template and I accidentally erased the portion of the template that displays post titles. Ever since then I have made do by repeating the title of the post in boldface at the top of every post. I finally decided to fix that, giving a nice large blue title to each blog post. Of course, now that means I am going to have to go back through over 900 blog posts and eliminate the boldface-repeated-title from each one, as I have already done for the posts you see here on the main page. I figure that is probably going to be about five or six hours of work, yay.
But, these sorts of things are a trivial change here. I've done a number of such changes over the years.
The biggest change is probably not immediately apparent. Oh, sure, you've probably already noticed that I have changed the title section to an image. But there is something special about this image.
Resize your browser.
Pretty nifty, huh? The image stretches or contracts according to however wide you have set your browser. You will notice that the text in blog posts also stretches to fit, and if you look down the page and keep resizing, you'll see that the Sudoku puzzle area and the Station V3 comic also resize according to browser width.
I haven't checked it on all browsers, but it works in Opera 9.02, Firefox 2.0.0.2, and Internet Explorer 6. I have no idea if it works on other browsers, so if anyone reading this is on a Mac or using some other browser, please leave a comment telling me if this works for you.
The technique is called Elastic Design. I have long wanted to do this. Some people have much larger displays than others, and some are still using 800x600 displays. If someone has, say, a 1280x800 display, and the a website has a fixed width slightly smaller than 800 pixels (to allow for an 800x600 display with a vertical scrollbar on the right), then there is a lot of white space on the right hand side of the display for users with larger screens. However, if one wants to design the website so that it is viewable to almost all users without using horizontal scrolling, and one is stuck with a fixed-width website, then that whitespace must simply be accepted.
Elastic design allows us to get around this problem. With elastic design, it doesn't matter what size display the user has, or whether the user resizes their browser - the page simply adapts to fit the browser window.
Now, I did a lot of Googling over the last few days, trying to find out how to do this. Although the elastic text part was pretty easy, it was damn near impossible to find out how to do elastic images. I probably would have given up too - most sites that talked about this topic either had some very difficult code to implement, involving lots of javascript tricks and storage of multiple copies of the desired image, or else simply said that this was impossible - however, the Station V3 cartoon pretty much pushed me to keep trying.
The image for Station V3 is set at 750 pixels wide. My sidebar has a width of 160 pixels, with padding of five pixels on the left and ten more on the right, so if I wanted to show Station V3 at full size, my blog would need to be at least 925 pixels wide. My display is only 1024 pixels wide, so that would mean that I couldn't have my Favorites list up in IE6 without having a horizontal scroll bar on the page. Up until now, my solution was to have the width of the Station V3 image set at 630 pixels. This was not an optimal solution though, as the text in the comic was at times difficult to read, and it meant that anyone using an 800x600 screen was still stuck with a horizontal scrollbar.
So I kept plugging away and plugging away at it. Sometimes I would think I had found the solution, only to try it in another browser and see that nope, it didn't work. I also noticed in my searches on how to do this that quite a few other people had been looking for the same thing. So, now that I finally have something that works in several browsers, I figured I'd share the technique with the world. Hopefully anyone else who wants to do Elastic Design on their blog will find this right away and won't have to go through hours and hours of fruitless searching.
The basic template for this blog is the Minima design by Douglas Bowman of Stopdesign. The formatting in the text areas below has been altered - I have removed all the line breaks that Douglas Bowman had in there. In the template itself the line breaks are necessary for readability, but if I copied the code straight into the text areas there would be all sorts of < br> tags that shouldn't be there. One can cut and paste the following code straight into one's blog template, but line breaks should be reinserted as necessary to increase readability.
The first modification was in the Style section of the template (between the <style> and </style> tags):
The width:* commands in this style section allow the elastic sizing of the text in blog posts; these basically set the width to "whatever is available". The #content part is for the entire blog, and the #main part is for the section with all the blog posts and title and so on. The top:35px for the #main and #sidebar sections allow room for the Blogger Navbar at the top of the page.
Next, I had to make up a new division tag, also in the Style section:
I'll explain this in a minute.
Normally on the Minima blog template, there is a "header" section immediately after the body tag:
I wanted to replace this header section, which normally just had plain text, with my fancy new image. To do that I had to get rid of that entire <div id="header"> ... </div> section. Then, immediately following the main and main2 <div> tags, in the main content part of the blog, I inserted the following:
The first thing to note here is the <div id="variablewidthimage"> tag. This is the tag that I defined above in the Style section, which set the width at 75%. This sets the width of the division at 75% of the browser width. I figured that the minimum size browser screen would be 750 pixels wide, for an 800x600 display with a vertical scrollbar on the right. I knew that my sidebar plus padding would take up 175 pixels, which is a little over 23% of the width of a 750 pixel wide display, so that 75% wide division is wide enough to take up the rest of the width of the display without running over the sidebar, and also gives just a little bit of padding on the outside. If my sidebar took up 250 pixels including padding, and I was again assuming a minimum browser width of 750 pixels, then in the Style section I would have set the width of the variablewidthimage division tag to some percentage slightly smaller than 66%, probably somewhere from 60% to 65%.
The next thing to note is that I used the <center> tag both inside and outside the <div> tags. The center tag on the outside centers the division within the main section of the blog, and the center tag on the inside of the division centers the image within the division.
I did the same thing with Station V3:
Both my title image and the Station V3 image have a width="100%" command inside the <img> tags. This tells the browser to display the image at 100% of the division width, not 100% of the original image size.
The original image width for my title graphic is 625 pixels, and the original image width for Station V3 is 750 pixels. Both of these images are displayed at the same size on the blog though, whatever corresponds to 75% of the width of the browser window. It doesn't matter if the available area is smaller or bigger than either original image; they are both either shrunken or stretched to fit. Figuring this out was a huge headache - and hence this lengthy blog post so nobody else has to go through that same headache.
Stretching the Sudoku puzzle section was quite a bit easier. The Sudoku puzzle is in a table, and rather than having a set width to the table like I used to (i.e. <table width="650">) I simply left the width part out (ie <table>). The table expanded to fit the width of the main part of the blog, as defined in the Style section above.
That's it, that's all there is to it. I hope you like it.
If this is your first time here - maybe you came here via a Google search looking for how to do elastic images or elastic design - then you might also be interested in the method used to do the scrolling blogrolls in the sidebar. You can find the necessary code for that here.
Update: whoops, for some bizarre reason, comments and backlinks were turned off for this post. Fixed now.
Update 2: OK, now this is bizarre. I was looking through this code months later and I noticed something strange. Immediately prior to the #variablewidthimage declaration in my style section, there was an extra closing brace } all by itself, with no corresponding opening brace; that is an html error. When I took that brace out, the elastic images no longer worked in all browsers. You read that right: I had to introduce an html error to get this to work in all browsers. That freaked me out. It shouldn't work at all! But it does. I did this a little differently - without html errors - in my Space Feeds aggregator; that method uses tables though. If you want to see how I do it there, just click on over and View Source.
Wednesday, February 28, 2007
Excuses Excuses
Excuses Excuses
On this post, an anonymous commenter asked me "why do you not post daily?" Well, that's a good question and it deserves an answer. There are a number ofreasons excuses as to why I don't post every day.
Some days, after having spent quite a bit of time reading through all the space blogs, I find that all those other space geeks have already said what I wanted to say. It's a little disheartening to come up with a great topic and then find that 20 other people who share my same reader market have already written what I wanted to say, but did it better.
Sometimes, rather than blogging myself, I will just leave comments on a whole bunch of other blogs. By the time I've left a comment on Bad Astronomy and Comics Curmudgeon and Transterrestrial Musings and Cosmic Conservative and Selenian Boondocks and small dead animals and Angry in the Great White North and Betsy's Page and Lone Pony and Classical Values and Posthuman Blues and on and on and on and on... well, by the time I've written comments on all those blogs, I've said pretty much everything I've wanted to say for the day, and writing a blog post on top of that would be redundant all over again a second time.
Some days, real life interferes and I just don't get a chance to even get on the computer, much less write a blog post. I might be on the road, or just really busy at work.
And some days, I get really lazy and would just much rather play video games. Generally if I have spent all day working on programming or on the lathe or mill, I just don't feel like writing anything on the blog, so I start up Mechwarrior or Age of Empires and just lose myself.
How about the rest of you? For those of you who have blogs, but don't blog every day, what excuses do you use to explain that? Leave them in the comments.
Update: When I wrote this earlier, I forgot one major reason why I don't write every day. Sometimes, I have a Big Idea pending, and I take several days to collect my thoughts on the idea. The gaps over the last couple of weeks are mainly due to precisely this reason. I have what looks like it is going to be a series of three and perhaps four blog posts - about environmentalism, conservationism, and space - pending, and I want to get all my ideas in order before I put them out there for the world to see.
On this post, an anonymous commenter asked me "why do you not post daily?" Well, that's a good question and it deserves an answer. There are a number of
Some days, after having spent quite a bit of time reading through all the space blogs, I find that all those other space geeks have already said what I wanted to say. It's a little disheartening to come up with a great topic and then find that 20 other people who share my same reader market have already written what I wanted to say, but did it better.
Sometimes, rather than blogging myself, I will just leave comments on a whole bunch of other blogs. By the time I've left a comment on Bad Astronomy and Comics Curmudgeon and Transterrestrial Musings and Cosmic Conservative and Selenian Boondocks and small dead animals and Angry in the Great White North and Betsy's Page and Lone Pony and Classical Values and Posthuman Blues and on and on and on and on... well, by the time I've written comments on all those blogs, I've said pretty much everything I've wanted to say for the day, and writing a blog post on top of that would be redundant all over again a second time.
Some days, real life interferes and I just don't get a chance to even get on the computer, much less write a blog post. I might be on the road, or just really busy at work.
And some days, I get really lazy and would just much rather play video games. Generally if I have spent all day working on programming or on the lathe or mill, I just don't feel like writing anything on the blog, so I start up Mechwarrior or Age of Empires and just lose myself.
How about the rest of you? For those of you who have blogs, but don't blog every day, what excuses do you use to explain that? Leave them in the comments.
Update: When I wrote this earlier, I forgot one major reason why I don't write every day. Sometimes, I have a Big Idea pending, and I take several days to collect my thoughts on the idea. The gaps over the last couple of weeks are mainly due to precisely this reason. I have what looks like it is going to be a series of three and perhaps four blog posts - about environmentalism, conservationism, and space - pending, and I want to get all my ideas in order before I put them out there for the world to see.
Monday, February 19, 2007
BlogBurst
BlogBurst
I have just joined BlogBurst, a syndication service that will spread content from this blog to websites such as Reuters. Mwahahaha, I'm spreading like a virus.
I am including this post to verify my account with BlogBurst; they asked that I either include the button above in a blog post or in the blog template. I have had a bit of a problem changing the blog template ever since I switched over to the new version of Blogger, hence this post.
I have just joined BlogBurst, a syndication service that will spread content from this blog to websites such as Reuters. Mwahahaha, I'm spreading like a virus.
I am including this post to verify my account with BlogBurst; they asked that I either include the button above in a blog post or in the blog template. I have had a bit of a problem changing the blog template ever since I switched over to the new version of Blogger, hence this post.
Thursday, February 15, 2007
I knew this day would come
I knew this day would come
For the last couple of months, I have resisted switching over to the new version of Blogger. I have seen the major problems encountered by everyone who switched, and cringed at the excruciatingly long time it takes to bring up the comments page on all blogs that have made the switch (sometimes in excess of ten minutes, and who has that kind of time when surfing the web?).
So, I put off switching, and put it off, and put it off. And with every blog that made the switch, my decision not to do so just looked smarter and smarter.
Well, no more. Today when I tried to sign in, Blogger gave me no option. As soon as I signed into the old Blogger, it forced me to make the switch to new Blogger. After some wailing and gnashing of teeth, I went ahead and did it. It was either that, or have no access to my blog.
I sure hope that Blogger has worked out all the (many many many) bugs in their new software. Oh well, I guess I got what I paid for it. At least there is one silver lining, as I can now try out Blogger's new labelling function.
Technorati Tags: blog, Blogger
For the last couple of months, I have resisted switching over to the new version of Blogger. I have seen the major problems encountered by everyone who switched, and cringed at the excruciatingly long time it takes to bring up the comments page on all blogs that have made the switch (sometimes in excess of ten minutes, and who has that kind of time when surfing the web?).
So, I put off switching, and put it off, and put it off. And with every blog that made the switch, my decision not to do so just looked smarter and smarter.
Well, no more. Today when I tried to sign in, Blogger gave me no option. As soon as I signed into the old Blogger, it forced me to make the switch to new Blogger. After some wailing and gnashing of teeth, I went ahead and did it. It was either that, or have no access to my blog.
I sure hope that Blogger has worked out all the (many many many) bugs in their new software. Oh well, I guess I got what I paid for it. At least there is one silver lining, as I can now try out Blogger's new labelling function.
Technorati Tags: blog, Blogger
Wednesday, November 02, 2005
space cadets
I belong to a couple of blogrolls, such as the Red Ensign Brigade, LLP, and others. One thing that I would like to see is a similar blogroll of all the space bloggers. We could even have the Carnival of the Space Cadets or something like that.So, if you have a space blog and are interested in getting into such a blog roll, send me an email at spider_boris-at-yahoo.com, and I'll add you to the list. Make sure your email includes the name of your blog and the blog URL, and please put Space Blogroll in the subject line.
To display the Space Blogroll on your site, add the following script to your blog template (updated December 28, 2010):
To display the Space Blogs logo (158x158 pixels) above, include the following in your template:
Now, I already have a bunch of space blogs on my blogroll; if you find your blog already on the space blogroll, you don't have to do anything, but it sure would be nice if you would include the blogroll on your page.
If anyone comes up with a better button, then send me a link and I will put the code here on this post. The existing button points back to this post so anyone who wants to join the space blogroll only has to click on the button to find out what it is all about and how to get on board.
For instance, this button (200x164) was put together by Sector 4 Command. Here's the code for his version of the button: Afterthought: If you find that your blogrolls are getting very lengthy and want to see how I do the scrolling blogrolls in the sidebar, you can find the necessary code for that in the first text box above, all the stuff in the div statement.
yet more, added January 11,2011: The Space Blogroll by itself might be nice to have, but you may also be interested in the latest blog feeds or space news feeds, as I have in my current right sidebar. The code for those is as follows.
Latest Space Blog Feeds:
Latest Space News Feeds:
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)