SimplyOddBlog

Nobody reads this.

Posts Tagged blogging

Leading a Double Life

Jul 22

Posted by chuck in Tech | Comments off

While it’s never been a secret that I run the website Creepy Cleveland, I have tried to keep this blog and that one separate. (And doing a damn good job based on traffic to this blog.)

Well, I’ve decided that I want to have a place to bitch about the trials and tribulations of running Creepy Cleveland.

I *do* have a category on Creepy Cleveland named ‘Announcements’ that I use for news and non-haunted-type posts, but I suspect that CC visitors probably don’t appreciate me rambling about converting the blog from .asp to .php or transferring from one host to another.

So I’ve decide to bore my readers here with that kind of blather. (Shouldn’t be too hard, considering the three people that read this with any regularity just skip the posts marked ‘tech’ anyway – Hi Carrie, Dad and Joe!)

So anyway… let’s get on with the show shall we?

Here’s what’s bugging me about Creepy Cleveland now:

  1. Once upon a time I set up TwitterFeed to feed my CC posts to Twitter. It still works, but I have no idea what login/password I used to setup the account. And TwitterFeed is no help.
  2. I keep all my CC email in a separate gmail account with one of those random generated passwords (for ultimate security!). It’s so secure that even I can’t remember it, causing me to have look up the password any time I want to check my email.
  3. I just recently moved CC to a new blog engine with way more flexibilty and features! I’m fixing broken links and pulling old content from my hard drive to republish. (OK – not a problem – I’m just really busy)
  4. I keep all my CC linkroll bookmarks in delicious and I hate what delicious has become. Plus it’s *another password* to remember when posting content.
  5. I’ve recently created an Adsense account to see if I can maybe make at least enough money to pay for the hosting plan. I also take great pains to hide/kill ads in all my browsers. Conflict of interest? Yep.

I guess that’s it for now. None of the above is really a big problem. I really love running Creepy Cleveland and enjoy the challenges of trying to make a popular, readable site. I’ve gotten some positive recognition for it and hardly any criticism (and I get invited places!)

In my mind – it’s totally worth it.

I’m just glad I have a place to complain about it now.

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WordPress fanboy?

Jul 21

Posted by chuck in Tech | Comments off

I guess I’m a wordpress fan boy now.Simply Something Sophisicated - a WordPress poster

Yesterday I converted Creepy Cleveland from Blogger to WordPress.

I’m hoping most people won’t notice any difference (apart from the cool makeover), but I’m excited about the WordPress plugins I get to try out on a blog that actually gets some traffic. (Nobody reads this blog, remember?)

Of course, this blog has been a wordpress blog for nearly a year and I’ve got a couple private blogs hosted on my home and work servers (I came up with that idea after Google Notebook went under – you wouldn’t believe what a great idea that turned out to be)

WordPress is famous for their 5-minute install and hundreds of user-contributed plugins.

Oh, and it’s linux-based (of course – well, technically, if you’ve got MySQL and PHP – you’re fine) and it’s free.

Show some love.

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Buy me this shirt.

Jun 29

Posted by chuck in Babble | Comments off

Blog: Who are you talking to?
Me: My readers.
Blog: What readers?
Me: Oh, right…

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SimplyObservations

Oct 5

Posted by chuck in Babble | Comments off

I’ve been waiting and waiting to convert this blog to Google’s new Blogger Beta format. From what I’ve read, if you get selected to convert your blog to the new format, when you log into your dashboard you’ll see a link in the sidebar saying something like “Try Blogger Beta!”.

Well, I’ve been waiting and I haven’t seen shit.

So tonight I decided to start a brand new blog (using the new Blogger Beta format). I’m still keeping this blog as a sort of catch-all for keeping friends and family up on all the news that is me, so I needed a more specific topic for the new blog.

I decided on SimplyObservations. A blog where I can just spout off about anything I feel like. (Yeah – I know – this here blog is pretty much about anything I feel like, but the new one will have a bit more structure)

Blogger Beta has a pretty slick editor from what I’ve seen so far and a couple neat features that I want to play with. I’m also going to try to syndicate it just like this blog so I can link up the most recent post on the home page

I thought of making some sort of formal promise to try to post an observation everyday – but even I’m laughing so hard that it’s taking me forever just to type this sentence. But we’ll see. I’m looking forward to being able to just drop in a few sentences and maybe a picture about a product or a place or a weird thing that happened to me, give it a tag and post it (the new Blogger posts way faster too) without feeling guilty that “I didn’t write enough” or that “this post doesn’t have anything to do with anything”.

‘Cause it’s all in the eye of the Observer.

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Long September

Sep 30

Posted by chuck in Babble | Comments off


Another long dry spell.

I’m reminded of a passage from a book I read about a teacher who assigned a writing assignment to his students only to be confronted by a girl who wanted to write an essay about the United States. In an effort to help her along, the teacher suggested she try narrowing the focus of her paper from the entire United States to just the town they lived in.

When the paper came due she didn’t have it and was quite upset. She had tried and tried but she just couldn’t think of anything to say.

She had him stumped and he thought about how to help her. “Narrow it down further. Write about Main Street only”, he suggested.

She nodded dutifully and went out. But just before her next class she came back in real distress, tears this time, distress that had obviously been there for a long time. She still couldn’t think of anything to say, and couldn’t understand why, if she couldn’t think of anything about [the entire town], she should be able to think of something about just one street.

At this point the teacher became angry and shouted at her.

He told her, “Narrow it down to the front of one building on the main street. The Opera House. Start with the upper left-hand brick!”

Surprised, she left and returned the next day with a five-thousand word essay on the front of the Opera House in their town.

“I sat in the hamburger stand across the street,” she said, “and started writing about the first brick, and the second brick, and then by the third brick it all started to come and I couldn’t stop. They thought I was crazy, and they kept kidding me, but here it all is. I don’t understand it.”

He didn’t understand it either, but theorized that she was trying too hard to prioritize facts that she learned from her lessons in school.

She was unable to think of anything worth repeating. She couldn’t think of anything to write about the town because she couldn’t recall anything she had heard worth repeating. She was strangely unaware that she could look and see freshly for herself, as she wrote, without primary regard for what had been said before. The narrowing down to one brick destroyed the blockage because it was so obvious she had to do some original and direct seeing.

That passage from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance feels familiar to me because this whole past month I’ve been unable to think of anything to say. The same things happen day in and day out. Work, Home, Work, Home, Work, Home. I’m extrodinarily busy at work but having a really good time because I’m into some really interesting programming projects. Home is uneventful in a very good way. Everybody is healthy. October is coming up (We love October around here! I must post pics when the house is decorated for Halloween!) Like the student in the above story, I may need to spend some time looking for the very first brick.

And this post might be it.

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I’m not very good at this

Apr 27

Posted by chuck in Babble, Tech | Comments off

I deleted the blog two days ago.

Did you notice?

It’s OK…nobody else did. I haven’t updated in over a month.

Blogging is hard. I have a responsibility to post something every day (or every other day at most) and I can’t.

I’ve decided that I didn’t really like the layout of the blog anymore. It was too complex. Too hard to update easily. Days spent in front of the computer have unearthed a bunch of cool web tools. Sites that generate RSS feeds for almost anything. TV shows… bookmarks… recipes… anything. The web today is no longer about spending long hours painstakingly writing code. Today’s web is quick. Type a sentence, tag them with a few words, include a link and press a button. You’re outta there. You’re updated. You’re cool.

So I spent the evening blowing away my old blue template for the blog in favor of an easily maintained stock Blogger template and creating a simple frontpage to collect my feeds and links and lists.

I know there are a few of you that really read the blog. For you… I’ll make an effort to get to it more often. But for me… it’s all about simplicity.

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Get on My Calendar

Dec 8

Posted by chuck in Babble | Comments off

Now presenting the latest in a long line of tools/toys I stick on this page to make it look like I’m more organized than I really am.
The Simply Odd Calendar. (It’s over in the sidebar)

I’m really disappointed that the Google Calendar thing was apparently an unsubstantiated rumor. I still think Google will come out with a calendar application and I’m sure, since I’m a Google Whore, that I’ll use it and life will be wonderful.

Until then, however, I wanted some way to post calendar events on the blog. I found a solution over at RSScalendar.com. The new panel over in the sidebar will update automatically every week. I can add events to the calendar from any web browser and syndicate the results a whole bunch of different ways (daily, weekly, rolling 30 days…etc) It even allows you to accept comments and RSVP’s on your calendar events. I’m not sure how that part works yet, but I can see where it might come in handy.
While they don’t yet have a Firefox extension, it’s coming soon.
The only other thing that would make it perfect would be if it were sharable. Maybe it is, but I haven’t found that feature yet. If I could share it by giving people their own login, the whole family could post events to the calendar and there would be no excuse for missing birthdays, anniversaries and Christmas Concerts.

Not that there’s a big problem with that.

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Why Blog?

Oct 19

Posted by chuck in Babble | Comments off

I got a book from the library last night called BLOG: Understanding the Information Reformation by Hugh Hewitt. I haven’t read it yet, but I was skimming through it earlier and came across this chapter headline: “The Meltdown of Mainstream Media and Where Its Audience Went”. On that page this quote caught my eye:

…”news” is ultimately just a series of choices of a news organization over what to elevate beyond an individual’s attention…”

Wow. I’ve been thinking the same thing for a while now but I haven’t been able to nail it down to a concise sentence.

Today’s news media, in my opinion, sucks. I don’t read the newspaper unless I find one on the bus. I rarely watch the evening news and I only watch the morning news because it’s easier than booting the computer and logging on just to see the weather. On the off-chance I do catch any television news, they hardly ever cover the issues that I’m most interested in. Oh sure, the top headlines that everybody should know are broadcast in the first few minutes but for the remainder of the hour? Blah blah blah.

I blog because I think people should know about issues that you won’t see on TV:

The RIAA is suing a 14 year old girl for file-sharing

Verizon doesn’t know what the word ‘unlimited’ means.

Anheuser-Busch stops promoting “Bud Pong” tournaments after finding out people were playing it with beer instead of water.

I didn’t see any of those stories on the news this morning…

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Simply (Odd) New Blog

Oct 17

Posted by chuck in Babble | Comments off

OK it’s time for the "State of the Blog Address"

The old blog: "Book of the Mad – A cursor dipped in X", is gone.  Actually, it’s still out there because I don’t know how to delete it, but it won’t be updated any longer.  I moved all the entries to the new address and renamed the blog to compliment the new website. If you saw the site in the last few days you’ll notice that I’ve taken great pains (yeah – it did hurt) combining the blog with the old web page.  Once I got the old page uploaded and working I decided I wanted it to be more than just a page linking to the other pages of the site.  The fact that one of the links on the old page was a link to the blog*spot blog was especially bothersome.  I knew if I spent some time figuring out how the blogger template system worked I’d be able to come up with something I’d be happier with.

I spent two whole days working with a custom, from-scratch template that I was very proud of.  Until, that is, I tried to read some of my old posts.  The archive pages were all screwed up and things generally looked kinda wonky.  I did a quick Google and found Blogger Templates, finally deciding on the minimalist design.  All I wanted was for the guts of the template to work correctly so I’d have something to learn from while customizing it.

And here we are.

Now I have an inspiration to update the blog more often as well as a nice convenient place to introduce and advertise any new pages I come up with.  (The links are over on the right)

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That’s Odd, Isn’t it?

Oct 12

Posted by chuck in Babble | Comments off

After many years I’ve finally done it. I went out and paid for a web host!!
Let’s start from the beginning…
Recently, a guy who used to visit Creepy Cleveland when I had the site up and running (Billy Meade) emailed me and asked if I’d let him revive Creepy Cleveland and host it on his server. He’d even register a domain and everything. He was offering to run Creepy Cleveland but still give me credit for the site. The more I thought about it, the more I leaned toward saying yes because Creepy Cleveland was really fun while I had it going but it was also alot of work. So be it. Creepy Cleveland should live again. I said yes.
Except… there was no way I wanted Creepy Cleveland out there looking the way it used to a year ago. I’ve learned a few things about web coding in the past year and I wanted to clean up Creepy Cleveland before the new unveiling. It only took a few days to put a little polish on the site and send a skeleton version to Billy.
That’s where we’re at now. I’m waiting for word from him as to the next move.
But, the plot thickens…
Spending a few days of non-stop web coding whetted my appetite for it all over again. I’ve got to have 7 or 8 webpages out there rotting on free web hosts with no traffic and horrible bandwidth restrictions. I did a little digging around and restored all my old sites from backup and put together a brand new site. I did a bit of research and decided to host with godaddy.com and registered the domain simplyodd.com. (I thought of a ton of names but narrowed it down to this one based on availability and the fact that all the different sites in one place is certainly a bit, well, odd.)
For now, simplyodd.com is my index of web pages but I have bigger plans (a photo album springs to mind!) and now I have the tools to try out some things I’ve been wanting to do.
Stay tuned…

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