Helping with the Blog

The other day while I was doing a little work on my blog posts Jack was sitting right next to me and doing his best to help with the pushing of the keyboard buttons and the moving of the mouse with the trackpad. He thinks he can be a great helper but sometimes he deletes things on accident and then I can't remember what I had already typed. Silly kid!

Summer Project

I've mentioned previously that I have several website projects to put the finishing touches on over the next couple of months before school starts up again, but along with that I had been wanting to decide on another project that has not been started yet to work on that would allow me to try and reinforce current skills but also figure out some new things I haven't learned yet.

After mulling it over for a couple of weeks I've decided that the best option is to begin work on my 100% custom designed blog site. I've never been entirely satisfied with the way that Blogger or Wordpress sort of limit the way I can adjust the appearance of my blog, and I have a very specific vision for what I want it to look like. The problem is that working within those two platforms is not all that easy, so building it from scratch seems like the best idea.

Now, don't worry, I'm going to keep this personal/family blog right here, so you won't have to worry about learning a new address or finding me when I move. This new blog is going to be of a more professional nature, with posts twice weekly I think rather than every single day. I don't have a subject matter figured out yet, but it will have something to do with something, how is that for ambiguity?

Building this new site (http://calebflanagan.com) will give me the chance to practice what I already know, but also build on it by needing to figure out the storage of pictures in a database, WYSIWYG editors, tagging of posts, and some other things that will be helpful. I'm hoping I can incorporate some new javascript and perhaps even some Flash knowledge as well in some way. We'll sort of see where it takes me.

I don't have a finite timetable for it to be finished, but I'm thinking with regular work throughout the semester I can get a solid foundation finished before school begins again, and perhaps have another good website for my personal portfolio when all is said and done.

New Blog Title Image

I had a few moments between assignments this morning and decided that since I really liked the header image I made for Crackerjack Coalition months ago that I would alter it to fit over here at Archelon Kingdom as well.

I hope you like it. It's nothing fancy, but it is more unique than the standard blogger template header for this particular setup.

Ah Yes, School Again

It's the first day of school again, just like it has been far too many times over the past couple of years for me. How awesome were the days when each year only had one "first day of school" and not two or three. I miss those days, I really do.

I got to work nice and early this morning because I knew the Graduate Instructors were going to have copies they needed of their syllabi and other things, but much to my instant dismay, I was locked out of my desktop at work with usernames and passwords that were no longer valid. Apparently the IT guys from the Humanities Department decided it would be fun to remotely update my computer over New Year's and accidentally reset my login information. Not good, not at all. Now I have to play catch-up for the rest of the morning, and Roxy is going to have a lot more work than I had hoped she would have on her first day back to campus.

In other news, I gave the old blog a new and fresh look again as it has been a little while since I made any changes, and I was a little bored with the white space in the old design. This is just one of the normal templates from Blogger, but with a couple of color tweaks here and there. I also did some trimming of my blog list and kept mostly just family blogs and the ones I took off are now in my Google Reader so I can still see what is happening with folks.

You'll notice in the archive over on the right side that I made 10 posts in 2006, 84 in 2007 and 160 in 2008. I think my blogging goal for this year is going to be to beat my mark from 2008 and try to surpass 200 posts in 2009. That means I need to write 17 posts per month for the year, which translates into roughly 1 post every other day. I think that is a reasonable and achievable goal, especially with all of the new things in my life with Jack and impending graduation.

This semester should be smooth sailing, but I've said that before, haven't I?

Announcing Crackerjack Coalition

For the past couple of months I've noticed that my posts to this blog have been delving more and more into the realm of reviewing movies, books, or other things, talking about my career oriented endeavors, and other things that are likely not anywhere near as interesting as you want them to be when reading the posts I make here.

So, with that in mind, and given that Archelon Kingdom is supposed to be a family and friend oriented blog, I made the decision to split into two blogs, one for the family and friends with adventures in life and daily happenings, and another for my more serious topics.

That's why I now have Crackerjack Coalition as a second place to find my posts. I'll be focusing on a more professional and well-thought out approach over there, and keeping the funny stories about Jack, Holly, and myself, the facts of life, and other such things over here.

However, despite splitting into two areas, I'd like to encourage everyone who reads this blog to add Crackerjack Coalition to their blog list or RSS feeds. I'd love to get good feedback on the things I'll be writing over there, and Blogger recently released a new feature that allows readers to mark if they thought the posts were interesting or not, which I'm going to give a try on the new blog.

I hope to see you and your comments over there soon!

This Blog is Worldwide!

Okay, so it may be a bit of a stretch to say that this blog has a worldwide audience, but nonetheless, if you take a look at my FEEDJIT map over on the right hand side you can see my audience is prevalent in the United States with 5 different locations in Canada as well.

Unfortunately, due to some awkward button pushing on my part, you'll have to trust me when I say that I've had hits from all of the following areas listed below. I accidentally deleted the wrong widget from the sidebar and had to reinstall, thereby losing all of my previous red squares on the map. I'm sure I'll get them back soon enough though.

More interesting is the fact that I have two in Australia, two in India, five in England, and one each in Ireland, Thailand, Malaysia, Greece, Slovenia, Italy, Spain, and Poland.

I can't say as I have any sort of clue why people from all those locations are reading my blog, but it does make me feel sorta cool. Now, it would be nice to gather up a South American and an African hit so I can have one from each of the populated continents.

The Commenting Game

1. As a comment on my blog, leave one memory that you and I had together. It doesn't matter if you knew me a little or a lot, anything you remember!

2. Next, re-post these instructions on your blog and see how many people leave a memory about you. It's actually pretty funny to see the responses. If you leave a memory about me, I'll assume you're playing the game and I'll come to your blog and leave one about you.

An Unfortunate Turn of Events

I like to change up the look of my blog all the time as many of you well know and the other day a few weeks back I found a great site that provides templates for blogger.com that actually work with the XML features this site supports. Well, I liked the minimalistic look that I had going for me the past few weeks, but I had begun to notice a disturbing trend. With the non-blogger template my posts would randomly get re-ordered with no spaces between sentences, and no spaces between paragraphs.

Oddly enough, it seems to happen at random and sometimes refreshing the page works wonders, and other times I would have to go in and re-space and then re-post the entry to make it look normal again. So, alas, I have had to switch back to a more standard template once again. This does mean that Gunner can return to the header though, and that should make several people happy.

I'll just have to push through until I learn how to use WordPress someday.

Condensing My Blogs

Okay, so I know that I am not the best person at sticking with a single blog title or address, but yesterday I discovered something amazing that will fix the problems I have had with switching a blog and not being able to take all of my old posts with me.

Blogger has a beta site called Draft Blogger that allows a person to see some of the upcoming features while they are still being worked on. Well, one of the new features that is nearly perfected is the ability to import and export your blog as a .xml file. What this means is that after a bit of hunting around for old passwords and usernames I was able to export both Scrap Judgment and Dispensing With Accuracy onto the hard drive of my MacBook and then import them into the same account that I use for this blog.

Once I had done all that, I was given the option of publishing all of my posts from the two old blogs, and when I did it put them onto this blog in the same order, on the same dates. Now it looks like I've been using this blog address from the very beginning. How cool is that?