Category: meta

Those who follow this space closely (which is all of you, right?) will realize that my “Picture of the Week” has been the same for two weeks.

Normally I change it on Saturday or Sunday. But I haven’t changed it for a while because there’s some controversy over how it should work.

I haven’t made any of the suggested changes yet, but I wanted you all to know that I will be changing the picture. It’s going to work the same as it’s always worked.

Also, I can’t keep up with Friday Night Cat Blogging. Just too much stuff going on on Fridays for that.

I’ve had a request that I’m asking for input on:

Over on the right I have my “Picture of the Week”.

I prefer to have it simply be a link to my picture gallery. But someone asked if it could be a link to the larger version of the picture.

Which would folks prefer?

While scanning my web logs, which are not the same thing as weblogs; what I was scanning was the logs associated with my web host… er, OK, at any rate…

I found a site that includes me in their links (or “blog roll”, which is another term for links or bookmarks posted online of other blogs; damn, the terminology is really getting out of hand, huh?)

…er, where was I? Oh, right: The Modulator has a page of the most complete blog links I’ve seen in a while. And, way down under the heading “Visual Arts” (which surprises the heck outta me, since I think of myself as a writer) is “Lunar Obverse”!

Coolio!

The folk at The Modulator also archive any and all “Friday Night Cat Blogging” (also dog, spider, etc., etc.), which I’ve learned is a long-standing tradition amongst bloggers. Little did I know…

Other things I’ve learned from reading the logs is that someone, somewhere, used the Belgian Google to search for something on my page. Twice! Yeah, baby! Bring on the Belgians!

Did you know that it can take 5 minutes or more for my blog to load if you’re on dial-up? Yeah, bad, I know. If any of you are out there reading it after waiting that long, I probably owe you booze or something. I like the way it looks but a) my page doesn’t validate as CSS-anything, and b) it’s super-resource-intensive, and c) it really only looks good in the browsers I use, which means that the majority browser (Internets Exploder from MS) wasn’t even considered when I designed it. So, I need to come up with something new. And I’ve kinda been putting it off, since I haven’t been, y’know, inspired.

However, I’m happy to announce that I’m much closer to a final design for Lunar Obverse v2.0. I worked on a mock-up tonight, just sketching something out and getting the colors down. And I’m not even sure these are the final colors and right now none of the elements are in place but, what the hell, I’m posting a tiny scaled-down version of it just to show everyone that I’m working on it:

click on image for larger version; opens in new window

See, the image at the top will be an actual picture (grabbed from NASA, since all that stuff is public domain for taxpayers) — the grey area will be the surface of the moon and the blue blob is the Earth. The tiny little bar underneath that will be the navigation menu. The wide left-hand column will be the main content, my posts; the right-hand column will have the extra stuff, like the Picture of the Week, the archive links, and maybe a poll someday or something.

I haven’t decided if the sections will all be boxed in like that. I mainly did that to show myself where they’d go.

I’ll work on it some more tomorrow and when I’m done, I’ll use it to throw together some HTML/CSS and then mock up a couple of posts, ’cause I still have to decide what color text to use for all the elements. I still like light text on a dark background but might flip that and just have dark borders around everything. Decisions, decisions… and I’m not a graphic designer, dammit, I’m a writer and a geek. So comments are welcome. But hold off until I’ve got more of the total design filled in.

Then I’ll post a link to it, hopefully later next week, and let people comment on it.

One thing I don’t have now is an “About Me” page. But the whole damn blog is about me, so why would I be redundant?

Today is a day for linking to friends.

Caleb thinks he’s fixed dante, the server his site, my site, and Geeks Against Bush (among others) all reside on.

Time will tell…

I’m experimenting with comments on my posts…

Naturally I’d prefer email, but comments might be amusing, too.

I added permanent links to my posts. I had to kludge around in Blogger to get it all to work properly (mostly to get my sidebars to show up), but it’s working for now. I can figure out how to make it pretty tomorrow.

It also increases the total size of my blog by a lot; and increases the time it takes to publish it once I make a post. But it will be worth it.

Yay! I can post at will once again! I was experimenting with other blogging software (including one written by my friend Caleb called “blogtastic”) but in the end I was able to figure out the settings that will allow me to use Blogger on my new webhost.

Prepare for lots of blogging to come! I’m also going to move my running journal to another section, and make some other changes to the site. But for now, it’s working just as it did before!

My apologies to the three or four people who actually read my blog. Since I’ve been working to move my domain to another host (a cheaper, better host (thanks, Caleb!)), I haven’t wanted to make a lot of changes or updates here. I have a current backup of the entire site, and don’t want to have to keep up. It’s easier for me to just work behind the scenes and prepare for the move.

Here’s what still needs to happen:

• We need to get the parts to upgrade the host’s server, and upgrade it.
• We need to get DNS running on the host.
• We also need to find a secondary, and possibly tertiary DNS server, with the proper geographical separation.
• Once that’s done, we need to update my registrar’s records to point bamoon.com to the new DNS servers.
• At some point in there, we need to actually move the files over to the host.
• After the files are moved over, I need to update Blogger, and I’ll also need to fix whatever is broken (there are some CGI scripts I use that the new host probably won’t allow, since they’re insecure).

I’m toying with the idea of updating the look of my site when I do this, although that might make the whole task more involved than I’d like. But, for instance, for modem users, my background image is a little large and takes too long to load. I’ll continue to toy with the idea of a site update.