I started blogging back in October 2003. Back then, I used a blogging software program called iBlog that created blog pages in plain old HTML. It worked okay but I soon outgrew it and switched to WordPress.

The trouble is, I used iBlog for more than two years, accumulating hundreds of posts. Although I was able to export those posts to XML, getting them properly formatted with their images and importing them into WordPress was extremely tedious and time-consuming. I worked on it periodically for months. And then I gave up.

This week, I’m prepping for a new book based on a collection of my blog posts. I realized that the best way to make sure I didn’t miss any of them was to get them all online on An Eclectic Mind. So I sat down and completed the tedious chore of importing the last bunch of posts, all of which have lots of photos and date from January 2004 to June 2005.

Here’s a list of what I added:

• On Close Calls
  Why a control tower clearance is something to be taken with a grain of salt. October 9, 2004
• Through the Magic of Photoshop…
  I get a photographic image of a helicopter that hasn’t been built yet. November 7, 2004
• A Trip to California
  I take a trip to California with my family to see Zero-Mike-Lima. November 24, 2004
• People are Pigs
  A tenant moves out and I am amazed by the way some people live. December 2, 2004
• A Trip to Quartzsite
  I have a nice flight to Quartzsite and back with some pilot friends. January 17, 2005
• Air-to-Air
  An air-to-air photo shoot gives mixed results. January 24, 2005
• Exploring the Desert by Helicopter
  We wander through a mill site, fly over an open pit mine, get a hamburger in the middle of nowhere, and see the “land now” light four miles short of home. February 5, 2005
• A Trip to Phantom Ranch
  We take a mule ride to the bottom of the Grand Canyon, spend two nights, and return to civilization. March 5, 2005
• My Trip to Georgetown
  I take Zero-Mike-Lima on a long cross country trip to take care of business and visit some friends. May 8, 2005
• Red Mountain
  We “walk inside a mountain” near Flagstaff. June 1, 2005
• Could it be? A building at our place on Howard Mesa?
  Our soon-to-be cabin was finally delivered to Howard Mesa. June 5, 2005

Over the years, I’ve posted almost daily lists of links to articles I’ve read on the Web that I think blog readers might enjoy. They come under the main title of “Interesting Links” and include the date on which I found them. Clicking the “links” tag in the sidebar will display them all, in reverse chronological order.

It might surprise some people to learn that this is mostly automated. I simply bookmark the page I want to share with Delicious. Each night, a plugin on my WordPress blog, checks in to see what links have been added. It publishes the day’s list as a blog post at around 11 PM.

That would explain why an “interesting links” page might contain a single link; I only bookmarked one link that day.

What I like about this solution (other than the automation, of course) is that it enables me to determine exactly what I want the post link to say and include a description of the post.

Some of you may have noticed that these posts stopped appearing at the beginning of December. The truth of the matter is that I simply stopped bookmarking links. I got busy and traveled around, mostly between Wickenburg and Phoenix. I stopped following Twitter — which is a great source of links to interesting information — so closely. And, frankly, I got lazy. When I found an interesting page, I didn’t bother to bookmark it. Maybe I realized that it might be the only link I bookmarked that day and I didn’t want it to be all alone in its blog post.

But I’ve started bookmarking again and hope to continue to share the best content I find on the Web — usually with the help of some Twitter friends.

And I’ll do it legally, by offering just a description and link, rather than a word-for-word reproduction of what I find. (More on slimebags who do that in another post.)

Yesterday, I spent a lot of time reading old blog entries as part of the process of adding excerpts that would appear in search results.

And now I must go off on a tangent to explain why….

On Tags and Excerpts

A few weeks ago, I added a feature to this blog that would list related posts at the end of each post when viewed in single page view. (If you don’t see what I’m talking about at the end of this post, click the title of this post to switch to single page view and you’ll see it.) This feature uses the tag feature of WordPress to match the current post’s tags to other posts in this blog. The posts with the most tag matches are listed as related. Makes sense to me and it actually works pretty well if all the posts are properly tagged. I set this up so it displays an excerpt after the post title. I tend to use vague titles in many of my posts — a blogging no-no, I know — so the excerpt helps readers get a better idea of what the post is about.

The trouble is, if I don’t create a custom excerpt, WordPress uses the first bunch of words — 50, I think — as the excerpt. This is not satisfactory. So I need to go through all those old posts and update them so they have excerpts. While I’m at it, I’m also updating the tags.

And, of course, I’m reading a lot of those old posts.

Why This Blog Exists

This blog has been around since October 2003 — six years this month. As I’ve explained elsewhere on this blog, I embraced the idea of blogging early on. I’d always wanted to keep a journal of the things going on in my life and blogging seemed the way to do it. Rather than rely on myself to keep a diary or journal that only I read, I could put a lot of my thoughts and experiences on the Web where others could read about them. Their comments and other means of interaction could help me understand other points of view and grow as an individual.

Sounds silly and idealistic? I don’t think so. I’ve met a lot of people through blogging — people I’ve become friends with. Miraz, for example, co-authored a book about WordPress with me a few years back after we met on my blog. Ann flew with me once and has introduced me to other people after finding me on another site I manage, wickenburg-az.com. There are other folks who have connected with me through my blog. They’ve all made my life richer and have given me good reason to continue blogging.

So, with 1,910 blog posts on this site and another 100 or so in the archives still waiting to be imported (long story), I’ve built quite a journal with plenty to look back on.

I do want to mention here that I’ve had a personal Web site since 1994. This blog is simply the current incarnation of it.

Back to My Original Train of Thought

So, as I was saying, yesterday I spent a lot of time reading old blog entries. It reminded me why I started this blog — as a journal of my life. So it makes sense to journalize my NaNoWriMo ‘09 experience as it happens.

I announced that I was thinking of participating in NaNoWriMo this year in a blog post yesterday. I’d actually written the post the night before, but the Internet went down (as it often does in Wickenburg) and I wound up posting it the next day. That was a big step for me. Although I didn’t say for sure that I was going to participate, publicly suggesting that I might was enough to get me thinking very seriously about it.

And if I move forward — which I expect I will — I thought I’d journalize the process for future reference.

Just Say No to Forums

I don’t think the digital ink had dried on that blog post when I got my first query from a Twitter friend:

so whats your userid on NanoWriMo ? you can probably guess mine

I could guess his, but I won’t share it here. My response was this:

I will not be participating on the NaNoWriMo Web site or forums. I don’t see any benefit.

My advice: When you’re ready to start writing, stop goofing off on the NaNoWriMo site. You can’t get work done there.

Indeed, I’d checked out the NaNoWriMo site back in 2005 when I’d first heard of NaNoWriMo. I was appalled. The site seemed to exist primarily to raise money — $110,000 — to build libraries in Laos. It was heavy on the NaNoWriMo-branded merchandise and requests for donations. Someone was obviously making money — possibly lots of it. It really irks me when I see people or organizations preying on wannabe writers.

The forums were full of NaNoWriMo participants chatting about writing or not writing. It seemed to be an extraordinary waste of time. Why would you spend any time participating in a forum when you could be spending that time actually writing?

Remember, the goal of NaNoWriMo is to write a novel-length work. I think the number of words tossed around is 50,000. With 30 days in November, that’s nearly 1,700 words a day every day for an entire month. Miss a few days and that number rises dramatically.

It seems to me that a serious author should be more focused on the writing task, not the socialization aspects of yet another writer’s forum.

Another Twitter follower had this to say about the forums:

lol maybe not but its addicting – as is twitter this year for me. :p It’s good advice though

I replied:

I haven’t checked it out this year. I was turned off last time I was there. Lots of people chatting, no one writing.

She replied:

Hmm… well that’s what the forums are for. You write the novel in your own time. For me the forums are a break during writing.

I’m afraid I let my cynicism get the best of me in my response to that:

If I need a break from writing, the last thing I want to do is visit a forum full of people whining about writing. IMHO.

I later pointed out the fact that I’m a cynic and linked to my first blog post about NaNoWriMo back in 2005.

What I also should have linked to is one of my more popular posts, “Why Forums Suck.” I think it pretty much covers my opinions on forums in general. Although a well-moderated forum can be an incredibly useful tool for getting and sharing information, the vast majority of forums have a signal to noise ratio that’s just too low to be worth wasting time on.

And I’ll go back to my original point: why participate in a forum if you can spend your energy writing the actual novel?

The way I see it, the NaNoWriMo forums may have value now, before the month begins. But come November 1, the serious writers should pretty much abandon it and get to work.

100 Monkeys?

I’ll step out on the line one more time here to remind folks that the goal of NaNoWriMo is to write a complete novel. That means it needs a beginning, middle, and end. It needs character development. It needs plot and subplots and underlying themes. It needs dialog and description. It needs to create loose ends and tie them all up before the last page. It needs to be compelling so someone will want to read it and written in good English (or whatever language you prefer) so someone can read it.

When you write a novel, you’re telling a story.

What I took away from my NaNoWriMo non-experience back in 2005 was that people seemed to think it was more important to get the 50,000 words out than to actually write a coherent piece of literature. Even one of my Twitter friends this year gave me this impression when he wrote:

Doubt I’ll make anywhere near the 50,000 words.. real life will get in the way

It’s not the word count that matters as much as whether the entire work holds together as a novel.

100 monkeys with typewriters can churn out 50,000 words of text in a month. If you’re participating in NaNoWriMo, don’t be a monkey.

On Life Getting in the Way

The above quote brings up another topic for consideration: the responsibilities of life preventing you from completing a NaNoWriMo project.

The main reason I’ve never participated in NaNoWriMo is because of work and related responsibilities. I write for a living. The last thing I want to do at the end of a day full of writing step-by-step instructions for completing a mail merge with Word (for example) is spend any more time in front of a computer, writing.

I also travel extensively and, when I do, I have numerous responsibilities for either getting work done or seeing to the safety and comfort of passengers. Clearly, NaNoWriMo would interfere with my ability to perform while on the road.

Notice that I said that NaNoWriMo would interfere — not that my work would interfere with NaNoWriMo. That’s because if I participate in NaNoWriMo, it will become a priority in my life. That’s not to say I won’t do anything else — I do have other priorities. It just means that I won’t let life get in the way (if I can help it).

Isn’t that the point of NaNoWriMo? To force you to finish the novel in a month? To make time for it? To make it happen?

And this goes back to something I said back in 2005: You cannot write a novel without the complete support of your significant other or family. Fortunately, NaNoWriMo makes this easy. After all, you only need their support for a month.

More Coming

I think I’ve written enough about this for today, so I’ll stop here. Tomorrow, I’ll get specific about what I’m doing to prepare for NaNoWriMo.

Are you participating in NaNoWriMo? Let us know by sharing your comments — and perhaps a link to your own journal — here.

One of the problems with this blog — at least as far as blogging experts are concerned — is that it covers too many topics. Blogging “experts” agree that to have a “successful” blog, it should concentrate on just one topic. That will attract people interested in that topic and keep them coming back for more, since it’s just what they want. A while back, I tried this by spinning off all the book support blog posts to a separate blog — Maria’s Guides — and leaving the rest behind here. I changed the name of this blog to An Eclectic Mind to help communicate the fact that there’s a lot of topics covered here. I refuse to spin off each major topic to its own blog — at least right now — because there’s so much overlap in the topics and because I simply can’t be bothered managing more than the 5 or so blogs I’m already dealing with. So this blog covers all kinds of things, from flying to photography to life in a tiny desert town to travel to politics to…well, you get the idea.

Finding Content with Categories and Tags

I’ve made content easier to find by embracing WordPress’s category and tag features. Categories are broad topics, tags are narrower ones. For example, you’ll find Flying as a category, but you’ll find helicopters, airplanes, airports, aviation, helicopter video, etc. as tags. The idea is that if you’re interested in flying but don’t give a hoot about helicopters, you can click the airplanes tag and zip right in to content that discusses airplanes. (Don’t expect much; I’m a helicopter pilot.) You can find all categories listed in the sidebar’s category list and all categories assigned to a post in the post’s footer. You can find the most popular 75 tags in the sidebar’s tag cloud and all tags assigned to a post in the post’s footer. All posts have at least one category; all recent posts have at least one tag.

(You can also use the Search box in the header to find content on the site, but even I don’t have very good luck with that. Too many results. This blog has nearly 2,000 posts and unless you’re looking for a topic with a very unusual word — for example, “cauliflower” — you’ll likely come up with more results than you’ll want to wade through.)

Which brings me to the real topic of this post — getting the content you want delivered right to you.

Using RSS to Subscribe to Categories or Tags

A friend of mine who is always sharing aviation photos and videos by e-mail recently discovered my “nosecam” helicopter videos. I create these by fixing a POV.1 video camera to the nose of my helicopter when I go flying. The resulting video can be tediously boring or extremely interesting or somewhere in between. I take the best videos, process them a bit, and put them on Viddler, a video sharing site. (And no, I really can’t explain why I don’t use YouTube. I should probably rethink this a bit if I want the videos to be seen by more people.) Once online, I usually create a blog post with the video embedded. Those are categorized Flying and tagged helicopter video.

Now WordPress has the incredible ability to generate an RSS feed based on any category or tag. The formula for creating the feed URL is very simple:

• For a category on this site, http://www.marialanger.com/category/category-name/feed/rss where category-name is the abbreviated name of the category. You can get the exact category name by looking in the address bar after clicking the category’s link in the sidebar. So the RSS feed for the Flying category would be: http://www.marialanger.com/category/flying/feed/rss
• For a tag on this site, http://www.marialanger.com/tag/tag-name/feed/rss where tag-name is the abbreviated name of the tag. You can get the exact tag name by looking in the address bar after clicking the tag’s link in the sidebar. So the RSS feed for the helicopter video category would be: http://www.marialanger.com/tag/helicopter-video/feed/rss

Of course, knowing in RSS feed URL is one thing, but using it is another. You’ll want to put this URL in your feed reader. If you don’t have one — or don’t even have a clue what I’m talking about — check out Google Reader. It’s a pretty popular feed reader that starts you off with a complete explanation, with video, about RSS feeds and how it works. Perhaps some of the more knowledgeable folks reading this post will share their favorite readers; I’m not big on feed readers and do all my feed reading from within Apple Mail.

Getting Helicopter Videos by E-Mail

Now back to my aviation video friend.

After looking at a bunch of my videos on Viddler, he e-mailed me and asked me to include him on my mailing list to be notified when new helicopter videos come out. Well, I don’t have a mailing list. I’m not one of those people who sees something cool on the Internet and e-mails it to half the people in my address book. In general, I don’t like to receive e-mails like that, so I certainly don’t like to send them.

But I realized that there were probably a few people who were interested in the videos, had no patience for RSS, and couldn’t be bothered manually checking this site periodically. So I whipped up a Feedburner subscription feed specifically for the helicopter video tag. Folks who want notification of the latest helicopter videos published on this site delivered directly to their e-mail in boxes can subscribe using one of the following methods:

• Enter your email address:

  Fill in the form in the box to the right.

• Click this link: Subscribe to “An Eclectic Mind | Helicopter Videos” by Email

Either way, you’ll be sending your e-mail address to Feedburner. Feedburner will send you a confirmation e-mail to assure that you really want to subscribe and this isn’t an attempt by someone else to add you to the list. You will get that e-mail message almost immediately. You MUST follow the instructions in the confirmation e-mail message to complete the subscription process. If you don’t, the subscription will not start. If you can’t find that e-mail message in your in-box, check your spam filter.

Once the subscription is activated, you’ll get an e-mail message only when there’s a new helicopter video on the site. That could be once a month or it could be three times in a week. I tend to release them in batches.

I use the Feedburner service because it’s good. It does not generate any spam. Your e-mail address is not shared with others. I know this because I also subscribe to several of my own feeds, just to make sure spam isn’t going out with the feed content. It’s also really easy to unsubscribe from; just click the link in the bottom of the e-mail message you get.

Getting All Content by E-Mail

You may have noticed an E-Mail Feed link at the top of the sidebar on this site. That’s for all site content. If you subscribe to site content using that link, you’ll get everything, including the helicopter videos. If you’re only interested in the helicopter videos, unsubscribe from that feed and subscribe to this one instead.

I hope this long story (as usual) gives you the information you need to subscribe to the content that interests you most here.

As I blogged last week, I was on the verge of updating my blog to WordPress 2.7 and a new theme. Less than 24 hours passed before I did both. I really couldn’t wait.

The new theme is called iNove. (I’m not sure whether I should pronounce that eye-nove or in-nove. If anyone has a clue about that, please do let me know.) I found it while putting together the exercises for my upcoming Self-Hosting a WordPress 2.7 Blog Essential Training course for Lynda.com and I pretty much fell in love with its simplicity. But what I really liked was the inclusion of an “east” and “west” sidebar, which makes it possible to put categories and tags in two narrow columns, side by side. A tiny bit of CSS tweaking to widen one column while narrowing the other and a bit of WordPress hacking to change the maximum tag cloud font size, and it looked just the way I wanted it to.

For the first time as a WordPress user, I’m making a special effort to utilize widgets for most of my sidebar content. This is a huge change for me, since I normally hand-code all of my sidebars. The good thing about this is that it limits what I can put in a sidebar without installing more plugins. And let’s face it: my old design was simply too busy.

Comments? Observations? Use the comments link or form for this post to share your thoughts and suggestions.

WordPress 2.7 is out and it is an incredible upgrade. I really can’t wait to set it up on my blog.

Trouble is, my blog is also in dire need of a redesign. A friend mentioned that he wanted a blog like mine, but not so busy looking. I looked at it objectively and realized that I didn’t want one that was so busy looking, either.

This past week, while with the nice folks at Lynda.com, I got to play around with some new themes. I liked one of them so much, I want to install it on my blog.

But while I’m at it, I want to pare down the number of plugins and features that rely on them. I want to clean up my blog. I want it to be less busy looking.

And to do that, I need to start removing content.

All the old polls that weren’t working anymore have just been deleted. They’re gone. I’ll add a new poll feature sometime in January.

The guest book will be gone very shortly. I don’t need a guest book. It’s a spam magnet.

And do I really need so many categories? I can combine a bunch to narrow things down a bit.

Links? On a links page!

Recently posted, read, commented? Who cares?

So bear with me as I start paring down this site. I’m hoping to get the new look online by year-end.

If there’s any feature of the site you’d really prefer me to keep, speak up in the Comments for this post.

If you’re a subscriber to one or more of the RSS feeds available for this site — including e-mail subscriptions via FeedBurner — you should be aware of a few changes I just made.

• Blog Name and Description. I finally figured out how to update the blog name and subscription for my main feed. For as long as I can remember, it was using the old “The official Web site…” name and tag, which I dumped over a year ago. I tweaked a FeedBurner setting to customize it. You should now see the blog name, An Eclectic Mind, and current tagline.
• Deleted feeds. I just deleted to category-based feeds from my FeedBurner setup. Maria Langer | Flying and Maria on Blogging have been removed. There were very few subscribers to each of those feeds and I didn’t think they were worth keeping on my FeedBurner account. I’m trying to simplify many aspects of my life these days and that’s just some of the minutia involved. Category feeds are still available, although I won’t be emphasizing them much in upcoming changes to my blog.
• Deleted e-mail subscribers. If you attempted to subscribe to my feed via e-mail but never got an e-mail message with content, it’s probably because you never responded to the confirmation message that was sent to you from FeedBurner. There were a bunch of you in the list. Since I maintain a “no spam” policy, I didn’t think it was appropriate to send an e-mail message to remind you. If you subscribe to this blog’s content via e-mail, please remember to complete the verification process. Again, e-mail subscriptions are guaranteed spam free and are the most convenient way to get new content delivered to you when it’s available with no more than one message a day. Want to subscribe by e-mail? Click here. You can always unsubscribe when you get tired of reading me.

If you have absolutely no clue what I’m talking about, you need to read this: Feed 101.

Yesterday, while I was busy working — yes, I do work, too — I missed a major milestone in my writing life: my fifth anniversary as a blogger.

I latched on to blogging very early. I saw it for how it was originally intended, as a “Web log” or journal. I’d been wanting to keep a journal of my life and thoughts but could never stick with it. By blogging these things, I put it out there for feedback from others. With an audience, I felt a good reason to write these journal entries. I kept it up.

For five years.

I started blogging on October 15, 2003 with an offline blogging tool called iBlog. I’d use it to compose blog entries offline. When it was time to publish, iBlog would generate all the HTML necessary to create all of the pages for the blog. Publishing was time-consuming, especially as the blog grew in size. It was published to my .Mac disk space and co-existed with my Web site.

In 2004, when I went up to the Grand Canyon to fly helicopter tours, I found it necessary to start a new blog so I could blog from my laptop. This was a shortcoming of iBlog and it soon drove me nuts. Later the same year, I found a way to synchronize my two blogs back into one.

In August 2005, I discovered podcasting. I set up a podcast using Blogger (of all things). Maria Speaks was born. I podcasted quite regularly for a while, but have since let things slide. I hope to pick up podcasting again soon. In the meantime, I discovered AudioFeed Creator, which automatically translates all of my blog posts — including this one! — into an audible podcast feed.

In December 2005, I finally saw the light and switched to WordPress. While I was brave enough to install it on my own Mac OS X Server — and even got it to work! — server problems convinced me to move it to a hosting service. It’s been there, running smoothly, ever since.

All this time, I’d been blogging about whatever I felt like. This included the kinds of “days in my life” posts you find here, as well as how-to articles I wrote for the readers of my computer books. But in November 2007, I decided to split off all the computer articles into their own blog-based site called Maria’s Guides. There was a lot of technical tasks required to pull that off without 404 errors, but I think I did a good job. Sadly, I’ve been neglecting Maria’s Guides a bit lately. I’d rather think — and write — about other things.

That brings us pretty close to today. My blog continues to chug along on the Internet, with me at the helm. I enjoy the ability to say what I want in a forum where others can read and comment on it. I enjoy the interaction with most (but admittedly not all) readers. I find it amazing when certain posts become extremely popular. For example, “Flying At Lake Powell” has been read nearly 19,000 times since it was written in April 2006 and “Cynical Humor” — which is based on content sent to me by a friend — was read more than 2,000 times just the other day. Other blog posts have resulted in a chain of comments which add valuable information to the original post. “The Helicopter Job Market,” which has been read over 18,000 times and has collected 75 comments so far, is a good example.

So yesterday, with no fanfare at all, the fifth anniversary of my first blog post came and went. If it weren’t for a recent reader comment that my blog is “as big as the Grand Canyon,” I would have forgotten this milestone completely. But the comment made me think.

It should be big. I’ve been at it for five years.

I’ve made a few minor tweaks to this blog recently. Thought I’d take a moment to point them all out.

Tag Implementation

I’ve begun assigning tags to posts on the site. In WordPress, tags are similar to categories in that they enable a blogger to categorize the content of a post. I never used them before because I thought having categories was enough. But I’ve recently discovered two things:

• Tagging posts helps make them rank better in Google. (Please don’t ask for a link to the article where I read that; I don’t have it.)
• Tagging posts offers additional ways to organize them without having dozens of categories.

Implementing the tag feature isn’t an easy task for me. Sure, it’s easy enough on a go-forward basis. But this blog has over 1,500 posts. To truly implement tags, I need to go back and add tags to all the previous posts. I’ve been doing that, little by little, and hope to be finished by the end of the week.

The main benefit of my tagging efforts to blog readers is that they can more easily find posts that cover topics of interest to them. This is implemented two ways:

• In each post’s header, you’ll find a “Tagged:” heading, followed by a list of tags applied to that post. Each tag is a link; click the link to display a posts with that tag applied. Here’s an example of a post heading:
  
• In the sidebar, you’ll find a tag cloud. This is a really cool feature of WordPress that displays tags in an alphabetical list, with each tag’s font size corresponding to how often it’s used in this blog. Here’s a screen shot of the tag cloud as it exists right now. (Remember, only about 200 posts have been tagged so far.)

Category Name Changes

I’m always tweaking the names of categories, although I haven’t done it for a while. This week, I made three category name changes:

• Recipes has become I Cook, Too. I made this change so I could add a recipes tag.
• Writing has become The Writing Life. This change was completed primarily so I could have a separate writing tag.
• Twitter has become Social Networking. I made this change so the category could cover all posts about all kinds of social networking. Twitter has become a tag.

I’ll probably make a few more category name changes in the coming months for pretty much the same reasons. I just need to come up with catchy category names, which is often a challenge for me.

Interesting Links

Those of you who have been visiting this site regularly for some time may remember my link posts. They were automated through a feature on the del.icio.us Web site. I’d bookmark interesting pages on my Delicious account and the links would be automatically accumulated and posted nightly. I set this up in 2006 and it ran pretty well until recently, when changes to either Delicious or WordPress broke it.

I recently discovered a WordPress plugin called Postalicious. This plugin replicates the functionality of the Delicious feature that broke. The result is the daily (or almost daily) Interesting Links posts you find on the site. They’re all posted to the This Just In… category and are tagged links. You can browse all of my Delicious bookmarks at http://delicious.com/mlanger.

If you’re a Delicious user, I urge you to bookmark the blog posts on this site that you like. Not only does this help spread the word about the content here, but it helps me identify the content that readers enjoy reading most. You’ll find an Add to delicious link at the bottom of each post.

Polls

The Polls feature stopped working. I don’t know why. I’ve removed the poll from the sidebar and may remove the remaining polls if I can’t figure out how to resolve the problem.

New Link Categories

I added a few new link categories and placed them on the right sidebar. One of them is called On Politics and includes links of interest to U.S. voters this election year.

I urge all Americans who are eligible to vote to do so.

I’m not quite sure why, but the polls feature on this blog doesn’t seem to be working properly. Until I have time to troubleshoot the problem, I’ll be pulling the current poll off the sidebar. If I can get it fixed, not only will I put it back, but I’ll come up with a new, more interesting poll.

Suggestions? Use the Comments link or form here.

I don’t have much time to write this — and that’s the reason I haven’t been writing more regularly. I like to compose at least 5 blog posts a week, yet this is only my third in just over a week. The last post — a video — doesn’t really count, since I didn’t write anything.

So why the neglect? As I mentioned above: time.

Every once in a while, life throws a perfect storm at us. You know what I mean — it’s a period of time when everything seems to go crazy at once.

In my case, it was the following, which have all occurred since July 29:

• Completion of the annual revision of one of my books (ongoing throughout this period).
• Reposition my helicopter from Quincy, WA to Seattle, WA.
• Reposition my camper from Quincy, WA to Page, AZ.
• Brief 3-day catchup period at home in Wickenburg, AZ.
• Distribute the animals among multiple boarding facilities.
• Trip to Seattle, WA.
• Reposition helicopter from Seattle, WA to Page, AZ.
• Set up housekeeping in my camper in Page, AZ.
• Entertain an overnight guest in a very tiny camper.
• Deal with FAA, airport manager, and local tour operators in Page regarding tour, photo flight, and charter work in Page, AZ (ongoing).
• Provide moral support for my sister, who has been laid off from her banking job.
• Three photo flights from Page to Monument Valley.
• Start of new book with August deadline.
• Three trips to medical facilities in an attempt to diagnose some severe back pain.

It’s this last thing that’s really gummed up the works. I did something to my back while I was home and the pain became unbearable after the commercial flight to Seattle the next day. I was in an urgent care clinic there where I got prescriptions for drugs I couldn’t take because I had to fly. The pain has varied from annoying but bearable to absolutely crippling every day since then, with one day so bad I was in the hospital emergency room. It hurt to sit and since I need to sit to write, I couldn’t work on the new book — let alone write blog entries.

Miraz hit the nail on the head in her Twitter comment to me, when she said, “Pain is so time consuming and draining.” Wow. I’d never really thought of it like that — probably because I’ve never been in such severe pain for so long.

So now I’m behind in just about everything, racing against the clock to finish a book that’s due tomorrow. (It ain’t gonna happen.) The pain is under control — yesterday was the first day that it was tolerable throughout the day — and physical therapy starts on Monday.

Please bear with me. I do have lots to write about. When I get this book off my plate and catch up on my FAA stuff, I’ll be back with some interesting (I hope) new content here.

Reader comments are often what can make a blog far more interesting than it would be without comments. In fact, the commenting feature of blog software can create a community at a blog when regular readers and commenters add their two cents to blog posts.

Unfortunately, not everyone has something of value to add to a conversation. And that doesn’t stop them from adding it.

Comments Here

I review every single comment posted to this blog, so I know the full range of comment quality. Tossing aside the hundreds of daily automated spam comments caught by my spam protection software and the obvious attempts of human readers to redirect my blog’s readers to their sites, the “real” comments can be informative, helpful, interesting, funny, or thoughtful. But they can also be sarcastic, nasty, rude, or offensive.

I state my comment policy in various places throughout this site, including here. Although I occasionally do have to delete a comment that’s overly offensive or one that’s sure to generate a nasty argument, in general, this site has a great group of regular readers and commenters that don’t need to be watched over as if they’re poorly behaved children.

As an example of how much commenting can contribute to a blog, check out one of my posts, “The Helicopter Job Market,” which has accumulated almost 50 comments in just over a year. Many of these comments offer helpful insight to helicopter pilots and wannabes. They’ve created a conversation that just keeps growing — indeed, five comments have been added to that post in just the past week.

Anyway, I welcome comments and won’t prevent one from appearing unless it’s either offensive or totally self-promotional. Get a conversation going. I really enjoy it. And reader comments are often what trigger me to write new blog posts.

A Comment Policy From Down Under

Today, while in search of both images from the Iran missile photo controversy, I stumbled upon an article on the Herald Sun Web site. It showed both photos and provided some commentary about the situation. It mentioned that Iran was firing more test missiles today. The thought that if they kept firing missiles for tests they might run out came to my mind. Since the article had a comment field, I decided to voice that unlikely but amusing thought, mostly to lighten things up.

I posted the comment and submitted it. On the confirmation page, the following comment policy appeared:

Please note that we are not able to publish all the comments that we receive, and that we may edit some comments to ensure their suitability for publishing.

Feedback will be rejected if it does not add to a debate, or is a purely personal attack, or is offensive, repetitious, illegal or meaningless, or contains clear errors of fact.

Although we try to run feedback just as it is received, we reserve the right to edit or delete any and all material.

What I like about this comment policy is how clear it is. It’s warning commenters, almost up front, that what they submit may not appear at all or as it was submitted. I like the second sentence/paragraph. (Oddly enough, the commenter before me said “I Still dont Belive USA went to the Moon” and I’m wondering how that got through the moderation process, being that it’s pretty much meaningless, contains clear errors of fact, and does not add to the debate, but I guess that’s just my opinion.) I find the third sentence/paragraph bothersome, mostly because I don’t believe in editing someone’s comment. If it needs editing, it probably shouldn’t appear at all.

Up for Commenting

Anyway, I’m just tossing this out there, mostly to see what visitors here think about it.

Commenting is one of the good and bad things about blogging. On this site, I really enjoy most of the non-spam comments we receive. As long as you keep commenting, I’ll keep writing.

I’m an amateur photographer and, like many amateur photographers, I sometimes get lucky and capture a better-than-average image. While I’ve often shown my best photos here, I’ve been wanting to put them in a place of their own for a while.

I don’t like Flickr. I don’t think I want my photos as part of what seems to primarily be a social networking service. I do have a Flickr account, but I rarely put photos there.

I did set up a RedBubble account. When I first signed up, the service was small and I was very impressed by the quality of the work there. These weren’t snapshots and doodlings. These were pieces of artwork. And, when I ordered some cards and framed prints, I was extremely pleased with the high quality of what I received. Cards were printed on thick photo paper. Framing was professionally done and properly sealed in back. This was how I wanted my best work to be presented — among other high quality work, available for sale at reasonable prices for high quality product. I wrote about my initial experiences and excitement about RedBubble here.

Well, RedBubble has changed. As the service grew, it became just another image-based social networking service. A mutual admiration society where many people were uploading images that, in my opinion, were pretty crappy and other people were telling them how good they were in five word praises. Photos over-corrected with Photoshop. Cell phone images! Besides, the management of RedBubble seemed more interested in “art” than photos and really pushed that kind of work. I’m not an artist and really didn’t like much of what the RedBubble folks were pushing. The print quality, however, remains good, so for now, I’ll continue to upload my images there.

But I didn’t want to use RedBubble as a showcase for my photos. I wanted something better. Something more personalized. Something that showcased just my photos.

The answer came a few months ago when the folks at Automattic, makers of WordPress, and eight6 jointly released a theme called Monotone on WordPress.com. I tried it out and liked what I saw. The theme had the amazing ability to sample the colors in an image and choose one as the background for the image. It was like color-coordinating the mat for a matted photo. The results was unique and visually attractive.

But I had a few problems with the WordPress.com-based theme. The biggest problem was the way it handled post tags — it pooled them with tags from all WordPress.com users. So if I tagged an image with the word “Arizona,” clicking a link for that tag in my photoblog post would display posts tagged “Arizona” on all WordPress.com blogs. I was not interested in maintaining tags for the benefit of other WordPress.com users. (Sorry, folks.) And I certainly wasn’t interested in maintaining a photo blog with so many exits to other blogs. So After my initial trial, I stopped posting.

But Friday, I discovered that Monotone had been released for WordPress server installations. I decided to give it a new try by installing it on my server. The result is what you can find at http://photos. marialanger.com/.

I did have some problems with the installation. I think it’s because I followed the instructions to the letter. (Silly me.) When I removed the .htaccess file that had come with the theme and used the Permalinks feature of WordPress.com to create a new one, the problems went away.

Then I was able to customize the theme by making minor changes to its template files. For example, I inserted copyright information and reformatted for lowercase throughout much of the blog. I also made the vertical image format page wider. I’ll continue tweaking — I always do — but for now, I’m pleased with the way it looks.

And most image posts link back to RedBubble, where the image is available for sale in a variety of formats.

I hope you’ll visit Maria’s Pix and participate by commenting on my work. Your feedback will not only help encourage me to stick with it, but will help me to be a better photographer.

Just want to let readers know that while I’m traveling for the next five or so days, I might not be able to check the site regularly. Since all comments must go through moderation, posted comments may not appear for a few days. Be patient; I will eventually get around to it.

I look forward to posting updates about my trip and reading your comments.

I’m deep into preparations for my summer-long trip to Washington State and Page, AZ. And it seems that every other week, I’m traveling. And I have two video training courses to record for clients. And I caught a bit of a bug that had me out of action for about a day and a half.

And the W key on my MacBook Pro is not being very responsive.

I’ve also been reading, and when I read, I have less time to write.

Those are just some of the excuses I can offer as to why I’m blogging once or twice a week rather than once or twice a day.

But I’m working on a few blog posts now and hope to release them as they’re finished. Getting started is always the hardest part, so I thought I’d start a few of them at once and let them sit in ecto until I’m ready to finish and publish them.

Let’s see how I do.