What...are you still here? You must have the patience of Job. You do realize, don't you, that I killed off the Gazette? And not just once, but at least fifty times, and that was just last week.
Darn thing keeps coming back to life, though. Rob Zombie would be proud.
I'm glad that one of my New Year's resolutions wasn't to blog more often, as that would be yet another lack of accomplishment to feel guilty about.
It's not that I don't have anything to write about. If anything, life has been overly dramatic during the past few weeks. We've had births in the family, and deaths, illnesses and operations, disrupted routines and far too many football games. But most of those things are too personal to write about, in this forum anyway, and the rest seem too trivial in comparison.
[Editor's note: What happened to your distaste for blogging about how hard blogging is? You do realize that you sound all whiny and pitiful. Yeah, well, thanks for pointing that out. But since I am all whiny and pitiful, it seems appropriate to do this. Fine; just don't make it a habit.]
I'm too stubborn to give up; I've never let a lack of meaningful content or talent stop me before and I'm not going to start, um, stopping now. If the Cowboys can win a playoff game, the least I can do is throw up a post every now and then. (I don't mean that literally, of course; I rarely ever throw up while blogging. I leave that to my readers.)
OK. Well. I'm glad we've got that out of the way. Look for more frequent blogging in the near future.
I almost typed that with a straight face.
The following is certified Content Free™
I spent much of the day paralyzed by my social media choices. I couldn't decide whether to blog, tweet, update my Facebook wall, tweak my LinkedIn profile, or stare in shame at my MySpace page...and so I did none of those things. I'm pretty sure that the world was not affected one way or another by my indecision.
Mondays are often like that, though. I don't really dread Mondays; as a freelancer working from a home office, one day is pretty much like another. I have specific events and tasks to attend to, and some of them are day-specific (attending church on Sunday, for example, or grocery shopping on Monday) but I don't tend to categorize days of the week along a spectrum of good/bad. Still, Mondays seem to be harder than other days in some respects.
I will admit that I always dread working out on Mondays. While we're pretty active on the weekends, we usually take it easy on Sundays, unless the weather is just perfect for a bike ride (and it's funny how often it isn't). That one day off doesn't sound like much, does it? But at my age, that's still enough time for the joints to stiffen and the muscles to protest and - most of all - for the mind to convince itself that one more day off won't matter...it will be a good thing, in fact, a recuperative interlude. But I also know myself well enough to understand that down that path lurks disaster.
So, instead of succumbing to all the social media temptations (let's not discuss actual work, OK?), I climbed on the treadmill and slogged through four miles and felt sorry for myself the whole time. The good news (well, for me, anyway; maybe not for you, who had to read all of this) is that it gave me something to write about at the end of the day. So I suppose there was more than just physical benefit to the activity.
Today's workout seemed even more grueling than usual, even for a Monday. It wasn't until a couple of hours later that I remembered why: we donated blood on Saturday. I really was running on empty! (My wife validated that theory at lunch when she described what a miserable time she had during her workout. Of course, at 5:30 in the morning, there's very little besides drinking coffee that doesn't meet that description from my perspective.)
For those who have subscribed to the Gazette's RSS feed, I have some good (or bad) news. We'll be providing the full post via that feed, starting today, rather than a short excerpt.
Over the years, a few people have requested that I do this, but I was hesitant to make the change for a couple of reasons. First, I didn't want to clog the news readers of subscribers.
Second, I wanted people to come to my website to read the Gazette. This was partly selfish, in that I wanted to see those visits reflected in the site's statistics. But I also felt that it facilitated the discussion because most news readers don't allow you to view or leave comments; you still have to click over to the website to do that.
However, in the Gazette's new incarnation, I don't even have a hit counter, much less a dedicated stats program, so I'm no longer concerned about tracking traffic. I do still have a concern about adversely affecting the dialog provided by comments, but I figure that if I write something that moves you to leave a comment, you'll make the extra click or two necessary to do that. At least, I hope you will.
As always, if this makes absolutely no sense to you, then you're not affected by the change. Carry on!
Perceptive readers may have noticed that the clever little icons that originally appeared at the bottom of each page of this site have now migrated over to the right sidebar. And, I've reactivated the FAQ link (can you guess which one it is?).
But here's the problem. When I shifted back to a traditional blog format, I consigned most of the previous FAQ to irrelevancy. What's there now is pretty skimpy. (And lame, but that's a whole other issue.) So it occurs to me that you might be able to suggest some additional questions to include in the FAQ. If so, please leave them in the comments and I'll consider expanding the FAQ to include them.
It took me awhile to figure out the commenting system for the new blogging software, but I think I finally have a handle on it. I initially wanted to require all commenters to register (although those who already have user accounts with services such as Google or Yahoo could use them to sign in), and I would also approve all comments before they appeared on the site. I didn't particularly like this process but deemed it necessary to control spam.
However, I either configured things incorrectly, or Movable Type's registration process sucks, because some of you experienced problems not of your doing. Comments were showing up with weird usernames, and the whole thing was a big mess. So, given that flexibility is my new watchword, I've quickly shifted to Plan B.
Plan B allows anonymous comments (not that I encourage anonymity; I think it's the bane of the blogosphere, but this is the only way to give you complete control over the identifying information that appears along with your comment). However, I still encourage you to register, because when you do, it allows me to add you to the "Trusted Commenter" list and your comments will bypass the moderation queue and appear immediately. As far as I can tell, there's no way for me to do this for comments by unregistered visitors, even if they provide complete information (name, email address, and URL) when they comment.
If you're not thoroughly confused by now, I haven't done my job. But for those who are persistent enough to actually leave feedback on this site, you are surely exceptional in all important ways.
I really do dislike blogging about blogging, and I realize that you probably find it tedious and uninteresting, too. But, like death and government bailouts, it's inevitable when a website is going through such significant changes.
The revised layout that you're seeing now is an unstyled template provided by Movable Type, which is the blogging platform I'm once again using. It's ugly (in a way; but in another way, it's attractive in its simplicity) because it's being display on your monitor according to the default styling settings of your browser. Over the next xx days, I'll begin to override those defaults and [hopefully] return the Gazette to more or less the same layout I was using just before this latest change.
Please bear with me while I get this done. If things work out the way I fear, I'll be devoting more time to designing than to writing. I hope the end result will be worth your time and my effort.
