Bill

#ThisSite

I'm going to leave this blog here but, at least for the forseeable future, I'm not going to post on it. Instead I'll be posting to Google+. I've put each of the people who currently receive an email notification when the blog is updated (about 30 of you) and put you in a "circle" there. Thus, when I post a blog post there you'll still get an email notice about it. However, you might have to create a google+ account to read it. I'm not sure.

Anyway, I find myself posting here less and less frequently but I routinely post on Google+ and so I've decided to try and consolidate my efforts. Hopefully I won't end up regretting this decision :O)

I'll be leaving this blog intact so that it can be referenced and because there are a bunch of posts on here that journal cool moments in my life that I don't want to lose access to.

Hopefully I'll see everyone over at Google+!

#ThisSite

I imported one of my other blogs into my this blog tonight to consolidate. I didn't realize it but when I started the import a new email was sent for each imported post. So my 20-30 subscribers each got about 500 emails from me tonight. DOH! Sorry folks; I promise I won't make that mistake again.

#ThisSite

I have switched my commenting system from the native wordpress solution to one provided by Disqus. Hopefully I won't regret it. There are a lot of benefits to everyone that their comments are stored this way though to most of my blog readers they are pretty trivial benefits that you might not care about at all. However, here is a short rundown.

1. 
   
2. You now have ownership of your comments. They aren't stored on my server anymore and you can manage your own comments via disqus (you'll just need an account there and then you'll need to claim some comments here as yours.
   
3. You can aggregate your conversations from around the web. Sites like friendfeed can pull all of your disqus comments into one place and you can participate in many conversations without having to visit every page where you left a comment.
   
4. Less spam? Well this is the hope. We shall see.
   

Ok so that isn't really "a lot" of benefits but it's a few so be happy with with little I can offer - OK?

#ThisSite

Last week my site was the target of some annoying spammers who were posting totally inappropriate comments. Typically my spam deterrent system is sufficient to catch and purge spam comments but somehow the spammers last week were fooling my detection system and successfully posting crap. Thus for the time being I have turned off comments until I can find a better solution.

Hopefully this will be a short lived condition and all discussion can resume.

#ThisSite

My post yesterday comparing the equity of punishments for two different crimes actually generated a dialog in the comments section. And when I say dialog I don't mean my mom and I having a conversation about my need to be safer while mountain biking. The fact that folks decided to chat and share their own viewpoints was pretty exciting. Thus I've decided that I'll inject a few more commentaries on my blog and not keep it so secluded to "family talk". If you are subscribed to the blog and are receiving an email notification each time I post but you don't want any "commentary" posts you can modify your preferences and exclude the commentary category.

I probably won't be crafting a ton of these articles but I imagine you'll see a couple each month; maybe more depending on the reception to them. I'd love to engage the 40+ people who are subscribed via email and the others who subscribe via RSS into more of a two-way dialog so hopefully this will prove fruitful.

#Commentary #ThisSite

I really detested my last effort at designing a theme for the site. It was ugly and had no real appeal at all. Not only was it ugly it was incomplete. I kept on finding different parts of the site that didn't look quite right because I had never gotten around to really finalizing the theme. Well today that comes to an end. I found a theme I really like - one that is free and that I am allowed to reuse - and I replaced my ugly white theme with this one. So far I really like it - in fact my site now looks better than it ever has.

The sidebar with all the links point to all sorts of other things that I write or maintain online. So every other blog I have is now rolled up into that sidebars links. Beyond that there isn't much else to point out about the site. I hope it is easy for everyone, old and young alike, to read.

#General #ThisSite

Did you know I have what amounts to four blogs on the web? You probably didn't. More than likely you are only familiar with this one; the one where I plop all my family updates and stuff. Truth be told this one blog is probably sufficient and I could probably figure out a way to consolidate all my other stuff into this one - but I kind of like the other ones I have and each has its own purpose. You might even be interested in some of the others. With that in mind I am going to tell you about each of them and then, possibly, introduce you to a cool bit of technology that will help you keep up to date on each that you are interested in.

My newest blog is at bits.rawlinson.us and it is a small "tumble blog aka tumblog" where I just stick interesting stuff I find on the web. Generally you won't see big long postings like this one there. Nor will you see much origional content by me. However, I will stick all sorts of stuff there that I think are interesting or worthwhile - mostly videos and quotes of other people. Generally I will be in agreement with the content or I will at least find it highly entertaining. The tumblog format is ideal for these kind of posts and it helps me keep the focus of this blog, primarily, on my family.

In the past I have posted some observational essays about politics or whatever on this site as well. However, overtime I have also been dual posting many of these to a site called Newsvine. Newsvine gets a lot more traffic there so my opinion can reach a broad audience, and thus, I get far more feedback from people there. I won't say I like the direction Newsvine has been heading in lately (as far as the belligerent and rude crowd goes) but overall there are still a lot of bright people there who give back some great comments and criticisims of my opinions that help me figure out where I really stand on the issue. I've actually had the headlines of things I put on newsvine being shown on the homepage of this site for a long time as well.

Way back when I first started this blog I had about as many technically jaron laced posts as I did personal ones yet the majority of my audience wasn't that interested in my tech postings so I ended up starting a second blog In The Trenches that deals almost entirely with more technical stuff relating to my job. That blog is still going strong though, at times, I get as bad about posting there as I do here.

The reason I decided to write this post was because I want to find a way to share the stuff in my tumblog with the people who also read this blog - or at least give my readers a chance to opt into seeing what I've recently discovered. However, there isn't a clean cut easy way for me to integrate the tumblog with the automatic emails that get sent by this site and I really don't want to spam anyone with additional emails. In fact, I don't really like spamming your inbox with my blog updates all that much either. I'd rather help you read my blog(s) at your leisure without getting in your way at all. Fortunately there is a technology that solves this specific problem and does it well; it's called RSS. RSS is a "news feed" where each item I post on any of my blogs would be considered a news item. So, basically, you could subscribe to any of my blogs (or really any blog at all) and use that news feed to keep up with the blogs content without ever having to actually visit the blog.

Basically each blog has a unique web address for it's news feed. So, for instance, this blogs news feed is at http://feeds.feedburner.com/rawlinson-us. This address can then be used with a feed reader, like Google Reader, to organize and track all of the news feeds you are interested in. You'd be amazed at how many sites (almost everyone I go to) have a news feed. I use Google Reader to track all of the feeds I like to read (about 100). The thing is you don't have to read everything that comes through in every feed - I just skim the contents till I see an article I'm interested in then read it, and then mark the rest as "read" and move on. It is a really great system.

Some of you may already be familiar with RSS - in fact I already have five people who are subscribed to my feed and that's without me having any advertisement for it at all. However, if you aren't, even if you don't want to subscribe to any of my feeds, I'd suggest you explore it a little. The technology, in the long run, will make your life on the net a bit easier.

Here are my various news feeds.

This Site

http://feeds.feedburner.com/rawlinson-us

Tumblog

http://bits.rawlinson.us/rss

Tech Blog

http://feeds.feedburner.com/InTheTrenches

Newsvine

http://finalcut.newsvine.com/_feeds/rss2/master?articles

You can subscribe to each or all of these in your feed reader and then categorize them all as "Bills Stuff" or something and viola you have all my writings on the web in one handy place that you can go to at your leisure and read. If you need any help getting this setup please just let me know and I'll be glad to help.

#General #Geekiness #Entertainment #ThisSite

Well I have done it, I bit the bullet and made a new theme up for the site. It's very, very plain but still pretty different from what I had before. Hopefully it will be easy for you all to read the content and to participate in the conversations. If something seems "odd" please just let me know as this current theme is very much a work in progress.

#ThisSite

This is about as short and simple of a post as you'll ever see here. I just changed the site to have a nearly monochrome color scheme. Hopefully, the black on white contrast of the main posts will make it easier for some of my older readers. I realize it's kind of boring looking and I'll be revisiting this when I have more time - but for now enjoy the monotony!

#ThisSite