Hiatus

Busy Startup + A Very Busy Travel Schedule + A Large Young Family = No Blogging.

Sorry. I hope that something changes but I have to say that business is great and the family is a blast and unfortunately my returns to blogging will be getting the short end. I have a couple of things today to post about so I thought I would start with this.

Blogging Birthday - 3 Years and counting

As of today, I have been blogging pretty regularly for 3 years. Back in 2004 when I started I don't think I imagined I would keep doing this. Now, 882 posts later, I find it more enjoyable than ever although my ability to move to a long form of narrative has never materialized. For those who keep tabs on me through this vehicle, thanks for the kind comments and your continued interest.

Spring Cleaning

If you have been here before more than a couple of times, you may have noticed I cleaned up my blog. Three things happened to make this so. 1. I am approaching my 3rd anniversary of blogging next month and it seemed like a good time for a change, considering I have been using the same template for over 1000 days. 2. I really wanted to see what you can do with the new Blogger infrastructure (I am a bit of a creature of habit and if I were to start all over again today I would look long and hard at six apart and word press) 3. Some guy who writes a post about good blog design singled me out as an example of widgets and links gone bad.

The last one cracked me up alot. I saw the link sometime around 6 months ago and I finally felt like I should address his holding me out as a junkyard dog of blogging. When I find the link I will post it. Technorati couldn't help me tonight to find it.

So, the new Blogger templates...Very nice. I like the ease of adding javascript/html. No more scanning a template. This is a big reason I didn't get rid of things. Other than being lazy, it felt like a big risky undertaking. No more. Add a piece/delete a piece fairly easy.

Aesthetically I think the new look is much cleaner as well. Nice and structured. A little plain but I am sure I can fix that with some thought.

As for widgets and add ons other than archives, profile and blogroll, I added three things. 1. A cool Flickr flash badge. Very tricky. My friends and family mostly come to my blog to go to the pictures so I hope they like the improvement. 2. My ad words. I am getting my first check. Woot! Don't spend that $100 too fast. Hey can you guys please click on my ads sometime? I guess I deserve that since I don't click on yours. 3. Sitemeter tracker. Given the low volume of comments on my blog, if I didn't have the stats to secretly track you, I don't think I could carry on with my blogging.

So there it is. Hopefully I will post a similar post in 3 years when I go to the immersive virtual reality template from Google, but who knows. I will be adding more blog junk shortly so enjoy the Spartan look while it lasts.