Comments

I've started to shut down commenting on posts older than a year, and maybe even just stuff older than a month. It's going to be a piecemeal process because Blogger doesn't seem to have a universal way of updating all the 5,000+ posts on this blog by date, so I can't just reset them all to disallow new comments at once. And with over 5,000 posts... well, I don't like going through and updating one by one, but that seems to be what I'll have to do.

Maybe that will stop the avalanche of spam I get, maybe it won't. A lot of it is posted on older posts. They still won't get through my moderation, but whenever someone attempts to post spam on an older post I'll update that post to reject new comments.

I'm hoping that after almost a year at my "new" job, I can start to re-balance my life and get back to a little light blogging, a little light Aquaman fan stuff and maybe some other stuff that fell by the wayside while I learned how to be a reporter.

Ego Feeding Time at the Blog

I've added one of Blogspot's less useful "features" to my blog. I don't know how long it will remain, because it's a clumsy and poor implementation of a what actually is a pretty good idea. If you have Javascript enabled (which, in general, you shouldn't), you should be able to see a check box at the bottom of each of my posts with the words "Feed My Ego: Click if you appreciated this blog entry." followed by a number in parenthesis.

This is my version of the "Reaction Button" that Blogger added to their blogs a few years ago. I wanted a "Like" button, but didn't want to link to Facebook to get it. So I took the reactions, which are actually designed to allow you to have multiple reactions to an entry, and just put one option instead of 3 or 4 in.

Again, I'm not sure if it will remain on my blog for very long. It doesn't look great, and there's no way to customize it. The counts are a little too easy to reset. And it's javascript, which is blocked by most responsible web browsers anymore. If I find a better way to do this, I'll probably use it. In the meantime, feel free to click it and see what happens.

Blogging About Blogging...

In case you were unaware, Blogger went down for about 20 hours, and then it took some time before the last couple of days of posts were restored. Everything appears to be back to normal again, but if something should vanish again it is probably Blogger's fault, not mine. I hope.

Commenting Issues

I'm aware that some people are having troubles posting comments to this blog. It appears to be a bug in the way Google's Blogger Commenting system works, but beyond that I'm not certain what is causing it. I've adjusted some settings and played with the template a little to see if it helps, so if you've had your comments disappear, please try posting one now.

One suggested fix is for the person doing the commenting to enable third-party cookies in Firefox. That would be under Tools --> Options --> Privacy and click "accept third-party cookies". Apparently Google uses some sort of cookie to check your identity and it'll kaput if you have that disabled.

So. Try to comment. My comments are still moderated, so it'll take awhile to show up, but I could use people testing it. Thanks.

Update: Spammers, I know this will disappoint you, but I *still* won't pass through your comments. You are the reason I moderate them.

Now That's Done...

Time to get back to writing my con report. I feel surprisingly refreshed after a few days of troubleshooting templates. Ok, I didn't want to do it and was very grumpy about it when I started, but I do seem to be designed to be happiest when I'm figuring out a problem. I really should have been a computer developer and not a writer. *sigh*

Well, THAT was Anticlimactic

After all that work on Elayne's blog, which I'm pretty happy with, and all the work it took to convert this blog, I thought the Aquaman blog (which is embedded in the Aquaman Page) would be the hardest of all. Instead, it was the easiest. In some ways it was even easier than converting Eric's Wonderful Blog of Oz and Teacher Blog (although, to be honest, both of those were a snap).

But if I hadn't done Elayne's blog first, I would have had a lot of trouble with it, just as if I hadn't done this blog before Elayne's, I would have had more trouble converting hers. I learned a bit more CSS and a lot more XML along the way. Fun stuff!

And so, it's done. All posts should be accessible on all the pages I actively participate in. Nothing should be hidden by a deliberate bug. And hopefully Google won't decide to radically alter the design again and force me to play catch-up.

HA!

Go look at Elayne's Blog and let me know if you see any errors there. I just finished downgrading her classic template to a layout format. And it only took... well, all day yesterday and most of the day today. Good thing I'm between contracts.

Next up: The Aquaman Page, which has an embedded blog.

Ready to Make the Change

I'm about to start making changes, so the blog may look a little odd over the next couple of hours.

Update: 10:36pm - It is done. Well, there are a few tweaks I need to make, but mostly it's in the layout format. It is rough around the edges, but I've got four other blogs to convert, so I'm going to worry about smoothing it out later. If you see any major format problems, please let me know (and mention what browser and OS you are using, thanks).

Blogging About Blogger is a Sin

And I'm a sinner. Still working on downgrading this blog to the layouts format, and finding, slowly, answers to most of my questions. I'm going to go technical to record some of the problems so when I get to Elayne's page I can remember what I did...

0) I set up a dummy blog and imported my classic template into it in order to have a safe sandbox to play in. Google has made it impossible to test edit any other way.

1) Start with the shape of your page. The widgets or gadgets or whatever they are calling them this week are immaterial until you have the layout of page itself fixed up. To do this, you can find a similar layout and switch to it, then strip away everything that doesn't fit. This is the most difficult step, but not the most annoying.

2) Gadgets store the information you really need in a database on Google. This means that you have no access to the code you insert into a gadget unless you go through the rigamarole of opening each gadget individually. This is the most annoying part of downgrading. You cannot simply edit the code within the HTML, it's not stored there.

3) Some prepackaged gadgets don't allow you to format the information in them. This sucks. It makes it very hard to duplicate the look I have on my sidebars. Apparently it's the cool thing to hardcode formats now. I spit on developers who do that with stuff they intend to share. Gadgets would be "cool" if they were more customizable. As it is, many of them are simply unusable.

4) If you want a custom header, you have to delete the default header. You cannot edit it. It will revert back to whatever you edited it from. This is not just annoying, this is maddening. It would have been nice to have a warning on it, or even in the documentation, that it isn't possible to edit it.

4a) You can only delete the worthless default header by deleting it in the HTML editing area. You cannot delete it from the drag 'n' drop window.

5) Download the HTML repeatedly while editing. If you hit a step that destroys your work, you can upload a working copy. Trust me, you will hit a step that destroys your work.

6) If your previous template worked on IE and everything, don't assume it will still work. Test on IE, Opera, and Firefox. If it works on Opera and Firefox, it's a non-compliance bug in IE. Curse Microsoft for their non-compliant browser, and then try to fix it. There are numerous hacks to work around Microsoft's unwillingness to be compliant with browser standards. They are ugly, but having your page display oddly in IE is a poor choice.

7) The good old "conditional tags" from the classic templates have been replaced by poorly documented If/Else statements within widgets. This is annoying, but not impossible. The format for these statements is simply enough. It must be right after the b:includable tag, and be in the format b:if cond='statement' where "statement" is the condition. To make a widget show up only on the main page, the statement is data:blog.pageType == "index". To make it show up on everything except the main page, you change "==" to "!=" like so: data:blog.pageType != "index". The other pageTypes are "archive" and "item".

8) There must be a good tutorial on XML templates somewhere, but I haven't found one that doesn't assume knowledge I don't have. Annoying. Frustrating. Maddening.

Oh well, back to work. I hope this helps when I start to dissect Elayne's template.

Update: Ah, I remember the problem I had before. Because each bit of code is saved in a database, you can't just create a dummy blog and transfer everything over. ARGH!!!!

Blogger: Auto Pagination

Hi all. As I was going through my archives to try to find a couple of things to help me write my con reports, I noticed that a WHOLE BUNCH of my posts were no longer showing up, and nothing I did would make them show. I eventually hunted down the information in the edit window, but it appears that those posts are no longer available to readers unless they know the exact URL of the post page.

Why?

Because Google has introduced a bug (which they call a feature) to Blogspot blogs. This bug, called "Auto Pagination", limits the amount of data that will display on a page. The data is limited at the source and cannot be worked around. For all Blogspot users that have a "layout" version, this isn't a real problem. Those blogs have an "older posts" link at the bottom of the page which leads to the posts that don't show. But for those of us on classic templates, like this blog, it's a real problem. Because Google never bothered to figure out how to give us an "older posts" link, those posts are simply no longer available!

In short, Google is being evil to all Blogspot users who are still using Classic Templates. The workaround is to downgrade our templates to the sucky "layout" version. This wouldn't be a problem if I hadn't heavily customized my template, but because I did, I will lose ALL formatting if I make the change and have to start over from scratch. There is no conversion tool, and Google has not offered any help. I will have to learn a completely different tagging system, and will probably not be able to get my blog back to this format (which I'm very happy with) even if I do manage to learn their layout garbage.

So I have this choice: either downgrade my blog from classic template to "layout" format, or have a large number of my posts become lost.

Gee, thanks Google.

There really isn't a choice. I don't have the energy for it, but I'm going to start working on the problem as soon as I can muster any strength. The "layout" format is supposedly easier to edit once you've got your blog in it, but I dread converting six blogs (including Elayne's) into it from their heavily customized state. I don't want to learn another tagging system. I just want my freaking blog to WORK. Times like this I really consider just converting over to a Wordpress blog hosted on my own domain. I don't like that solution, either, but at least I'd be in control.

So if you notice any strange format errors on this blog over the next month or so, you know why. Or if this blog suddenly moves to a Wordpress blog hosted over on gjovaag.com, you'll also know why...

Another Linkdump

Google Reader makes it easier to do linkdumps...

Emerald City Comicon has updated: "actress Margot Kidder (that's right, Lois Lane from the original four Christopher Reeve Superman movies) will be making an appearance SATURDAY ONLY." I just got my tickets for the con.

TangognaT is giving away Manga. Go enter!

Have you seen This Strip? Peanuts Sunday Strip needs to be found in better quality.

Comic Book Urban Legends Revealed #92. Again, when's the book coming out?

More from NYCC, including this intriguing and distressingly familiar quote from another Laura:

We almost end up in the manga section, and that makes me sad, because I’m a female comics fan that isn’t really into manga, and I wish there were more of me. Unfortunately, people like me exist despite the entrenched comics industry as it exists, not because of it.

I enjoy Manga, now, but it's true that I like superhero books as well. And I wish there were more of me, and more superhero books that I really enjoyed.

FilkerTom wishes happy birthday to Dr. Suess.

The BBC has two YouTube channels, including stuff from Doctor Who: David Tennant's Video Diary and Freema Agyeman's Video Diary. Check out the BBC Channel and the BBC Worldwide Channel.

Cavemen Sitcom. Sounds like a really bad idea to me. The commercials are just barely tolerable as it is.

Blogging about blogging is a sin: 34 Reasons Why Readers Unsubscribe From Your Blog. Reason #1 is why I limit myself to 3 posts a day. Reason #2 is why I try to post at least once a day. And reason #3 annoys the heck out of me.

Headline of the Day: "Swiss Accidentally Invade Liechtenstein."

Here's a newspaper correction for you: Emus, not ostriches, victims of dogs in SeaTac. There's a reason I believe very firmly in leash laws for dogs.

Misbehaving Pituitaries on DI.

The Bad Astronomer is in love with Saturn. At least it isn't Uranus.

Star Wars Steampunk with pictures. Ooooooo.

Net Neutrality and DRM.

Lefty Brown links to an interesting article about Huey Lewis and the News.

Heh heh heh: Oh, Leif! Why do you taunt us so?

If you haven't read this letter on Neil Gaiman's website about what librarians have to go through, then go read it now.

And on that topic: Hot Library Smut. Via Garrett.

And, speaking of smut, Boing Boing continues to cover the horrible case of Julie and the pop-up porn.

War on drugs continues to be stupid.

The Sandbox: The Little Things.

Attention LINUX geeks: does anyone have any really good instructions on installing LINUX to dual-boot on a machine that already has Windows XP installed? I'd rather not mess up my existing XP too much, but I'd really like to give LINUX a real try instead of just running the live boot CD.

CUTE!

Infodump

Countdown. Hey, the pic includes Aquaman. And yes, I like the new guy quite a bit, thank you.

Jeff Parker speaks of the forbidden. Seriously, as one commenter said, if you want to know what sort of advantage a publisher can get by having free digital copies of their books available, TALK TO PHIL FOGLIO. I would love it if all my comics followed the Girl Genius model - months of daily/weekly pages followed by a collection. I'd buy nothing but collections and love it. But I digress from the topic... Jeff is wondering about pirated comics.

Lots of folks linking to Kevin's rant about buying comics that suck. It's a slow progression for me, but yeah, I've been moving my money from superheroes to more diverse books for years, and never regretting the books I leave behind. But you'll have to pry Aquaman from my cold dead fingers.

I love (postmodern barney)'s Blogging post. Go read it if you have any intention of blogging, or even if you already blog.

Brian Wood is exhausted but fine.

Yay. I've bought my tickets to Emerald City Comicon and only paid $7.12 extra for the privilege of making the purchase through #&%@$! Ticketmaster (and yes, the obnoxious fees are worth the lack of hassle... just barely... my main issue with them is Ticketmaster doesn't tell you about them up front, only after you've gone through multiple steps do you find out the full amount of fees).

I was once told by a computer science student that it was possible to predict with 100% certainty what a computer program would do. Having had several years of tech support under my belt by that time, I contradicted him, saying it was theorectically possible, but in reality not possible at all. He called me ignorant. I've been vindicated.

Oz and Ends reports on a clueless review of the Bridge to Terabithia movie.

Encourage the fans, grow the fanbase. Duh.

Paul Cornell has pictures from Gallifrey. MAN I wish we could go back to that convention. Someday, Paul.

Here's a link to a lovely review of the new AirPort Extreme Base Station. I used Netgear routers for a couple of years, then realized they were crapping out on me too quickly. We've had almost no problems since we switched to an AirPort. When our current AirPort craps out (if ever) I'll plan on buying the new one. Nice to know it's even better.

Look, Up In The Sky!

Check out Garrett Fitzgerald's Report on hearing Paul Rusesabagina speak.

You can help Julie, the tech-ignorant substitute teacher who has been threatened with 40 years in prison at the worst, and the loss of her ability to teach at the least, for other people's mistakes.

Evoting researchers buy used machines on the cheap. Yeah, REAL secure.

More on the robber from the Seattle Times.

Really cheap solar power.

Uh-Oh. They're Back!

Another Pug for the in-laws.

Tech Corner:

Ok, I've found one BIG problem with Google Reader. It does not appear to alert me when an entry has been updated. This could be a problem, as I've often been interested in the update more than the original entry (usually with Boing Boing). This, along with the lack of blogrolls, could be the killer for this app. Well, that and the fact that it's very very slow.

What Google Reader needs, in my opinion (only one full day using it): Blogroll capability, original AND last updated dates on entries, a way to indicate when an entry has been updated, more speed, a way to see how many users are subscribed to a feed, and a way to mark entries as read from the list view. Not a lot, but possibly more than they will deliver.

A Special Note To My Readers

If you read this blog via RSS feed or some other site syndication, please make sure you turn off any options to reload entries if they are updated. In the near future, I'm going to be making a LOT of changes to past entries, and the result will be flooded feeds if you don't make sure that option is unchecked. If you do not have an option like that (I know Bloglines has it, but I don't know about other readers), then you may want to consider unsubscribing from my blog for the next few months unless you don't mind flooded feeds.

To everyone else, here's what is happening. I finally got myself a domain so I can host my own website instead of having the long URL that I currently use for my personally hosted images and files. While I don't plan to host this blog on my new domain, I will be hosting most of the images that I put into posts on the new domain, which means I'll be changing the URLs of those images as I go back through posts. This will take some time, but most of you won't notice anything unless I completely screw something up.

And yes, the Aquaman website will be moving. While I'm fairly certain of the URL, nothing is set in stone yet so I'm not going to link to it right now. The URL will be much shorter, though possibly more difficult to spell. Heh.

Blogging About Blogging is... oh, you know.

Kevin put up a blogging tutorial.

I think I'll add some thoughts to that. Most of mine parallel Kevin's, so I may be duplicating him here to some extent. Sorry. I hope I add enough to his thoughts to be useful to someone.

First off, I don't recommend getting your own host until you're sure you want to keep blogging. Yeah, having a website is nifty, but if you are an absolute beginner, just try the stuff before you dive in. Both Blogspot and Livejournal are really good places for beginners to go to give blogging a try. I'm going to go into them a bit more in a second, but my recommendation to new bloggers is to dip your foot in the pool before trying to be a lifeguard. Yes, it's a lousy metaphor. But you probably get the idea.

Livejournal... Kevin doesn't recommend it for blogging, and neither do I. But I do recommend it for a certain personality type. Namely, people who crave feedback. If you start on some other system, you are unlikely to get an audience as quickly as if you start on Livejournal and comment on other people's posts. As Kevin says later, commenting (on topic, NOT spam) on other people's commenting systems is probably the number one way to build an audience. With LJ, it happens faster. Livejournal also seems more suited to personal stuff, which is what I post on my LJ. Yes, you are allowed to have multiple blogs for multiple topics. Don't limit yourself, but don't stretch yourself too thin, either.

Ahem. Anyway, if you are a person who can endure shuddering silence from your audience for a long time, possibly years, before you start getting feedback... then I say you might make it as a blogger. It takes a great deal of time to build an audience on a regular blog, and it's easy to lose their interest as well. More on that in a bit.

Blogspot is still the easiest and fastest way to set up a blog... and it's free and has a decent interface as well. So I recommend starting there. Set up a basic blog using one of their templates (which you can edit later as needed), test the interface, play a bit. If you like it, keep doing it.

Now, as you might know, I play Blogshares(B$) on a regular basis, and one of the main things I do in B$ is remove dead blogs. Dead blogs, or "clogs", are blogs that haven't been updated in the last six months. And there are a LOT of them. People start out without knowing what they plan on doing with their blog, and end up abandoning it, usually fairly quickly. Do not become a Clogger! Blogging isn't difficult, but it does require persistence. If you don't plan on persisting, don't start. You can still build a good reputation as someone who just comments on other people's blogs. Don't start blogging unless you've got enough thoughts bouncing around in your head to last you for awhile.

Now, I'm not saying you have to have ideas for 2 gazillion posts right now in your head! I'm just saying you've got to be a person who has something to say, and think you can say it regularly. One way to prove that... I'm going to go on and on about this point... is to post on-topic comments on other folks' blogs. If you keep commenting, people will start to recognize your name, and eventually they might even start to wonder why you haven't started a blog.

Ok, so you decide to start a blog. What do you need to do to build an audience? Well, we've already covered getting your name out by commenting on other people's websites. You can also put your blog address in your signature when you post on message boards and such. If people like the message board posts you make, they are likely to check out your blog. If they see posts like, "READ MY BLOG! I AM AWESOME!" they will never visit your blog, and you'll probably get banned from the message board. That's because of another major part of building an audience: content.

There are a LOT of good writers out there blogging. I place myself in the lower half of active bloggers as far as talent is concerned, but at least I have some writing skills. The vast majority of clogs I remove from B$'s listings are very poorly written screeds that say nothing of interest to anyone but the writer. Remember, this is a PUBLIC website, which means that people will be visiting, reading, and thinking about what you say. If it makes no sense to them, they won't come back. You've lost a part of your audience.

Concise writing is hard. Good writing can be difficult as well, but it's mostly just a matter of re-reading what you've read after you write it to make sure it makes sense. For instance, this post I'm writing right now will be re-read at least five times before I post it. Typos will still sneak through. But I'll fix most of the horrible grammatical errors and logical leaps before I post it. Most of my posts I just re-read once or twice before posting.

Also, don't pass by on the basics: write in complete sentences (mostly), use proper grammar (unless you're making a point), use a spell-checker (unless you are a spelling bee champ). Don't use slang except in small doses. Don't use "cute" spelling tricks or AlTeRnAtInG CaPs. They are hard to read and, unless they are the message, they distract from what you are trying to say. Punctuation and capitalization matter.

Then there is the matter of what you are writing about. Kevin makes the point well, I think, in establishing that you need to have something interesting. If people know that your website offers some sort of reading they cannot get elsewhere, they will come back. This applies to all blogs, not just comic book bloggers. Write about what you know, and make it interesting!

Now, we can't all be an awesome stuffed bull who loves comics, a doctor who examines the medical aspects of comics, or a retailer with a sense of the absurd fun of comics, but it sure helps if you've got an angle. Like Kevin says, let your personality shine through. Otherwise, you come across as bland (like, um, me).

The third part of building an audience, in my opinion, is posting regularly. Once a month isn't enough, unless you are already a master writer with a huge following. Once every two weeks... not enough, unless you are simply incredible at writing. Once a week isn't bad and will suffice for a standard blogger. Multiple times a week is better. Once a day is pushing into the blog-addict stage, and may be too much for some folks. Multiple times a day is fine only if you have a lot to say. The whole point of this is that people can expect new content when they visit your blog. If you post at least once a week, people know they can visit your blog once a week and find something new. Then everyone is happy. Long, unexpected delays between posts loses audience. And, like B$ points out, if you haven't posted in six months, your blog is dead.

Ok, so you've been blogging for a few months, have an audience, and now you want to make some money at it. Pardon me for a second while I go in the other room... *sounds of laughter from other room* ...ok, I'm back. You say you want to make money blogging? Well... don't expect too much. True there are some bloggers who hit a chord and gain an audience quickly. They can run fund drives or get advertisers and make real money by blogging. But most of us poor schmucks are not going to get anything from this. It's a hobby, not a job. Some of you may make it to the point where you can make profit from words. Most of you will not.

And yes, I have been offered a paid blogging position. It was not something I was interested in, and I turned it down (it also wasn't very much money, so don't think I was turning down a full-time job or something!). I've been offered places in group blogs as well. But I'm not reliable (despite the evidence to the contrary) and I refuse to join a group blog on the grounds that I will let everyone down. Only you can know whether or not you want to take such opportunities as they come to you. And if you blog long enough and well enough, they are bound to eventually come to you. And who knows, I may accept the next offer that comes to me, if I think I'm up to the challenge!

On another track, you've been blogging a few months and want to get your own host. Well, go read Kevin's recommendations. You can still post from blogger to your own host, or set up Wordpress (which isn't half bad either). If Blogger is working correctly, you can even move all your old posts over, if you choose. I admit to knowing very little about web hosts, but I'm learning very rapidly. Nowadays, setting up your own host is no longer too expensive or too difficult. So it's certainly a good option if you intend to keep blogging for awhile.

So, you still want to try blogging? Oh c'mon... give it a shot. Or at least start commenting on other people's blogs. Join the discussion. There's a lot of fun to be had. I know I've gotten a lot out of it these last four plus years.

Linkdump for Saturday

There is a tiny hack to help folks who want to see more than 20 posts for a label in blogger. The hack is detailed here. In short, you have to manually edit the URL for the label page to tell it to return more than 20 results, by adding "?max-results=x" (where x is the number of posts to return) to the end of the URL. Annoying? Yes. But you can see all my Ripples Through Time posts on a single page! Doesn't that make it worth it?

Mah Two Cents has PowerPuff Girls Z Episode 2.

Johnny B predicts the Superbowl. I have my own prediction: whichever team the officials want to win will win the game. I will ignore the game entirely, personally, and watch the ads to see if anyone actually made anything decent this year.

Doctor Who meets The French Dalek. Oh. My.

The Beat on Aqua Teen Hunger Force (which I've never seen, so don't ask me).

What sort of fees are you getting hit with if you use a Credit Card in another country?

"Does fifteen billion dollars worth of food a year depend on a bunch of retired hobbyists?". Yes, yes it does. Via Diane Duane.

Cory Doctorow on Shrinkwrap Licenses and just how stupid they are. In response: READ CAREFULLY. By reading this blog you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.

Friday Thoughts

Bully makes a DC teaser image. I like it better than the official one, cuz Bully's includes Aquaman.

Comic Book Urban Legends Revealed #88.

I need to get myself a slanket. I'm always cold, and would love one of these suckers to keep me toasty.

The King County Library System ordered 400 copies of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. I'm 409 on the list. ARGH!!!!

You can now do site feeds by post labels/tags! This means that if someone was interested in only my Ripples Through Time posts, they could use this site feed and get only those posts, nothing else. Happily, it's system-wide. Check out this help topic to see how to set up a label-specific feed for any blogger site that 1) has an active feed already and 2) uses labels.

Now, if they just fix this bug, labels will be much more useful to me.

Speaking of Blogger and its new system... I still haven't had any posting problems. Feed issues, yes, but no posting problems.

I have started looking at layouts, the new templates for New Blogger, and I'm irritated. The code design is ugly and uncommented, and while there seems to be lots of room for personalization, Blogger's unhelpful help methods are downright useless. I thought that converting the least customized of my blogs, The Wonderful Blog of Oz, would be easy, but I keep hitting major roadblocks. New Blogger has no "recent posts" widget, and there is no description of how to edit an existing widget without using the useless tools Blogger provides. For some reason, the templates I've seen put the site feed link at the bottom of the page instead of in the sidebar, which makes no sense to me, and there's no way I can see to move the feed to the sidebar because it's integrated into their ugly/messy blog post widget.

Still, despite the lack of useful help pages on Blogger, I'm making some progress with the conversion attempt. Haloscan, for one, was easy to set up as there is a conversion wizard, and I was able to compare the before and after code to see what they did. That's led me to figure out some of the other pieces of the puzzle. By the time I try to convert Bloggity's template, I ought to be an expert in this crap.

Coughing, Hacking, Sneezing...

I made a quick run to the comic shop, but half the shipment was misshipped or something, and there wasn't much to pick up. I did get the latest "52", which is good as it features Aquaman in a very tiny cameo.

My throat goes from mildly irritated to massively painful in just a couple of minutes now. I'm gulping down bucketloads of lemon ginger tea, but when I'm not drinking hot tea I'm in pain. I'm tired of being miserable.

I apologize to anyone who reads this blog via RSS. I want to take full advantage of the tag/label function, and so I've been going back and adding tags to old posts. I originally thought it wouldn't send those posts to the RSS feed... but I was wrong. So I turned off the feed, updating the tags, then turned the feed back on... but it still flooded the feed. ARGH!!!

My kitchen light is out. It's a florescent light, and it turns on but has a lovely headache-inducing flickering effect and gives out almost no actual light. This makes it incredibly difficult to cook anything. Worse is trying to wash dishes, since the dishwasher is in a corner with no light at all. So I called some local electricians and finally managed to get ahold of a live one instead of an answering machine. He could send someone out, sure... 6:30 am tomorrow. Yikes. Still, I like the idea of it possibly being fixed in time for making breakfast, and I'm not going to be able to tolerate it much longer broken anyway. Ok, what the heck. I've already set my alarm for 6 am.

Unfortunately, this means hubby-Eric and I are headed for a very financially tight month. I'm looking at putting up his Green Lantern stuff on eBay a little earlier than originally planned in the hopes that it'll keep us afloat. This puts our summer plans in jeopardy as well... I really want to go down to the Winkie convention with Eric this year, but it may not happen.

Speaking of conventions, tickets are now on sale for the Emerald City Comicon. At the moment, I plan to attend both days. I'll probably be with my "twin" sister for the first day and hubby-Eric the second. I hope to see other Seattle area folk there...

Playing With New Blogger

I'm not really interested in dealing with the template fun stuff yet, so I'm mostly working with the new labels/tags for posts. Lovely system, well overdue. Indeed, just about every other piece of blogging software had tagging a long time ago. I can't say I like the implementation, particularly for my FTP blog, as it eats up disc space I haven't got. But for the blogger/blogspot posts, it's very nice.

They also put it in its own css class, so I was able to style it to my tastes. That was useful. I'll be playing with my other blogs over the next few days, and updating tags on this blog. The one set of tags that is complete on this blog is the "Ripples Through Time" tag... but we'll see if that's actually useful as I go along. Eh, I'm enjoying myself. That's the important thing.

My upgrade to new Blogger was quick, relatively painfree, and apparently didn't lose any of my archives (as other people have reported). It took less than 5 minutes to convert. I already had a gmail account, so that wasn't an issue. They seem to have worked out the kinks now.

Update: Just discovered this problem and I'm oddly upset about it. How useful is it, really, to only have the last 20 posts under a label available? C'mon, Blogger. You can do better. Fix it for people who don't want to lose every single thing they've worked on with their templates over the last few years.

And believe me, now that I've played with the new Blogger templates (I created a new blog specifically for that purpose), I really hope I never have to switch over. You have to learn a whole new set of coding if you want to personalize it. I don't even have a clue where to start in converting my current template over to it... I only know that it would take a long time just to get back to where I currently am, which is annoying at the least and aggravating at the worst.

New Blogger, Same as the Old

I've just upgraded to New Blogger. I apologize to all the folks whose RSS feeds are flooded. As far as I can tell, the new Blogger is pretty much the same as the old for us folks who don't want to take advantage of the new features. I'm sure I'll figure out any other issues over the next few days...

The Internet is Surreal

I sometimes get some odd e-mail. The oddest so far was an e-mail from Kurt Busiek asking for my phone number. But I'm going to give this morning's e-mail from Marv Wolfman a close second. For the result of that e-mail, please see Marv's blog. There is something truly surreal about being asked to give a hand with a weblog by someone whose name is on a good number of my books.