Sometimes I feel the need to make an easy blog entry.

This usually means I’m torn – torn between A) the silent periods that occur on my blog because I haven’t taken the time to write something worthwhile, and B)posting “fluff” on my blog just to make an entry, hoping to avoid appearing dead.

My personal stance is – I’d rather a blog author not post something than strive to maintain a posting frequency that might make some of the blog postings “blah” or “ho-hum”. To me, micro-blogging aka social networking sites (twitter, utterz, etc) is where the “blah” belongs (blahlongs?) because at least there’s activity. “I. Am. Not. Dead.” is what micro-blogging screams. Having the sidebar show my latest activity, as inconsequential as it may be, helps the blog stay fresh.

I don’t want to have a blahg.

This stance of mine has evolved over time. If you look at the blog archives in my first and second years, I did a lot of fluff. I started with “pic-a-day” where I just put a photo or funny photo. I also did a “caption contest” series for a while. Back then, micro-blogging wasn’t all the rage, so many blog authors struggled with questions such as “is this tidbit worth a post?” and “gee, it’s been 4 days since my last post, what should I say? No, that’s not ‘big’ enough“.

I don’t remember when it clicked for me, but at some point I decided to try and settle on one post per day. This is what Blogography does. Since Dave2 has one of my all-time favorite blogs, I figured I could learn something. And learn something I did. Having a pre-set posting frequency helped me plan. I gave up the stress of posting something, sometime and traded it for the less stressful idea of posting something daily. The concept of a deadline actually helped the situation.

There were other benefits to this approach as well: for one, I felt that the expectation of a daily post would help readers decide to follow my blog. I knew that in my own head, I asked myself “What’s Dave going to write about today?” and it made me want to go look. I wanted that same question repeated throughout the world, but with my name in the question.

What about you?

So what do I post today?

I’m posting fluff.

In the extended entry, you will find some funny newspaper clippings sent to me via email recently.  What’s funny is I started with just the newspaper clippings and then realized that I was posting fluff, so I ended up making entire post about posting fluff, which in itself made the post not fluff.  To me, that’s as clever as Seinfeld making a show that’s about nothing.  

(PS: Microsoft, if you’re listening… I’d totally do an ad campaign for a lot less than $10 million)

(more…)

So, it seems 2.6 is out, the “latest stable release of WordPress”

So, anyone dare me to upgrade first?  Don’t be shy.

I’m at 2.3.3 cuz I chickened out of upgrading to 2.5 or 2.5.1 after a few issues I had with some of the blogs I help support.

I’ve been thinking recently about my blog’s name.  The “blog of whall.”  I’ve been the blog of whall for over three years now.  I took whall.org because the dot-com and dot-net variants were already taken.  I’d rather not have a dot-org for a couple of reasons - one of which you can’t have private domain registration and the other being you’re supposed to be non-profit - but I never took the time to brand myself on an available dot-com.

If there’s something I like about my domain, whall.org, is that it’s short.  It’s [mostly] easy to say (doubleyou-hall dot org).  I’m very used to typing it.  And, it’s an established brand, if you could call it that.

My brain, however, keeps diverting itself from thinking about important things such as work, family, breakfast tacos and Kirstie Alley and won’t let go of the idea of possibly changing my domain and blog name.  I weigh the disadvantages against the advantages; I wonder if I should go all-out on a real theme, logo, etc.

Some of the names I toy with include

1. whall.us (I own)
   Possibly more appropriate for commercial use, and short.
2. offthewhall.com (do not own)
   This is probably the one I think about the most - easy to remember, easy to say, and it’s a .com.  It’s also related to what I would consider my blog - off the wall.  Plus I love Michael Jackson.
3. whall.name and waynehall.name (I own)
   Very specific to my name.  However, I’m not sure about making my blog about my name.  There’s something to be said about using a theme and moniker instead of my actual name.
4. whallify.com (I own)
   I’ve used the name ‘whallify’ for a long long time.  It’s a verb meaning “to whall”. 
5. 4mon.com (I own)
   Short domain name, but totally unrelated to what my blog would be about.  It will probably be a domain I keep for intending to resell.
6. bitemy.net (I own)
   Snarky.  Maybe I should give it to Hilly.
7. firewhall.com (do not own)
   Short, easy to say, but not necessarily appropriate to the blog.

I want to open up the discussion - let me know what you think!

In many cases, a good design is as important as the content.  You can take the lamest thing and wrap a snappy logo design around it, and it immediately gains appeal and possesses some sort of credibility, albeit superfluous.   Take the Spice Girls for instance.

Similarly, a fantastic idea shrouded in bad form or not marketed correctly might not ever get taken seriously.  Take Betamax for instance.

This concept of uplifting style above substance is one of humanty’s Big Flaws.  We do it all the time - commercials, religions, personal image, writing, products we buy, and portions of everything we can touch and see.  In today’s busy world, we naturally gravitate to the stylish because it’s simply too much work to sift through all the dirt and noise and actually discern the quality content from the crap that surrounds us.

When a thing can *mean* something significant (substance) and look fabulous doing it (style), you then have something worth your time.

But is substance and style enough?  I think not.  I think there is something to be said for functionality as well.  Although there is a saying that goes “anything worthwhile doing requires effort” it doesn’t mean we can’t make things easier on ourselves.

It is with these concepts in mind that I bring you…. The begbar.

It’s conveniently placed above this and every post, right there at the top of the page.  The blog of whall now offers 24×7 begging.

It’s got the substance (pleas for help or assistance), it’s got the style (oooh, so suave and sexy!) and it’s got the functionality (it’s right there at the top and you just click on the item(s) you care about).

Most blogs have certain staples that hold them together - a header and footer, for example.  Most also sport various ‘bars’ like the sidebar, a navbar, a toolbar, a linkbar, and in some exceptional cases, an open bar (where is that link again?). I thought about calling this the “plea-bar” but I thought someone might make fun of it (plea bar again, anyone?)

I hereby populate my inaugural begbar with my latest lolacola submission beg for votes and my pepsistuff codes beg button.

“Help me… help you… help me.”

Visit the begbar and use it often. For the whall you save might be, well, me!

I let all the other bloggers do their “favorite posts from the previous year” posts in January.  Then I let February go by because it was short (and we need to be nice to the ones who are shorter than us).  So now it’s March and it seems like the PERFECT time for me to wax eloquent pimp myself out do a celebratory review of last year’s best posts (in the eyes of yours truly).

Normally, I’d say “without further ado,” but I actually have some more ado laying around, so I thought I’d ask a question of all of you.  Consider this my ado.

Ok, now back to my Year In Review.

In 2007, I started a “Stuff you don’t want to MISC” series, and here’s my first entry from June 17th, 2007.

Favorite Photo/Video from 2007

• Post Secret - probably my favorite 2007 post - where I profess my love (and make a video) for Michael Jackson.
• I need to be as cool as this guy - Greatest. GuitarHeroVideo. Ever.
• Chuck Says… - where I combine my favorite Chuck Norris quotes with the “Chuck Says” graphic-creating website.
• Zina - we got a new dog in June of 2007, but still miss Nitro.
• Wayne-O-Shop series #1 - Man, I look REALLY good when my face is photoshopped onto a sexy man’s body…

Favorite One-Liners / Definitions

• Pants - Top Star Wars lines improved by replacing a word with “pants” as in “I find your lack of pants disturbing”
• Waynal - where I submitted and was denied by urban dictionary the ability to define my new term
• Addiction - I outline Jaden’s addiction to the Binky and how we fought it.
• Evolution vs Competition - yes, it’s a serious question.  How do we balance compassion and competition?

Favorite Revenge

• Kitten War - about a guy’s revenge on a neighbor using his Internet connection.

Favorite Political Entries

• English as an official language - I was pretty coherent for an arrogant Republican.
• Golden Rule - I give you a new installment of the Golden Rule.
• Conspiracy Theory - Penguins - Yes, I still think it’s a conspiracy about all the penguin movies that came out
• Yay Harry Potter! - where dumbledor says guns are ok.

Favorite Technical Entries

• How to track down a MAC Address - I still like this one.  I need to do more technical posts, methinks.
• Blog RDA - Where I started a new domain but haven’t done anything with it.
• Whack Whack! - where I correct the entire Internet on when to use \\ or Whack-Whack
• How to recover if you’ve edited a Sharepoint Site in Frontpage - self-explanatory

Favorite Nostalgic Entries

• Fantastic Journey - I reminisc about a TV show that was only on for like 20 weeks or something.
• Lolly Lolly Lolly get your adverbs here - seeing Schoolhouse Rock Live in concert.
• I wanna go back - I can’t get more teary-eyed than remembering my childhood.

Favorite Polls

• What’s your favorite scene of… the Goonies? - where I started my first poll.

Favorite everything else

• I got to 3rd base at snackiepoo.com - my first guest post!
• Now hear this… - I became a certified astrologer.

I did a little maintenance on the ol’ blog this week.  For one, I upgraded to Wordpress 2.3.2 because they said it was an “urgent security release.”  Okay, I’ll upgrade.  It took a whole 3 minutes. I even used my Maintenance Mode plugin, which I love.

Some of the plugins I use also got a little lovin’ - Subscribe to Comments went to v2.1.2, Akismet went to v2.1.3, and Twitter Tools finally supported WP 2.3 with v1.1b1.  All of these updates were easy and quick. 

Now that Twitter Tools supports Wordpress 2.3, my tweets gets created automatically when I post a new entry on the blog.   Another cool thing I added was a sidebar portion that lists my most recent tweets (this comes with Twitter Tools).

Note: out of the box, the way Twitter Tools displays tweets looks horrible.  So I did my own little custom CSS to make the first line kind of highlighted in a blue-green tint by using a background image per LI tag, and also modified the actual Twitter Tools code to display the time with the hyperlink FIRST instead of at the end of the line.  I was dismayed to see that the authors didn’t allow the end user to define how they wanted the tweet displayed.  To me, it’s much more important to see how recent the tweet is, and THEN see the content. But either way, the plugin should allow personalization and custom CSS without requiring manual code work.

This is the code I changed in twitter-tools.php (original line numbers shown):

447
448
449
450
451
452

if (count($tweets) > 0) {
      foreach ($tweets as $tweet) {
//       $output .= '      <li>'.aktt_make_clickable(wp_specialchars($tweet->tw_text)).' <a href="http://twitter.com/'.$aktt->twitter_username.'/statuses/'.$tweet->tw_id.'">'.aktt_relativeTime($tweet->tw_created_at, 3).'</a></li>'."\n";
         $output .= '      <li> <a href="http://twitter.com/'.$aktt->twitter_username.'/statuses/'.$tweet->tw_id.'">'.aktt_relativeTime($tweet->tw_created_at, 3).'</a>: '.aktt_make_clickable(wp_specialchars($tweet->tw_text)).'</li>'."\n";
      }
}

The original line that comes with it is commented out (line 449), and the line I changed it to is now shown as line 450. This is based on version 1.1b1.

I also added this to my styles.php for the CSS to make it look more prettified:

/* twitter tools */
div.aktt_tweets {
        text-align: left;
        padding-left: 10px;
        padding-right: 10px;
}
div.aktt_tweets li {
        background-image:url('images/gradiated-3.jpg');
        color: black;
}

And just today I installed WP Syntax so I could finally MAYBE display code snippets in a post correctly.  Sheesh this is hard to do!  I tried the Preserve Code Formatting plugin but it didn’t work very well for me. Even with WP Syntax, tinyMCE still has problems with the greater than signs and stuff, and it converts them to the ampersand equivalents, so I had to turn off visual editing just to complete this post.

Hmm, since I’m composing this post “early” and scheduling it to actually show up tomorrow morning, I wonder if Twitter Tools is smart enough to not do a tweet? It probably isn’t. Shucks. I’m now exposed as a fraud. I guess that’s better than being exposed as a fraulein.

Oh, and Happy New Year!