Tag: Blog

Tiny Updates

A brief update from yesterday:

I’ve begun the fine-tuning of the bookstore. The bagpipe pages, for example, now feature music from my own list of favorites instead of a generic selection. Much of it is also bagpipe music that should appeal to the — gasp! — non-bagpipe enthusiasts among you, including some groups that really know how to rock. More bookstore updates will follow in the weeks ahead, so keep watching.

Also, I meant to mention yesterday, but didn’t, that SixDegrees.org is a partnership with the wonderful Network for Good. Please visit them and learn more about a very easy way to support some very worthy causes.

What I’ve Been Doing Instead of Blogging

Yes, I’ve been pretty darn quiet lately. What can I say? It’s that time of year again. Some day, perhaps, I’ll post about the strange and unpleasant phenomenon that seems to occur in my work life every April and May, when my usual hectic schedule spins completely out of control. But that’s some day. Today, I’ve got other things to tell you about.

While I haven’t been posting, I haven’t been neglecting the site completely. For starters, I created a little Amazon bookstore. It’s not finished yet. The front page is fine; it contains some of my current recommendations. The interior pages are another matter. Right now, they’re just generic listings of books and music, sorted by category and keyword. Eventually, I’ll pair those listings down so that they’re a bit more personal, containing items I’ve hand-selected instead of every single item Amazon sells with the keyword “horror” or “bagpipes” or what have you.

If you’d like to check it out, you can find the link toward the bottom of the sidebar, right below the Amazon search box. Or, even easier, you can just click here:

My Amazon Store

The other, more important project is the “badge” I added to the sidebar to let visitors make donations to some very worthwhile charities related to literacy, the arts and education — for example, Chely Wright’s Reading, Writing and Rhythm Foundation. You don’t like country music? That’s okay, neither do I. But I love the things that Chely’s organization does to promote arts in the schools, and to help schools that might not have a music program without outside support.

The badge comes from Kevin Bacon’s amazing SixDegrees.org, a project that shows something good can come out of a silly game, and that social networking can be about something other than geeky buzzwords and self-obsessed Myspace pages full of bad grammar and spelling.

You can find the badge at the bottom of the sidebar. Take a look. Who knows? You might even feel moved to click one or two of the “donate” buttons.

The Things You Do In Hotel Rooms

No, not that. At least not at the moment. But I did have some time to kill this morning, so I tackled a long-delayed project: adding tagging capability to the blog.

Using tags will allow a deeper, more complete, more intuitive level of search and navigation than the simple categorization of posts. And they’re fun, since they can include keywords that are sensible and straightforward or lighthearted and odd.

I’ve not yet had time to go back and add tags to all the existing posts, but I’ve finished some of them, which should give you a good feel for how it will work. Eventually, at the end of every post you’ll find a list of tags. If you want to find other posts with the same keywords, just click, and off you’ll go.

Even better, you can use this entertaining tag cloud to find your way around the archives.

On another note, it looks as if the White Sox and Indians will play this afternoon, despite the bone-chilling temperatures (almost 40 degrees colder than yesterday) and some wind damage that occurred overnight at U.S. Cellular Field. We’re practicing our shivering and teeth-chattering now, so we should be all set.

Unborking That Which Was Borked

After an embarrassingly simple little fix, the site now looks pretty good in IE6. There’s still a minor rendering issue that grates on my nerves, but at least the sidebar finally lives in the right place on the page when viewed with older browsers.

Of course, you should still update/upgrade/change your browser for all the reasons mentioned below.

Feeling Better About the World

Here’s a question for you: How many blogs do you read?

And a more pertinent question: How many blogs do you miss when they’re not updated on a regular basis?

At the moment, I subscribe to – hold on, let me check. Okay, I’m back. According to Bloglines, I currently have 41 newsfeeds, scattered across categories that include “news” and “writing and literature” and “horror“ and “technology” and good old “miscellaneous,” among others. Is 41 feeds a lot? I’m not sure, but it sounds like a lot. It’s probably more than average, but I hope it’s not enough to make me seem like some kind of weirdly obsessive techno-nerd.

Anyway, of the 41 feeds, only seven or eight would qualify as blogs, and of those, only a few are updated on a regular or near-regular basis. And of those, the only one that I miss when I don’t get my daily fix is Neil Gaiman’s Journal.

I hope all of you are familiar with Neil Gaiman. If you’re not, stop right now, read no further, and get thee to Amazon or Borders or Barnes and Noble or Waldenbooks or The Little Shop Around the Corner and correct this deficiency immediately. You will not be sorry. Whether you’re talking about his novels, his young adult literature, his short stories, his comic book work or anything else he’s created in his eclectic and wildly productive career, Neil Gaiman is one of the best we’ve got – probably one of the best we’ve ever had.

His journal is just like the rest of his work: cozy, welcoming, diverse and quirky, chock full of fun stuff and interesting facts, serious, funny, caring and carefree, a bit strange at times, occasionally very strange, and always overflowing with the warmth of a generous spirit. On any given day he might be answering questions from readers, describing his latest reading or speaking engagement, giving a weather update from Minnesota or his current location on the road, praising the work of another writer or artist, posting a picture of his latest haircut, stressing the importance of protecting free speech, griping about deadlines, celebrating the birth of a new story, or pointing his readers to some odd but fascinating little corner of the Internet. He and his cohorts also make sure his site has plenty of entertaining attractions for readers/visitors, like this cloud comprised of words that appeared in his journal over the past six years or this bizarrely addictive little device – all of which are shared first with journal readers.

Neil is pretty good about posting something every day, sometimes more than once a day, but when he misses, I notice. I think, “Hey, there was no Neil Gaiman post today. Damn.” And that’s more than I can say about the other blogs I follow.

I think all of us should have something like Neil Gaiman’s Journal in our lives – a friend who drops in at odd hours to enlighten us, make us laugh, make us think, confound us, or just make us feel better about the world for a few minutes.

Neil Gaiman at DreamHaven Books

Neil Gaiman on Amazon

Who’s Got Standards?

It’s come to my attention that this Web site – which I think looks quite fetching, by the way – does not look attractive at all when viewed in old versions of Internet Explorer. It’s just fine when using the new IE7, which is much closer to being compliant with current Web-coding standards than its predecessors. The site also looks great in alternative browsers like Opera and Firefox, two programs that helped write the book on standards-compliance. But IE6? Alas, no. IE6 does nasty things to the sidebar and completely messes up certain other behaviors. In IE6 this site is, to use the vernacular, totally borked.

I’m going to study up on the arcane sub-field of Web development known as “IE hacks” — an array of tricks you can use to make IE6 (and IE 5 and IE4) behave properly — and with any luck, this site will someday look perfectly acceptable, even when viewed with an antiquated browser.

In the meantime, may I recommend one of the free downloads listed below? Any one of them is preferable to IE6. They’re more stable. They’re faster. They’re packed with many more features. They’re more standards-compliant. And most important, they are much, much more secure than IE6 could ever hope to be.

Check out one of them, or check out all of them. You won’t be sorry.

Firefox 2

Opera 9.1

Internet Explorer 7

Welcome

Welcome to my newest Web home. I’m glad to have you here.

I anticipate this site being a place for lots of miscellaneous chatter — thoughts about writing, reading, theatre, bagpipes (yes, bagpipes), family, you name it. There may be some overlap between what appears here and what gets posted at the [drum roll please] Official Paul and Dave Web Site. Occasionally I may even have to flip a coin to decide what goes where. But as time goes by, I think everything will sort itself out just fine, and I think you’ll enjoy stopping by both sites to see what’s going on.

Just to get things rolling here, I’m going to migrate a couple of recent posts that appeared at my former home in the My Opera Community. After that, we’ll just have to see where time and fate take us.

I look forward to sharing this space with you, and as always, I welcome your thoughts, comments, slings and arrows, compliments, and other feedback.

Thanks for being here.

PFO