D's Notebook

Tag: blogging (Page 2 of 2)

Looking Back

July 23, 2014 /

The first of two nostalgia-laden posts. My apologies; I’m a writer in my 40s. I can’t help myself.

This morning I finally wrapped up my review of the old posts here on the site. I won’t promise everything is completely cleaned up. But the number of posts with unreadable HTML segments smack in the middle of a sentence should be fairly low.

I didn’t read the posts closely while going through this exercise. I’d still be working had I done so. But a few observations from reviewing 11 years of writing.

  • I begin a lot of posts with the contraction “I’ve…”. I noticed this because in many of those posts the apostrophe had been converted to the code that tells browsers to insert an apostrophe. So I had to replace them often. Anyway, now I have a complex about it and will do my best to not begin posts with that contraction again.
  • I watched a lot more TV in the first, say six years, of the site than I do. That’s not a surprise in many ways, given our current cable-less state. But even when we were still rocking the whole Uverse package, it’s been years since I sat and watched hours of TV the way I did back in 2003-08. Probably a good thing. Although not all those hours were with kids. S. and I used to watch a lot of TV together. We spend most of our evenings working on computers or reading now.
  • I didn’t do a complex study of how the tone of the site has changed, but it clearly has. I think in the early days I was trying hard to be funny and carve out a niche as some kind of humorous social commentator. I imagine I was reading a lot of blogs that had that general tone and I was just mimicking it. And I wonder if some of my current tone is informed by writing for a paper and having to stick to the no-nonsense, all facts AP style. Granted there’s plenty of nonsense here still. I think the way I present said nonsense has changed, though.
  • Another big change, and this is mostly on me, is a different feeling in terms of the site being a community or conversation. In the early days I referred to this site as an online postcard to my friends scattered around the county. Since I allowed comments in the early days, I think that often turned into a multi-person discussion, even if just one or two friends added their thoughts to a post. Blame comment spam and my annoyance with it. Also, though, our lives have all changed a lot in the last 11 years. Those of you working now often have fancy titles before or after your names, where you were just employees or “associates” a decade ago. And most of us have added spouses and kids, so free time outside of work can’t be spent coming up with witty comments for my silly blog posts. Besides, that time is taken up posting witty comments to Facebook and Twitter, anyway! We’ve all changed a lot, my friends.
  • I write about politics a lot less than I used to. Many reasons for that, none of which we need to go into now. I would imagine even folks that see the world through the same ideological perspective as I do are thankful I’m not writing 3500 rambling words about this issue or that anymore.
  • It amused me greatly to read my posts about the various changes in look or platform for the site. Always so excited about the fun opportunities the latest change brought. Always to be rehashed 18 months later when I made the next change.

Running this site is one of the most consistent things I’ve done in my life. I started it two weeks into my marriage, and in my first week living in Indianapolis. I didn’t become a father until a year after the site’s first post. I’ve known a lot of you much longer than that, but time, distance, and circumstance means I see you all way less than I used to.

I don’t know how many of you read this regularly. I always imagine a certain friend is reading a specific post and taylor it for them. But even if no one is reading, it still scratches an itch that I have. I imagine the next 12 months will bring another round of life changes for me, as the girls go off to school and I look for a way to become at least a semi-productive member of society again. Given what this site means to me, don’t expect it to disappear just because I’m not spending 90% of my time at home with a computer handy.

Yes, I Did It Again

July 15, 2014 /

Yeah, yeah, the site looks different. Normally when this happens I share a long, detailed accounting of the hows and whys that went into it.

Not this time.

A variety of user errors piled up over recent months and had things not working the way I wanted. After a week of tinkering I decided to scrap the system I’ve used for the last 11 months and go back to something less fiddley. Or at least something that if I fiddle with it, I can back up and fix things easier than in the past.

A couple things that might be better for my readers:

1- Archived posts are now much easier to get to. I’m not done importing but in a few days you’ll be able to go all the way back to June 2003 rather easily.1 I’ll still need to go back and do some code clean up in many of those posts, but they’re still readable.
2 – I’ve long wanted to implement the bigfoot.js footnotes feature. Now I can! Easier, prettier footnote access for my readers!

So hopefully it’s all good for you and a couple weeks annoyance for me until everything is locked in again.

As always, thanks for reading.

  1. With that six-month gap in 2011 when I was messing with things and somehow lost all the posts from that period. ↩

Blog Change Manifesto

September 18, 2013 /

As promised, the long, boring, navel gazery that is the “Why I Changed The Blog” post. Feel free to skip.

First, the important things you need to know. The landing page will show the five most recent posts. If you want to read further back, just hit the Journal link over on the left and you can browse to your heart’s content. To the tune of 150 pages of blog posts!

That’s right, I’ve finally gathered most of my web writings since 2003 into one site. Notice I say most. Over the years I had deleted things here and there during other platform moves. Somehow, sometime, I lost about six months of posts from 2011. And I did clean out some posts while moving everything to the new setup. But there are nearly 1350 posts from June 2003 to today if you want to keep paging back.

The downside to that is, at this point, I have no cool search function or formal archive section. Hopefully that will come in the future but for now you have to manually work your way back.

As I mentioned a couple weeks ago, I’m no longer posting pictures of the girls here. I figure they, and their friends, are getting old enough to use Google, so why post pics that can be used against to identify and possibly embarrass them. Chances are you’re a Facebook friend, so you’ll still get to see the occasional pic of them there.

I’ve also done my best to scrub full names from the site. Which took some work, because I used to use a lot of full names in posts when I first began writing on the web! How come none of you ever complained? Hopefully you will just see first names and last initials or family names, but never full names. If you find one I’ve missed, please let me know and I’ll clean it up immediately.

Regarding the old posts, I gave them all a quick skim to remove full names, bad links to pictures, clean out sloppy HTML, etc. But there may be bad links or the occasional rendering error. You should get the gist of most of them, though.

Also deleted have been the old Friday Vid posts. I’ll still be posting Friday Vids, but the YouTube format I will be using here is different from what I’ve used in the past. Rather than go through and update a couple hundred posts with new code, it was easier just to delete them all.

Finally, some explanation on what exactly has changed for the other geeks out there.

Over the past ten years I’ve used Blogger, TypePad, WordPress, Tumblr, and Squarespace. I liked Squarespace a lot and would still recommend it to anyone with limited technical knowledge who wants to build a website. But for all the things Squarespace was good at, it kind of sucked for the thing I care about most: getting the words in. Its web interface was temperamental at best, its mobile apps were unusable, and there were no signs they planned on upgrading/improving them any time soon.

Over the summer I began researching static, or flat-file, blog systems. An overly simplified, and possibly incorrect, explanation of these is that rather than being built with through databases, static blogs are built with simple text files. To write a new post, I open up a text editor, type in some words, save it to the appropriate folder, and the site is instantly updated. No logging in, copying/pasting into a web interface, or any of the other steps database-based systems require. Static sites should load quicker, be much easier for to update the software for, and take up less server space.

I spent a solid week reading up on static systems, another weekend playing with the Kirby system, and finally decided to go with Statamic in mid-August. Since then I’ve been collecting all my old posts into a folder, playing with a mocked-up version of the site in a virtual server, and now, here I am. In addition to the simplicity and speed of Statamic, the real beauty of it is that all the site’s content is stored in a single folder as a stack of plain text files. If/when I decide I want to do something new and different, I can just copy those files into the next system and everything will be there.

So that’s that. So far so good, and I’m pleased with how things look/work. Statamic is a fairly young platform, so while I’d like to add a few functions as it develops more, I also plan on keeping the site pretty lean. Once I can offer a good archive page, I think it will be about perfect.

As always, thanks for reading.

The Next Version

September 12, 2013 /

Well, it’s time.

It’s been almost two years since I’ve made any large changes to the blog.1 The itch to change has been bugging me and it’s finally time to scratch it. Over the next three days, I’ll be picking everything up and moving it to new servers, installing new software, and hopefully by Monday, all will be working as normal again.

As always, there’s no need for you to do anything. The address you have saved will remain the same. And if, for some strange reason, you choose not to read this post and come back next week, you may think all I’ve done is tweak the visual elements of the blog again.

But if you check in the interim, you may get a surprise. I don’t know exactly when I’ll make the switch, but at some point over the weekend you’ll likely get an error message if you attempt to access the site. No worries. It’ll all be back to normal soon. I promise.

I’ll save the lengthy explanation for why I’m making the move and what kind of changes you should expect for next week. In the meantime, we’ll skip a Friday Vid this week as I tear down the old and build up the new.

Wish me luck and have a terrific weekend.

  1. Not counting visual changes, obviously. I’ve done several of those during the roughly two years I’ve used Squarespace. ↩

It’s Been Such A Long Time

June 17, 2013 /

Mid-June is always busy with remembrances large and small here in Casa de B. June 2013 is extra special, as it marks the tenth anniversary of many of these events.

Last Thursday, for example, was the tenth anniversary of S. graduating from residency. That’s not one we celebrate but, as it was a part of a huge weekend ten years ago, we did acknowledge it this year.

Then Friday was our (first) tenth anniversary.1 We don’t make a big deal out of anniversaries, so we didn’t really have a celebration planned. But thanks to our neighbors mentioning they had a sitter for a couple hours and one of my sisters-in-law stepping up to watch our girls, we were able to duck out for an impromptu dinner with them.

And ten years ago tonight we hopped into our cars, drove east for eight hours, and at roughly 2:00 AM the next morning, pulled into the driveway of our home for the first time as owners.

A lot of shit happened in a five day span in June 2003.

But the biggest anniversary is still a little over a week away. June 27, 2003 was the first official post at this site’s first home. None of your lives have been the same since then, have they?

Time really does fly. In some ways that doesn’t seem like so very long ago, as though we left the house for a few busy hours, came home, and suddenly we had three kids, a couple career changes, and were in our 40s. But when I pause to consider who I was back in June 2003 and compare that to who I am today, I think, “Did all of that really happen in just ten years?” I don’t think I look dramatically different than I did in 20032 but I am, in fact, a completely different person. Which is kind of mind blowing.

We’re not the only ones in our group of friends celebrating ten years of marriage this summer, so I’m sure several of you are going through the same kinds of reflections. So happy anniversaries to all of you. It’s hard to believe what we’ve done, isn’t it?

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  1. For those new to our family history, we had a small wedding in June that knocked out our legal and church requirements. A month later, after we had moved, we fulfilled the party with friends requirement with a second ceremony. Of course we are still one event shy of our friends the B’s, who had three wedding events in the spring of 2002. ↩
  2. Now that I’ve grown my hair back and after dropping those 30 dad lbs. two years ago. ↩

Stuff

August 17, 2012 /

First, yes, another visual change to the blog.

If you’ve been checking in during the late evenings over the past week, you may have noticed various changes on each visit. I continued to tweak my initial choice of theme on Squarespace 6. Instead of getting more pleased with my choices, I liked it less and less. So I explored the other options available. Eventually I settled on what you are now looking at, which I will likely/probably/perhaps stick with for a while. I like the combination of readability and minimal eye candy. The downside is it is pretty much a stock theme, so there will be other blogs out there with a similar look. Oh well.

When I was still on WordPress, I had hacked together a way to do ‘linked list’ posts. As you may recall, if a post was a link to something else, there was a visual cue in the subject line. I believe I used a double arrow or something. Anyway, Squarespace 6 has that built in, so I’ll start using it. If a post is mostly a link to something else with some comments from me, you’ll see an arrow in the title, telling you to click through for the original.

OK, week one at St. P’s is complete. I’ll call it a complete success. No calls or notes from teachers. No meltdowns at pick-up time. No trouble getting the girls up and put the door in the mornings. No complaints about kids treating them poorly in class or at recess. Not that we expected any of that, but with the high emotion of the first week, I was prepared for anything.

C. has been happy at pickup each day. She usually gets a little cranky at night, but has done very well. The highlight of her first week seems to be having a girl named Isabella in her class. That’s been her favorite name for a long time. Her favorite doll is named Isabella. Her fish is named Isabella. When she plays, she likes to be Isabella. So naturally she started hanging out with Isabella on day one. When I asked her if she did that just because of her name, first she laughed and said yes. Then she quickly turned serious and added, “But she’s really nice, Dad.” Perfect.

And now L. is having an even harder time waiting for her class to start.

High school football starts tonight in Indiana. I did not get a game this week but already have assignments for the next two weeks. Which is kind of a bummer because it is going to be an absolutely perfect night for football tonight. Perhaps it’s best, though, as M. has an 8:00 AM soccer game across town tomorrow morning.

Happy weekend.

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Seriously, Again?

August 10, 2012 /

A quick note about the new look. No major changes for you, the loyal reader, to worry about. Squarespace, the service I’ve been on since early this year, just released the newest version of their platform. Version 6 brings in a bunch of new technologies, most of which can be lumped under the term ‘responsive web design’. Basically what that means is a site should look the same whether you’re reading it on a 30′ display, an iPad, or a smartphone. I like what I’ve seen so far.

The downside is my old template did not carry over, so it gives me a chance to play around without being terribly disruptive to my readers. I’ve based my current look on the visual theme Solarized, which I’ve used for most of my text editing apps for a couple years now. It’s allegedly designed to make reading as easy and strain-free as possible. I’ve generally found that to be true, but I trust you’ll let me know if that’s not the case.

Ironically, despite all the super new and cool technology that backs up Squarespace, my site has gone from being full of graphics, sidebar links, etc. to looking closer to the first version of the site than anything else. Pretty weird, huh?

Thanks for indulging my technology itches and reading.

State Of The Blog

January 26, 2012 /

Greetings fellow citizens. I am here to talk about the State of the Blog. I can report that the State of the Blog is changed. Read on for the news.

It’s been a whole five months or something, thus it was time to implement some changes to Ye Olde Blog. I’ve bored you in the past (if you’ve chosen to read through such posts) explaining why I changed this or that. I shan’t do that again.

Basically I changed elements because I had the time and ability and, as usual, minor fiddling turned into a bigger project. The only changes you should notice are (hopefully) better overall performance of the site. The platform I used for the past year or so (Tumblr) had some issues and was occasionally slow to load, or didn’t load at all. That shouldn’t happen anymore.

I’ll admit the funny thing about my tinkering over the past year or so is the looks I’ve settled on each time have been quite similar. I guess I should get the message and quit messing around with it, huh?

The only area of controversy with the new design is that I’ve basically started from scratch with the posts. I wasn’t satisfied with how importing old posts worked. Thus, I decided to have no formal archive of posts before this month. If you dig around enough on the new setup, you will eventually find links to some of my old posts.

I felt bad about this at first, as eight-and-a-half years of archives is a lot to leave behind.1 But then I ran across this line, which made me feel better:

Old writing is like an old girlfriend: the memory is better than the reality

Indeed.

As always, thanks for reading.

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  1. Worth noting not everything I’ve written in my blogging career has been archived. But a good chunk of the 2003-2011 work is sitting on two other sites. ↩

Blog Housekeeping

April 17, 2011 /

I’ve been kicking around a minor change to the blog for a couple weeks. I’m still not 100% happy with how it looks right now, but I’m going to go with it for the time being.

Basically, Reader’s Notebook posts are disappearing. I will still be listing the books I read, but instead of doing a monthly listing, I will be posting each book individually on a new Reading page. You can either hit that link to see the first entry, or click on the Reading link up at the top of the page. Either way takes you there.

Why the change? A couple reasons.

First, it’s easier to write about each book that way. Sure, I could go ahead and write what I want and them let it sit for three weeks, but where’s the fun in that? This allows me to do a more thorough accounting of books I think deserve such treatment, rather than cutting it short because I have four other books to write about.

Second, I came across a nice personal blog on which the author has a reading section. She’s a web designer by trade, and uses a more complex blogging system than I do. Thus, she can do some really cool things I can’t do on WordPress. I’ve tested a few things over the past few weeks, and none matched the look she has. So I’m going with the closest thing that works without too much effort on my part.

I may continue to post a brief reminder here on the main page each time I update the Reading section, since I’d hate for you to miss out on a book.

❖

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