An Eclectic Mind

I really can’t hold myself back much longer.

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.

BLog Technicalities, Call Me a Geek blogging, updates, web design, WordPress

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A few maintenance tasks completed.

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.

BLog Technicalities, Call Me a Geek e-mail, RSS

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How time flies.

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.

BLog Technicalities, Days in My Life, On Blogging blogging, podcast, WordPress, writing

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For those who might be interested.

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.

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Blog feature fails.

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.

BLog Technicalities plugin, technology, WordPress

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