Tag Archives: blogging

Sidebar fun

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I’ve added a few things to my sidebar! Webcomics came first, after obvious things like archives and search. Today I  made a cute Welcome box that explains what I write about and includes a picture of me.

I also added a random assortment of my latest photos from SmugMug and a list of the most recently updated SmugMug galleries. This way, I can avoid blog posts that are nothing but one or two pictures. I always felt that picture posts detracted from my writing, but I was never sure how to solve the problem. With WordPress plugins it was quite simple to place my pictures in the sidebar.

Similarly, there was no easy way to incorporate an RSS feed into my FTP-published Blogger blog. Now all I have to do is drag a box to the right and add a link…so I’ve put a list of my latest blog posts on SparkPeople on the sidebar.

Back in the day I would post whatever came to mind here on pixelscribbles, because I wanted this blog to be wholly representative of who I am. I feel a little like I’m compartmentalizing my thoughts about health and fitness by putting them over on SparkPeople. But I don’t want pixelscribbles to turn into a weight loss blog. I don’t feel that health, fitness, and weight loss are “who I am” in any respect. Yes, I want those things, but I don’t want to become some sort of guru. I don’t want people to know me for those things. I just want to lose weight and feel better so I have the energy to concentrate on the things I truly enjoy–”writing, photography, travel, language, Japan, and the web”, as it says in the Welcome box ;>

Writing about my weight loss “journey” (as they say) has been helping me, though, and I want to keep it up. Plus, I adore feedback. So I’ve decided to actively blog about the process on SparkPeople. Hopefully the sidebar listing here will earn my thoughts some eyeballs and comments.

I may add more items to the sidebar–I haven’t addressed the issue of my blogroll yet, for example. But for now I think it’s shaped up pretty well.

Changes are coming to pixelscribbles

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On May 1, Blogger will no longer support publishing to FTP, which is how I currently publish this blog. Sometime before then–hopefully this weekend–I will be migrating either to Blogger’s hosted solution or to WordPress.

I’ve thought about shifting to a different platform for years. The reason I’ve stayed with FTP publishing for so long is that I felt comfortable and safe with two copies of my blog in existence: one in Blogger’s database and one in static html files on my server. With this duplication of my content, essentially an automatic backup, I was confident that I’d never lose my posts. That made me reticent to change blog software.

Now that my hand is being forced, I’m leaning towards self-hosting. Frankly, I trust my webhost, pair, more than I trust Blogger’s servers. This may be a misguided view, but in the eight or so years I’ve used both services, I’ve only ever had problems with Blogger.

The main uncertainty in my mind at this point is WordPress. I’ve seen so many WordPress blogs get hacked and wonderful content get destroyed, notably the several times it happened to Sushicam. If, after losing all my offline writing and photos in the fire, I lost all of this too, I would be completely decimated. I do not want to go through that feeling again. I want to continue to be able to travel back in time through my writing and remember what I used to think about and how I used to feel. This blog is really all I’ve got left of my life before August 2005. I can’t lose it.

Obviously, I’m still thinking about what I want to do. But a decision will come soon, and then my blog will move. When that happens, the design will probably change.

I’ve also made a change to my photo posting recently. For awhile there I was emailing photos from my phone directly to this blog, to quickly and easily share what was going on. However, I was never really a fan of doing things this way. For starters, it saved the photos here on my server instead of on my photo site. For another, having a bunch of posts with nothing but one or two photos in them took up a lot of space and pushed text content–my thoughts, the real purpose of this blog–down the page.

So I’ve started using SmugShot again, the SmugMug application for iPhone. Now I simply send the photos I take directly to the proper album on my photo site. So far I’ve sent photos to February 2010 and March 2010.

When I switch my blog to whatever I switch it to, I plan to pull my latest SmugMug photos into the sidebar, so blog visitors will know I’ve uploaded new photos without having to scroll past them to get to my real content. I’m pretty happy with this solution and look forward to implementing it.

Once all these changes are in place, I plan to really get back into writing here. I miss it.

Translation Exercise: "Analog Blog"

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I was catching up on a few RSS feeds, and I happened to read an interesting entry on Digital Camera Sketch (デジカメスケッチ), “a report on the ordinary using a digital camera”. Normally I use the Rikaichan Firefox plugin to get the gist of these posts and then move on, but today I felt like trying to write up a translation of this post, titled “Analog Blog”.

Here’s my translation:

Awhile back, this project was going on in the Nipponbashi area of Osaka. Pictures were taken with digital cameras, brought here, printed on the spot and pasted up together with comments. Incidentally, mine is the one on the right, the photo of the streetcar in the Nipponbashi shopping district.

Click here to see the original post and a photo. The “analog blog” in question has the title “Den-Den Town Bit by Bit Blog”. The post refers to a place in Osaka called Nipponbashi; click here for more information on that area.

Please note: I am not a professional translator, nor am I fluent in Japanese! This was just for practice. If you see any problems, let me know. I was unclear, for example, if he meant he took two photos or just one. Also, it seems like he used the wrong kanji in 商店会; I assumed he meant 商店街.

New email subscription setup

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Up until recently I had been using Yahoo! Groups to provide a mailing list for my blog posts. However, I’ve been wanting to burn my RSS feed with FeedBurner for quite some time, and I finally did that the other day. FeedBurner also offers an email subscription service, so I decided to use that instead of Yahoo! Groups.

Anyone who may have been subscribed to my Yahoo! Groups email updates will need to resubscribe via the new “subscribe via email” form in the sidebar. (I think there were two people signed up. Sorry for the inconvenience, guys! ;>)

Moblogging

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I’ve been trying out various moblogging methods in the past week. I loved that during my vacation I could snap a photo and send it online instantly via Blogger’s email post feature. That feature remains my favorite way to get pictures and text online from my phone. I can do it from the phone’s camera without installing any extra applications, and the post appears as the latest item on my blog, where people will notice it.

However, that last pro is also a con. If I send a lot of pictures, they push my regular posts off the front page very quickly. If I continue to use this method, I will need to change my blog template somehow to deal with this problem, or create a secondary blog just for moblogging and pull it into this template.

I also don’t like the fact that the pictures are stored on Blogger and not my SmugMug. I’d really prefer all my pictures to be in the same place. I installed SmugShot on my phone to see if it would work for me, but I ultimately don’t like it very much. The application doesn’t remember that I want my mobile photos to go into an album called “Moblog” and not their default “SmugShot”; I have to change the album every time I open the app. I also have it set to auto-tag my photos, but it doesn’t do it. Plus, posting this way doesn’t get the picture automatically on my blog. I tried installing a Flash slideshow of my moblog pictures, but it’s not really the same. It’s the kind of widget most people ignore when they’re visiting a site. Plus, I can only caption the photos, not title and caption like I can with Blogger.

My ideal solution would be something that would automatically save the photo to SmugMug, then create a post on Blogger that incorporates the SmugMug photo and whatever text I’ve put in the email, with the title of the email being the title of the post. Further, I’d love to be able to take a bunch of photos, caption each, and then send them as a bulk blog post, to keep the mass of pictures from driving other posts off my front page. That last would require an application, I imagine, since the iPhone can only send one picture at a time, and can’t do email attachments otherwise.

It’s possible some sort of solution exists for different blog software; I’m open to that too. I love Blogger, but since I publish via FTP I can’t use a lot of its features…and to be honest I trust my host (pair) a lot more than I trust Blogger’s servers (no offense), so I’m not going to shift my blog to Blogspot. I’ve toyed with the idea of using WordPress. I’ve also thought about Movable Type; pair lets you add it to your account for a nominal fee per month.

I guess I’ll keep looking until I find a solution that makes sense for me. Suggestions are welcome!

Comment moderation

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I hate to do it, but a round of World of Warcraft farming spam has left me with no choice.

I’ve enabled comment moderation.

This means, unfortunately, that your comments will have to wait for me to approve them before they appear on the site.

I’ve always enjoyed the immediacy of feedback here. I really hate to lose that. But I will not allow my blog to become some jerk’s advertising pipeline.

If you see any spam comments anywhere, please let me know so I can delete them.

To V

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I want to read whatever you have to say, so I hope you keep blogging. Not because I’m looking for guidance or for something to make fun of, but because I find you interesting. I hope that’s reason enough for you to continue.

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It’s a tragedy

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Grieving Fan: Oh man! I remember exactly where I was the second I found out Heath Ledger died…

V: Fag.

I just want to know if they’re going to show The Dark Knight with Ledger, or recast him, or what. (I’m actually a little afraid to see that movie…looks like it’s going to be really dark)

I found a new blog

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Damon Cline writes a blog called Scuttlebiz about area businesses and the economy and such for the Augusta Chronicle. He usually focuses on one story and then ends the post with a few nuggets. This cracked me up:

I’ll bet my left index finger (you can’t have the right; it’s my trigger finger) that Loco’s Grill and Pub, the casual dining chain that closed last week after two years in operation, will be converted into Augusta’s 213th Mexican restaurant. Mexican is the new Chinese.

Maybe you have to be a local to realize that this is hilarious because it’s true? When Mom visited I took her to Acapulco’s, the restaurant that replaced Fazoli’s on Washington Road. They had a few microwaved Italian and “American” options, and were otherwise very much a Mexican restaurant, down to the free chips and salsa.

Damon’s sharp and funny and seems to know his Augusta. Blogrolled!

(Edit: Apparently Acapulco’s has closed, after about a two month run. Heh.)