#62, Another Fairly Hot Night

Another Lazy Afternoon, Waikiki, Hawaii, October ‘07, artistic view.


The Horizon May Be Tilted, But Who Cares!, Waikiki, Hawaii, October ‘07, artistic view.

Yet another hot day, and the same is supposed to be true again tomorrow. We will survive for sure, but the evening exercise part has to be moved well deeper into the evening, since it is quite unpleasant at earlier hours. The cooler air breeze turns your mind away from daily routine activities, and into a very relaxing mood. Do not forget to go back to sleep, because walking till very early morning hours suddenly sounds very tempting.

Do you write your blog entries in text, html, or use a special software that generates the html code for you? I noticed myself that in order to prepare a fairly good-looking blog, you need to use a bit of everything. Using a simple text editor is the simplest method, but it has some disadvantages. It probably has no word spelling, for example, and you do not want to publish what you just typed in, so a Microsoft Word comes handy. You can arrange your thoughts now, check spelling, move paragraphs around, etc. The title, picture captions, and tags are also checked at this stage. Also copyright info is enclosed. No need to pay much attention to formatting at this stage, just paragraphs separated by extra empty lines. Next all text is printed and corrected till it looks acceptable. I never generate the html code directly from Word, although it could work fine. Then, I have html templates prepared in plain text in BBEdit, from previous blog entries. The templates are reusable, thus save some time. Now I place all text from Word into BBEdit, without paying much attention to formatting. Inside BBEdit, I usually add all extra html code that is needed, for example from Google Docs, formatting, extra links. This can now be previewed for the very first time, and most obvious mistakes corrected. There are still no pictures in the blog.

Then everything goes to Blogger. Then pictures are added. Adding more than a single picture involves some juggling around, try it. Now the real preview is undergoing its moment of truth. Actually the previewing part is not exactly 100% correct. What you see on screen is not what is going to show up in the final version. This is not good! If you publish your blog at this time, you risk showing your subscribers a half-baked product. You really do not know how the final thing is going to look like. You can check if the extra-added html is actually doing what it is supposed to, whether Google Docs is updating to the latest version of your document. It is also time to make some words and sentences bold or italic so they would stand out. All of this is not perfect, but by trial and error you can get very near your imaginary goal. Is WordPress better? If somebody is thinking about software that would be an interface to Blogger, for example, then remember that every time somebody at Google changes something, you need to change as well, otherwise your product is always going to be handicapped. So we managed to publish yet another blog, ads are flashing in front of our eyes, and advertisers' money keeps rolling in – oh, really?

Are my entries too short, too long, too random, or in “what are you doing” category, get a life? Every time I start to write, those things come to my mind. You need to be in sync with whoever reads your entries, you want to be informative, a little bit entertaining. I make sure that you can actually use something in your own work. That is my silent goal! Hope this works!

Two pictures for this entry are already prepared. Sometime along the way, I am going to discuss how the pictures end up looking the way they look like. It is another useful piece of information.

An iced tea with lemon, always tastes good this late at night. And a glass of cold Sauvignon Blanc. Now the editing and publishing time, following steps I just described.

Google™ is a trademark of Google, Inc.
Microsoft™ is a trademark of Microsoft Corp., Inc.

Microsoft Word from Microsoft Corp., Inc.
BBEdit from Bare Bones Software. It doesn’t suck.^®

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#60, Thoughts From The Mall

Walking On Ewa Beach, Ewa, Hawaii, October ‘07, artistic view.


3 For $5, Waikiki, Hawaii, October ‘07, artistic view.

It's again another hot day, and a sticky one on top of that. Not the one I like most. 75F is fine with me but 90+F is a bit too much. Need to get something to drink, fast.

Spent this morning preparing a package to be shipped to an eBay customer. It has been a while since I sold anything through eBay. The site has changed, it is actually more difficult to sell, and item prices are higher than they were before. In a nutshell, not as cool as it used to be. More corporate, the entrepreneurial phase is long gone. My deal went smoothly, I already got paid through PayPal, and a digital camera got shipped. Only I could not slide my credit card in and out of the shipping Post Office’s machine in a smooth movement and almost gave up and assumed that I would have to go somewhere else. Luckily, the Postal employee explained to me how to use it, and after several tense moments, everything completed satisfactorily. Till next eBay deal!

Now switching to a different subject. How do you decide if you should make your own web site or if you pay somebody experienced to handle it for you? I am in a situation like that right now. Certainly I can handle simpler designs on my own, but more advanced and better-looking websites require a bit more experience than I got. There is no need to learn everything on your own since this approach takes time and only delays the time when you will be able to see your website up and running. But if a simpler is good enough, then it may also be quite acceptable, and no doubt cheaper. Did not decide yet which way to go.

In my last blog, I used Google Docs for the very first time. Actually to display certain types of data, Google Docs could be fine. The good feature is that it is updated every 5 minutes, so it could be used to capture near real time data. I have to think about that. Some Google API’s will no doubt be needed. There are many new possibilities because of that.

I looked around the web for information about ads in blogs. The most honest bloggers will tell you that you need to have traffic to your site of over a million visitors before anything can be made to work. Below that threshold, essentially nothing is going to happen. This advice appears to make lots of sense. Before you have a pretty good traffic, do not bother with any ads. It is unlikely that the ads alone would attract new people to your site. Basically I got some time before a full-blown ad campaign starts on this blog! Lucky you.

I try to stay, on this blog, away from politics. Not that I have nothing to say or know nothing about it. Quite opposite! But it would be better to have that vast subject omitted here. You may have heard that at work you never discuss politics and religion. I think it works better for people who just do that, from my own experience. Since blogs can be read by anybody, also your employer, it is better here as well to omit those subjects. It is amazing, however, that in the country with so many freedoms, you are better of if you just keep quiet! Enough on that subject, already said too much.

Now watching JillBolteTaylor_2008_480.mp4, who is showing a real human brain. Will not spoil any more. Very interesting, you should watch too, recommended on Twitter by BrookeAlley.

eBay™ is a trademark of eBay, Inc. Google™ is a trademark of Google, Inc.

MP3 music: http://002e972.netsolhost.com/ .