I have friends in real life and they all get treated differently. Some are people I see weekly, some I see once a year, some I talk to once in a great while. Some I exchange pleasantries with and some I’ll complain/talk about work or my love life. Some friends I’ll travel with and and some I really only keep in touch with on the phone. Every relationship is completely different, not better or worse, just different. And I might turn down invitations with certain people for certain things, you don’t say yes to every single event/trip/movie you get invited to, do you? I don’t really like sports, a friend isn’t going to think I don’t like them just because I won’t join their group of friends in getting season passes to some team, right?

My on-line life has similar parallels. I might chat with someone often or occasionally. Some of my on-line friends are people who might have traveled to the same place I did so I friended them, but it’s so long ago I don’t even remember how we ended friends in the same place. Some are my friends in real life but I do no actual communications with them on-line. Just like real life the on-line people are treated differently treated different. So just like in real life, requests to be friends can be denied; I’m not looking for season passes that portion of your life, I’m happy with the way things are.

Plus you get on-line friends who ask you to join farmville, mob wars or what ever other junk they might play I automatically decline, I don’t play those things (I do play Scrabble though). And keep in mind when people invite you to those things, they are actually sharing some of your (possibly) private information with those games/programs, that’s how you get the invites.

In addition, I treat my real life differently than my on-line life. I occasionally talk about things to strangers on-line that I would never mention to friends or family; they might stumble across it, but it’s not like I had directly shared it with them.

I’ve actually got more friends and family on some social networks than I’d actually like. Who knows who might read something and share it with someone, like my Mom, because they assume I already have. And on the opposite side, in my real life my Mom probably shares more with friends and family than I’d prefer.

Here’s an on-line example, I’m friends with some of my cousins kids and one day talking to my mom and aunt I ask how my cousin’s son (the aunt’s grandson) enjoyed the high school dance the other night. When asked how I remembered, I mentioned that I saw some photos on-line (I did know my aunt knew there was a dance). So of course they asked to see them and I said, you know he’s shared those photos with people he knows who is going to see them and I didn’t feel right showing them; I was actually surprised how well they understood. I told them if I shared stuff he didn’t want shared, he might block me or limit my access or (even worse) he might limit himself…

It’s not like there was anything inappropriate in the photos, but it just wasn’t my info to share. And now that I think about it, I don’t even think they were his photos, I think they were just tagged with him in them.

This is just a test of MacJournal. I’ve tried it in the past, but I thought I’d give it another try since it just came in a bundle I purchased and they’re coming out with an iPhone app that you can sync your entries with it.

I had a few problems getting it to configure. I ended up manually doing the settings and using the MovableType protocol with a blog ID of “1”. Couldn’t get the atom protocol for posting to work (I’ve never gotten it to work with any blogging client). Actually, it just alerted me to version 5.2 with allowed me to use the WordPress protocol, but I still needed to use a blog ID of “1”. And when it pulls down my old entries, it pulls down my tags, but doesn’t seem to grab my categories.

As I write this, I see a way to set the tags, but I don’t see any way to set my categories. I see it pulled the categories down from the web site but I just don’t see how to choose them. When you submit the post (“Send to Blog”) is when it asks you to pick the category! That was not in the help section at all. Also, it’s kind of inconvenient, if you write an article off-line and wait until you are connected to the internet to post it you can’t just hit send, you need to pick the categories which might not seem like a big deal, but when you’ve got a 1/2 dozen posts you wrote off-line and you’ve only got a few minutes to post (and they might be charging you by the minute) it’d be nice to have done that part in advance.

Hmm… Trying to figure out how to wrap the text around this image. Can’t figure out how to edit the HTML (my preferred choice) to change it. Not so happy with this at this point, but maybe someone will offer some tips.

Later: It also auto capitalized my tags after I specifically typed them in lowercase, not happy with that. I’ve got a few other WordPress things: Not being able to edit custom fields and set the slug for the blog post name, but those are pretty specific things, but I wanted to mention them for those loooking for a client.

I’ll play with it a little more, but I think I’ll be sticking with Ecto which integrates with WordPress quite nicely. I’m not saying it’s bad, but it doesn’t let me do some of the things I want to do. Ecto handles the categories, tags, custom fields and the web URL (slug) for WordPress very well; plus it allows me to create some macros, makes it pretty to create Amazon links, has a nice preview and can switch between WYSIWYG and HTML quite easily.

FYI, this is MacJournal version 5.1.4 5.2 and a self-hosted WordPress 2.9.2 blog.

So it’s been six years since I started blogging. Sometimes I blog a lot and sometimes a little but I come really close to averaging one post a day (actually about 0.995 posts per day). I’ve really been slacking lately, all the vacation days when I’ve written more than a few help pick up the numbers, but I never like it when a week goes by that I haven’t posted. This year I only did a little over 200, so I’ll try and make up for it over the next year, if I could post five different days a week, I think I’d be happier about it…

This post is a bit of a mish-mash of tech details and thoughts of blogging.

I originally started using Movable Type for the blog in 2003, I had my blog in a subdirectory of GaryLaPointe.com and changed subdirectories a few timesand then in 2005 moved it to here at GarySaid.com and left it alone.

If had a tech suggestion for anyone blogging, it’s pick a domain name and stick to it so that you don’t lose readers (and search engine links); choose something vague/generic so if you change what you blog about your web address can stay the same if you want it to. While I call my blog the same name “Gary Said…” I could easily change the title to “Lone Geek Blogging” (or whatever) but still have the same easy to remember address.

I really enjoy blogging, it’s nice to reflect on parts of my life and have to think up semi-coherent paragraphs to describe whatever it is that I’m thinking about. I try to keep most of my blog positive and remember that I don’t blog about everything in my life, so sometimes it’s not always the easiest thing to come up with a topic.

I never knew who would come read and while I’ve met a few people I really have no idea how many people I know (or don’t know) actually read my blog. The one thing I know is that I really enjoy getting feedback from people (even when it’s something short like “I thought the same thing about that”) and it’s extra special getting a link back from someone when they just mention my site or even a specific article (even if it’s just one of my money saving tips). I hope that feeling never goes away!

Since I mentioned comments, here’s some comment info/stats and then I’m going to go (the day is almost over). On average, I actually get about 1.5 comments per post, but in actuality most posts don’t get comments. Of my 3,000+ comments I’d bet that 1,000 go to the same dozen posts over and over again (my bed has 454 comments, hacking iTunes has 91 and another ten have between 30 and 100).

I almost forgot: I switched to self-hosted WordPress last December (I played with it for a bit before the switch) and have really enjoyed using it since then. I feel I can do more with WordPress with less work than I did with Movable Type. I’ve mentioned things like this in a few posts: WordPress vs. Movable Type and Things I miss about MT.

FYI – Lisa’s book WordPress For Dummies is a great resource if you want to use WordPress.

Thank you for reading!!!

So a few months ago I installed the A Year Ago Today plug-in it shows a list of posts that I’ve done on this day (date) in the past at the top of my blog. I’ve liked it a lot, it reminds me of things I’ve done in the past so I generally revisit the posts. Sometimes I barely even remember blogging it. And sometimes it generates new traffic to the posts (most times not).

I think today is the first day that not only has there been a post from each of the year’s that I’ve been blogging but there were exactly two (2) posts from each November 17 for the last five years.

This helps me clean up my blog too: I’ll occasionally fix some links or add some tags and categories or sometimes fix something minor. Some of the categories I use now, didn’t exist when I wrote some of the earlier posts and I use tags the first few years. This results in things getting reposted to Facebook (via WordBook), generally I’ll delete them but sometimes I’ll leave them (if it’s got a photo or isn’t time sensitive). Occasionally, I’ll read a sentence and think “that makes no sense” so I’ll fix it, I try not to do this too much, it’s really about what I was thinking/feeling/doing then, but if it’s not clear it needs fixing…

So I applied for the job at The Big Trip and the big requirement was a ninety second video to go with it. I just found out about the job yesterday and put this together this video this afternoon.

An applicant will be selected from a pool of an estimated 30,000 worldwide applicants to travel and explore various travel destinations around the United States for a period of 3 months. Their journey will be documented, filmed and aired on thebigtrip.com in mini-episode form (similar to programs depicted on the Travel Channel) for millions of viewers to view each month.

Here’s my video in larger HD quality.

Not only will the applicant we choose get a dream job, they will receive a generous salary of $50,000 USD for their 3 month journey. The traveler will be given a video camera and a MacBook to upload the videos to the internet.

Oh, and they give you an iPhone too!

With a guesstimate of 30,000 applications the odd are low, but you can’t win if you don’t play! And I do love to talk about travel on-line…

LATER: I don’t see that many applications on YouTube (part of the requirement), I’m thinking less than 500, maybe even a lot less than that, but it’s possible people didn’t add any keywords or description. Also, the requirement was to be 60-90 seconds, quite a few are a little longer, many are a lot longer (and a few are too short); I wonder if that being too long will disqualify them? Most of the ones I like are too long, I could have gone longer, as it was I had to trim it to get it to less than 90 seconds…

I can be anywhere in the country and watch the space shuttle land live on my phone. It amazes me every day.

I can’t imagine what the next few years will bring

PS – I’m writing and posting this from my phone after capturing the image while watching it live!!!

I think it’s safe to say at this point I’ve become a huge WordPress fan. But I was a huge MovableType fan for a long time and I miss a few things about it.

What I really miss (and would like) in WordPress is –

• A good search and replace in the administration interface (dashboard).
• An easy way to maintain multiple websites with one login interface (a dashboard deluxe). From Movable Type I could maintain several blogs and with blogging clients I only had to log in once to configure for multiple blogs.
• An easy way to maintain multiple websites with one login interface (a dashboard deluxe). From Movable Type I could maintain several blogs and with blogging clients I only had to log in once to configure for multiple blogs.

Maybe I can do do this with WordPress mu (multi-user)? I’m thinking the last few times I looked at it mu still didn’t handle things the way I wanted it to. Multiple blogs with different domain names still seemed to need plug-ins and I guess I’d feel better if it was integrated in the core. And I’m thinking not all plug-ins are WPmu compatible. I’m thinking when WordPress and WordPress mu becomes one product the plug-ins compatibility will change.

The banner is an edit from a photo I took in Cardiff, Wales. It is of the Wales Millennium Centre (see photo) with (what they simply call) The Water Tower in front of it.

These are located in Roald Dahl Plass (plaza) dedicated to the Cardiff born author Roald Dahl. This Millennium Centre is beautiful at night, I didn’t have my camera when I wandered down there when I was in town, but that photo will be on my list for the next trip. And hopefully there will be water coming out of The Water Tower next time too! The Plass is lit very pretty too!

I’ve been thinking about Cardiff and also thinking about changing my photo so I choose this. I don’t have a lot of really wide photos that crop well so I looked around and found this one. Plus, I’ve got Torchwood on the the brain this week (month).

On the photo (in this post) if you read the right half of the building you can see it says: “In These Stones Horizons Awen (Awe and?) Sing”. The left half says something in Welsh. I was told the building is built from materials made all in Wales.

I’ve found a new WordPress plug-in that I like. It’s called “A Year Before“.

It’s got options to show a year ago today (or months or days) what you were blogging about. I’m using “anniversary mode” which I think is taking the post from today for as many years back as it can find.

Don’t worry if you haven’t been blogging long it’s got a “range” to show posts near a year ago (or six months ago). I’m running it on WordPress 2.8.2 (as of this writing) and it seems to be fine.

I’ve been using it the last few days at the bottom of my left sidebar, but since I’m blogging about it I moved it to the top of the left sidebar, so you can see what it really looks like. I copied the text here so the links actually work. I’m not sure where I’ll move it to later.

It’s interesting, maybe more to me than you, but they always say you should show links to older posts for newer readers. Without even reading them I’m reminded about a trip to London (and the concert I went to a few days before) and the slideshow viewer that never detected flash properly, a homeland security site (which now appears to be a FEMA site), Google maps adding the Moon, my dreams for a new MacBook and how $5 fixed my convertible roof saving me hundreds of dollars (and save multiple readers the same!).

So one of the coolest programs I’ve downloaded from the iPhone App Store is AutoStitch. It takes a bunch of photos and stitches them together. Alex Lindsey talked about this on MacBreak Weekly a few weeks ago. He spoke so highly of it, I plopped down my $1.99 and started using it immediately.

You take a bunch of overlapping photos and it stitches them together, it does this completely automatically, there is no user intervention. You can use pictures you’ve taken with the iPhone but you can just as easily use pictures that you’ve synced with the phone. So this can work for the iPod Touch too, just sync some photos and when you’ve got some spare time, stitch them together. It does an amazing job.

I first used some photos that I shot on my Canon SD1100, it that just happened to be synced to the phone and did a great job of stitching them together. So you don’t need an iPhone, an iPod Touch with photos that you’ve synced works great too.

Above you can see a sample screenshot from the program where I chose 22 photos and it stitched them together (click it to enlarge). Remember all I did was pick the photos and a few minutes later it churned these out. All these photos were taken with the iPhone 3gs. If I cropped some of the edges of the photos, it’d look like I took there with a really wide angle lens.

Here are two samples:

These pictures were taken at CityFest in Detroit this summer.

I’ve used it multiple times and only once had a problem; it got confused when I did a 360 panorama when the same type of railing showed up several times, this was because all the condos where I live are similar so it really couldn’t match things up. There are some matching issues with color/contrast and people moving, but this is really great!

This software is well worth the $1.99! I think I got that much fun out of it in the first hour, let alone all the time since then. ZZZ

So I’ve got a new theme. I figure I have to mention it because if you just read the RSS feed, you’ll never see it.

It’s pretty much the Simple Indy theme by India Fascinates. It really reminds me of a few other themes out there, but it handles my long categories, works well on Mac, was easy to modify, it’s zippy and it works really well.

I’ve modified it a bit here and there to fit my needs but it’s pretty close to the original code. I like titles on all my archive pages and added my header image. I also changed the way it marked posts with the tags and categories. I also like full posts, if it’s the main page, archive or search results. And I like error messages to come with a search box. So other than that a few other minor changes it’s 99% the original theme. I still need to integrate my old logo into it…

The photo will probably be changed soon, but it was one of the first ones I tried that fit okay. Currently it’s a view of the Pacific from Quepos, Costa Rica. I think maybe December of 2006 (New Years Eve,I think). If it’s not a picture of the coast with two tree trunks (like the thumbnail), then I changed it to something else

I liked my old theme but it just loaded too slow and it had been bugging me for a while.

My blog is going to be a little wonky from 4:30PM-6PM EST on Wednesday…

Testing the WordPress Client for the Touch and iPhone.

A few extra features with editing categories and pages, but I can’t figure how to use a current category. You can publish or keep local drafts too. Looks like it will post more than one photo (unlike iBlogger).

Sample screen below…

I like this, it’s free and it appears to work well off-line. It supports multiple blogs. It attaches the photos at the bottom but I think after posting it, you could easily edit the html (while still on the handheld) to move it. Still not sure how to use an existing category. I like the ability to publish drafts so I can possibly edit them on the computer before finally posting.

It also lets you approve/spam comments! This is a great feature!

(By default this showed up in the “uncategorized” category, but then it showed that cattegory so I changed the category to “blogging” )

This is a test from my iPod Touch.

The edit screen looks like this:

Doesn’t want actually post the tags that I manually typed for the post (while categories work fine). For some reason it seems to crop a photo to a square and only lets you use one photo. Works off-line okay. It’s pricey at 9.99 but works with multiple blogging systems and multiple blogs.

Give Website Grader a try. It looks at a bunch of things for your site (mostly from a search engine standpoint). You only have to give it your website and e-mail (and you don’t even need to give them your real e-mail).

It makes a few recommendations base on the length of your meta-tags and a variety of other things. It’s not perfect. I’ve noticed some case sensitivity in terms of 301 redirects and I had some issue in the past with it noticing my WordPress feed but as I retest it today that seems to be fine now. They also give you a variety of page ranks and inbound links. And mention if you’re in the major search engines.

It’s nice and easy to use. And one time it did find out something important for me, I had accidentally deleted something and it pointed it out. You have nothing to lose…

I used to have a list of blogs that I read on the side of my page. It’s that actual list that I used to use to visit these sites. I did it through blogrolling and it generally marked them in bold when they had fresh data (but lots of sites didn’t seem to update properly). And when I clicked on the link from my site, I probably end up on their referrer list (if they pay attention to those things) so they might check out my site in return.

Now I’m using Google Reader, which I love! And while I miss going to the actual sites, it’s much easier to catch up and stay caught up (and not miss information). Since moving to WordPress I never moved that blogroll over (it was way out of date) and I was needing something new. So I finally figured out how to get that information out of Google Reader and put it on my site (I’ll tell you how at the end).

So now I’ve got my Read Roll (it’s not just blogs) on-line. You can see the lists and the categories that I put them in. If you click the “Read more…” it’ll actually let you read the recent posts in that category.

It’s pretty easy to create this list: when in Google Reader go to Manage Subscriptions (lower left). Put the blogs in the “folder” that you want by selecting Change Folders (on the right side of the screen); you can create folders while you are there. Then click the Folders and Tags tab and share that folder. Then click “add a blogroll to your site” and it’ll give you the JavaScript to add to your site.

I’ve got five folders: Read Roll (sites I read), On-Line Deals (shopping deal sites), WordPress Info (Sites for WordPress tips), People I’ve Met (this is people I’ve known for years, met because of the Internet or people I’ve met and it turns out they blog) and Non-Shared (sites I don’t share). I only share the first four, the last one is junk you don’t care about like: some results of searches I’m tracking, WordPress tracking of certain help tickets, some Technorati searches, some friend’s kids on-line and some other stuff.

The People I’ve Met group is way at the bottom. If I’ve met you and you’re not on the list let me know (most people on this list are also on the read roll). I know there are people that I’ve met (because of the internet) that don’t blog any more (or never blogged) and I’m sure there are people I know (in real life) that I don’t even know blog.

I’m expecting this list to grow after WordCamp Chicago (June 6/7, 2009) will you be on it?!?

I can’t believe I’m still doing this with 2,000 posts all over the last 5 years! Never would have thought it grow on me so much!

I was trying to come up with something monumental to blog about for this post, but that didn’t happen so I’ll give you a quick update on some tech (the new blog site) and a few personal things:

• I’m averaging more than a post a day, but sometimes I skip more than a few days, so I’m going to try and post more consistently (and more images with posts).
• I’m really liking WordPress, I’ve completely migrated all my old posts (from MovableType) to WordPress 2.7 (at least I think I’ve got all 4,000-ish archive/category/single pages) and mostly updated the “about“-type pages. I’ve been playing around with WP for a year and this interface on 2.7 version beats the interface for the previous six months (it was actually better previous to six months ago, IMHO). I’ll be posting more about my WordPress transition over the next few weeks (I’ve been making notes).
• Google has done an amazing job reindexing the updated site. It’s grabbed a good chunk of the pages and about 80% of the old pages have disappeared been replaced in the search engine. I’ll be posting more about this too.
• And I just saw they picked the new Doctor Who, but I’ll make that my 2001st post
• I’m still sick from when I mentioned it last week. The (medical) doctor thinks it’s some lower lung pneumonia on the right side so I’ve just been staying close to home and taking it easy (I’ll get x-ray results next week). Sleep has been the worse, I think maybe the drugs are keeping me up, or I’m just bored. Hopefully I won’t be posting more about this!
• Even being sick, the holidays were nice and relaxing, exactly what I needed after the last year, I’d have liked some more snow consistently on the ground, just enough to cover the grass. I wasn’t sick sick until Christmas so I made it through everything.

That’s it for now, I gotta go read up more on the new Doctor Who…

It seems to be going very well so far. I think I’ve got everything imported. Feel free to try a test comment (please).

Most entries and categories and dates should be redirecting. Date based pages are not redirecting (need a .htaccess rule or need to rewrite all those pages in MT with a redirect), but that’s okay, you’re only going to find that from a search and if you clock to comment it takes you to the correct page, just a weird interface change.

Categories still need to have hierarchies and descriptions.

All RSS feeds are redirected, so you’ll probably get a full reader by the time you get this post. And as of right now, they’re all redirected to an Atom feed. Does anyone really care/have a preference?

Not thrilled with this blog template but that’s easily changeable later. I’ll break down the steps of the whole migration later for anyone wanting to go from MT to WP.

Any .htaccess people who can help me with a rewrite rule?
I need date formats like /chapters/2008_12.php -> /2008/12/ and the same for /chapters/2008_12_16.php -> /2008/12/16/ . Actually the latter is really the only one that matters since the first was prevented by robots.txt and I don’t think I did any posts linking to a month (maybe a date).

Honestly, I’ve had harder version upgrades with Movable Type, but we’ll see once I start modifying templates for myself.

Disappointments: I wish the categories could have been in the root directory without having to be in another directory (my /topics/ directory). I wish I could have more easily moved the old files in with their old filenames so things didn’t have to be redirected.

I’ve still got to fix “About”, “FAQ”, etc. and I need the date archives to redirect.

Spam filter is working great! I really like the way the tags work, but they need some cleaning up. Ecto really helped me to turn my technorati tags into WP tags.

Fixed the search engine with a smart redirect. Needed that since I do searches in the middle of my posts (I should be tagging but I’ve have 3 years to go back and tag).

Updated the sitemap.xml files too.

These last few things should really help with the search engines reindexing me (I hope!)

Google has already been cruising through indexing pages….

It imported my pings/trackbacks as comments But at least they are still linked.

Some drafts became posts. This may have not been an import/export issue, this may have been something I did after the fact when I reposted posts to get my blogging client, Ecto, to convert my Technorati Tags to WordPress tags.

Expect some outages over the next day or two(?) as I’m getting the migration to work and redirects and such.

It might be viewable in a few hours but there might still be bugs you can’t see.

So it looks as if I use Ecto 3, with WordPress it’ll automatically convert my posts Technorati Tags to WordPress Tags jsut by reposting them to the blog. Very cool.

On Ecto 3, I really liked Ecto 2 and was avoiding version 3 due to some key-press changes and some other visual changes. I might remember more later, but I just wasn’t liking the feel before, but with it handling WordPress tags properly, it’s now a no-brainer.

Another big bonus – It’ll actually let you edit the “Pages” in WP (like the “About” page) and it treats them differently than the posts! (But it seems to have some problems retrieving pages/posts once your site gets more full).

BTW, I had to set it to access the XML-RPC, I couldn’t get it to use Atom for the posting, I’m not sure if this really matters.

This is pretty much all the topics that I talk about. Larger means it’s mentioned more often. Closer to the top means I’ve mentioned it lately. This is based on my first five years of blogging. I usually keep a dynamic version of this page at what I talk about, but I thought I should keep a static version since it’s my fifth year blogging and I’ll probably have to start a fresh one with my new WordPress blog (coming soon).

So after 5 years of using MovableType, and talking about sticking with things yesterday, I’m planning on switching this blog to WordPress. As I said a few months back –

I think WordPress is easier to setup and it’s also easier for beginners to do quite advanced things with WP than Movable Type. From the other perspective, I think that doing really super advanced things is easier with Movable Type, while doing ultra-advanced things are probably equal between the two.

I’ve slightly modified that a bit to make it more accurate in what I’ve learned since then. I’m also going to add that

Upgrades appear to be much easier to do in WordPress, they’ve all been pretty painless for me. (I never even liked doing incremental upgrades with MT)

Maybe as I customize things more this won’t be as true but for now it’s been pretty easy. And it’s an educational thing for me too, I’ve really enjoyed learning about it…

So for the next month(?) I’ll be changing and testing things. I’ll be running both in tandem stating soon, I’ll want some posts/archives once the switch is made. I’ll probably switch back and forth a few times as I’m testing so be patient with me as I make changes. The worst tests might be for the people using RSS readers, but I’ll try to keep those disasters minimal. If you see things broken for more than a day it means I didn’t notice, so please e-mail me and let me know.I don’t think I’ll be able to ever import everything the way I want to: keeping all my old permalinks and everything else so that I don’t break a million back-links to my site (and throughout my site). So I think when I do the final cut over everything 2008 and before will stay on MovableType and everything 2009 and after will be on WordPress.

I’ll be documenting this since I’m sure I’ll have to do some interesting things for category archives (I think I’ll fudge the last entry of each category to include the old posts) and searching the archives (this may require two searches, but I’m not sure yet).

If I can’t integrate them very well, I’ll just have a prominent button that says “click here for 2008 and earlier”. And I’ll modify a lot of the old templates to say ‘click here for the new stuff’. I’d just hate to have to do that for all the category stuff.

Any tips on the migration from anyone? Any resources?

Wow! I’ve been doing this for five years! There aren’t many hobbies that I’ve stuck with for this long. Heck, there aren’t many jobs I’ve kept this long (only one). I did stick with Michigan State University that long (undergrad and grad school) and I collected comics as a kid for this long. Besides living with my parents, I’ve never lived anywhere but my current condo for that long. I’ve owned my current Sebring Convertible for that long too (my car before it was the same model, just a few years earlier model).

So it seems like it’s the latest stuff I’ve been sticking with the longest. Does that mean that I’m figuring out what I like beforehand and sticking with it?!? That’d be nice.

So I originally started out blogging and thinking that’d I’d try not to complain at all but that didn’t last; while I do whine I try not to do it too much. Also, I’ve always thought I’d break out tech stuff into a separate tech blog and get even geekier but that’s never happened (yet).

I’ve met more than a few bloggers and other people from social networks over the last five years which has been awesome. Not only do I get to read these folks, I get to meet some of them too! I’m sure I’ve met 25-40 different people over the last few years, I’d have to count since some of them came to multiple events. And I really hope to make it to TequilaCon this year (is there a location/date set yet?).

I blog for myself but I try to post stuff I think others will find interesting too. When I’ve got 10 topics that I’m thinking of blogging about I do try to choose stuff that I want to talk about and stuff that you might find interesting. They might not be the same post but sometimes they are.

Speaking of blogaversaries: During my first year I had changed the name and the URL a few times (that probably didn’t help with traffic). Halfway through the second year I started using GarySaid.com, changing the URL to it’s own permanent home; I think I’ll always keep this short URL for my personal blog, even if I change the title of the blog itself the address is nice and short and easy to spell. The third year I didn’t post much on the anniversary date but I posted some stat and info a few days later. Year four wasn’t the best, I just never got into gear much this past year but I did get to travel a lot which gave me some good blogging material Speaking of whining, it’s been a pretty crappy year this past year. I haven’t talked about all of it on-line much, but things started going downhill last October and I just never got back into gear. I’m sure it’s seemed worse to me because everything was going pretty awesome before that (but that might just be hindsight). While I didn’t blog about much of those issues, I’m sure it affected my blogging some…

Things started picking up a few months ago and I’ve still got a few major potholes that I need to fill. As I start filling them in, I’ll probably start talking about some of them (I just never got around to it before, I had planned to). I’m sure it’s affected the tone of some of my blogging and the blogging itself. Thanks for sticking around!

I’ll be making some changes in my life and around here; since I plan to make it better for me, hopefully it’ll be more interesting for you in the year to come…

So I’ve had some pretty crappy pages up at GaryLaPointe.com and I was just planning on putting up WordPress as a CMS for it. Coincidentally, when I went to download one of the betas of WordPress 2.7, it turns out they had just released the final version of WordPress 2.7 so I used that! So far it’s working really great and I’m really liking the 2.7 admin interface (I really didn’t like the 2.6 interface) I think I originally started with 2.3.x.

Now GaryLaPointe.com looks nice. Although if you frequent this site there probably isn’t much there that you haven’t seen here (maybe some photos or something).

It’s got some great new features. I especially like the clickable installation of plug-ins and widgets (but it really needs a much much better search to find them). It’s supposed to run with GoogleGears, but I’m not really sure what it’s actually supposed to be saving me.

Here’s a video showing off some of the new features. Notice the HD link in the upper right corner for some great quality and try it full screen, you’ll love it.

I’ll be using it more and I hope to discover more features as time goes on (and as I wait for the Second Edition of WordPress for Dummies).FYI, If you’re reading this site there isn’t really anything you’re missing at GaryLaPointe.com, it’s mostly just reruns and stripped down versions of what I post here and on some of the social networks. It’s where I point other people for things about my travels without pointing them to all the other stuff I blog about here; I just feel that’s more professional with co-workers and such…

So this topic has come up more often lately than usual and as I’ve been approaching the end of my fifth year blogging (with 2000-ish postings) I’ve been thinking about blogging more…

Thoughts about my blogging habits:

If your display is set to 1024×768 or larger you should be seeing my new background. That’s a shot from Montezuma up by the waterfalls, I hike up there every day that I can when I’m in town….

Does it fit okay? Does it load to slow? It’s the first time using an image, so please give me feedback!

I usually enjoy Indexed, a site where Jessica creates simple Venn diagrams or graphs that are humorous and/or have double meanings.

Today’s was funny so I thought it was a good time to add them to my From My Feed Reader list (while slightly sticking to my list my political sites first theme).

She’s also released a book called Indexed with new “cards” and best of material in it.

One of the oldest blogs and most political blogs I read is Dean’s World. Their tag line is “Defending the liberal tradition in history, science, and philosophy.” Lots of authors for posts so lots of different viewpoints are shown. They cover topics ranging from politics (mostly) to humor to Battlestar Galactica (and have an open comment post once a weekend where you can talk about anything).

I’m not very political so many times I don’t know what they’re talking about but that doesn’t stop me from coming back. But if you haven’t seen it, it’s worth checking out.

When I say “oldest blog” I mean they are one of the blogs I’ve been reading for the longest time. I’m not sure how I first found them – from a national story or something more local (Dean is in South-East Michigan). Check out some of the many times I’ve mentioned Dean’s World in my blog.

Unfortunately, you do have to register to comment, but they do make it pretty painless and it does count out a lot of the junk.

So I was thinking about Halloween and Candy Corn and here we are, with a new Halloween theme on my blog.

I got the background tile from Fortune City.

I’ve made minor changes to my Atom, RSS 1.0 and RSS 2.0 feeds so please me know if you have any problems with it. I’ve also made the RSS feeds be extended entry feeds so let me know how that is working.

Thank you.

So we had a whole crew at Piece Pizza again (we were there two years ago), thirteen people I’m thinking. Mostly people I’d met and a few wonderful new people! Our first photo is a little blurry (but that’s because we were drinking) but it’s got the most people in it. Starting on the left is Kevin and Katie, Suzanne, Mrs. RW and Tori in front. Tori I hadn’t met before but since she brought brownies she was quickly treated like family! Suzanne was another new person and even though she was a non-blogger she was really fun too!

This is Robin and Leah at our third location for the evening (we got around). I’ve met Robin before and was thinking I didn’t know who Leah was on-line but I just didn’t remember that I did know, because when I got back to the hotel and turned my computer on, the first thing I saw was her tweeting about being pulled over by the police during her cab ride home.

As usual Dave made us cool badges to wear and these had a “Piece” theme. Get it? (Guess whose site I stole this badge picture from?) And not only did we have cool buttons too, Piece Pizza gave us some of theirs!

Speaking of Dave is it a coincidence that he’s wearing his “Zombies Ate My Brain Shirt” in this zombish looking picture (you really need to click for the full effect). That’s RW sneaking up behind him.

That’s Jenny and Mocha Momma whom I’ve both met before but I don’t have a photo of Lynne and Kosh.

We just ate and drank and chatted and after we ran around to a few other places The Velvet Hour and the Tequila bar where we went a few years ago (name anyone?). It was just a bunch of old and new friends getting together, it seems much simpler than when I have to tell people who I’m going to go see in Chicago. Some of the people didn’t get to stay the whole evening and coincidentally (sadly) some of those were the ones I talked to the least earlier in the evening (I’ll talk to them first next time!).

Argh, that’s a lot more cutting and pasting than usual. But I think I got everyone and all the names right…

I didn’t have as many photos as I thought, so maybe I didn’t get all of them recovered (or maybe they were more blurry ones than I thought).

So a bunch of bloggers are getting together tomorrow and I’m going. It’s officially DaveCago 3 which means Dave from Blogography is in town and organizes a get together. So tomorrow evening we’re getting together to have drinks and dinner and drinks and just generally have a great time. I’ve gotten together with some permutation of this group the last two years and I wanted to do it again. I’m not even sure who’s coming, I only know of a few for sure but I’m assuming the group is more like 10-15+ people.

What else? I’m not sure if anything’s up for Sunday but if not, I’ll have my roller blades because down by the water in Chicago is one of the best places to go blading. I going to try to hit Standing Room Only for my ribs one of the days (it’s not too far from my hotel).

I’ll be taking the train, because I love the train!! I get too tired if I drive in on the same day to do stuff, the train lets me go in the morning and be awake the rest of the day (and also lets me be semi-productive for those five hours). If only I could take my bicycle on this stretch of the train, I really like having my bike in Chicago (you can really cover some ground).

So I’m tempted to migrate to WordPress (from Movable Type) I think I’ve got it all figured out on how to even retain my current URLs (as crummy as they are) so that I don’t have a bunch of broken links.

One of my worries is right now a lot of my pages score pretty good in Google searches, amazingly good sometimes, especially since my site doesn’t rank super high anyways, and I’m afraid of losing that rank. I’m not sure if it’s just that I built my pages well? or maybe my meta tags or if the structure of the page helps? or what? It’s just always done pretty good so I don’t mess with it.

What will I lose if I convert? What might I gain?The other thought is to leave my Movable Type site alone, delete the index page and use WordPress from now on but have links to the old pages. I’d need to keep the MT software so that comments and search would still work (I’d modify the WP search pages to say “you only searched the new site, click here to search for old stuff”). But I’d still have to maintain updates and such on the old site and check for spam and more….

Hmmm…. I’m either talking myself out of keeping the old one separate or possibly not migrating at all. I’m not sure which…

So I’ve always enjoyed the Waiter Rant but now he’s got a book called Waiter Rant: Thanks for the Tip–Confessions of a Cynical Waiter. Most of the stories are pretty good, but probably a bit embellished. Spend a few minutes at the site if you think you might like it but go back a few week to before he starts talking about the book.

I think the cover is a little boring, they’re a little more open overseas, here’s a picture of the UK cover of Waiter Rant…

So the idea of putting your life on the internet came up at work today. It was really more about people putting inappropriate things on-line. But the question was asked and I couldn’t come up with a good answer. I had some answers but I didn’t think I could make someone understand if they didn’t get it just a little bit.

I remembered back into the days when Heather was trying to get me to understand blogging and I just didn’t get it. Partially because I always put my life out there so it wasn’t something new, but the (semi)regular posting and using special software to do it I just didn’t understand. Let alone when she tried to explain trackbacks and pings. And if a geek like me didn’t get it, how can I get other people to?

Now here I am 1800+ posts later (and a million spam comments) and I still don’t have a good answer.It’s a lot of little things, it’s fun, it’s great to get feedback from others, sometimes it’s therapy to vent (and it’s free!) and sometimes it’s the thinking it out & making it coherent for others makes you think about it & understand it more.. It depends on the topic. I certainly get different things out of it when I type about a movie review than when I discuss a funeral I just went to. I generally try to avoid certain things: (complaining about) work, dating people (but I will complain about not dating), anything that would turn off a current or future employer, sex and a few other topics.

Back to the original question, why? I guess it’s what some people do these days. Some people keep quiet, some people talk, some hate using the phone, some people you can’t get off the phone, some people blog publicly, and some blog in secret.

I did mention that I blog all my vacations, which they understood as sharing. But they just see it as sharing with friends and not with the whole world. But it’s out there for the whole world too. “If you build it” and all that…

Yeah, I guess that’s what I should have said as an answer, that whole previous paragraph (not just the first sentence of it).

I use tech to complicate my life and make it better. Not simpler. I’ve never felt that it simplifies my life. Tech gives me information, organizes me and entertains me.

If I used just a few tech tools, it could simplify my life. An answering machine simplified it. And a fax machine. But those are very 1/2 duplex technologies, more like Web -3.0

Other basic tools like a calendar and address book help to organize my life, and make it so I don’t need to remember things which makes my life a little easier.

Much of what unsimplifies life are the more interactive technologies, the ones that require a response, especially the ones that require a response quickly. E-mail is my biggest interactive technology, I’ve tried so many of the others and while I enjoy them they just take up so much time… Twitter, IM, and other chat-type services. I really like Seesmic, but it’s hard to get a feel for what’s going on with just a glance, you’ve got to watch the video’s to see what they’re about; there just isn’t enough of a description to know what the conversation is about (or what it’s become after multiple responses).

And then there are all the interactive ones that you’re just exploring, there is so much out there and it’s so time consuming it’s un-simplifying my life in that it’s taking away time from the rest of it.

With it I can do more than without it. Do I need to be doing more? Probably not, but some of what I’m able to explore and experience makes it worth it to me.

I haven’t been doing much traditional blogging much. I’ve been spending all my internet time playing on Seesmic.com, which is kind of a video conversation/video blogging site. I’ll be back soon (days not weeks)…

Seesmic Updates

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All these video’s will seem way out of context if you don’t play the whole thread….

I really hope I can make it to TequilaCon 2009….

I’m sad I couldn’t go (again).

While I’m just home relaxing this weekend, last week was cRaZy, next week will be semi-crazy and I just went on vacation and I go again in June.

‘TQ08 Schwag‘ uploaded by Blogography

I had such good intentions on getting more Costa Rica blogging done (especially some more photos) the past few days and it didn’t happen…

And here I am getting ready to head out to East Lansing to catch a performance of Avenue Q so I expect I won’t get much done today either…

I thought this word cloud from what I’ve been tweeting was kinda cool. I created it at TweetCloud.com. These whow the most common words I’ve tweeted, bigger means I’ve tweeted more.
I’m on vacation right now, and I do miss Twitter a little bit. I want that constant stream of information. I also have been thinking of things to tweet and I can’t.

I can compose a full blog post when I don’t have ‘net access (and I can even backdate it) but I can’t with twitter. I probably won’t use twitter at all while I’m out of the country. I’m not going to use what little internet access I have on that, we’ll see, maybe I’d find it useful in a different way.

So I’ve been trying to use Twitter more and I found TweetStats to show me how much.

To give some background: TwitterFeed is actually how my blog posts get cross-posted to Twitter so those really don’t count much (started using this Oct 15, 2007). And I just discovered FriendFeed recently. But you can see that tweeting with Twitterific (w/phone and web) I’ve far surpassed that. Significant if you look at the below chart and see most of it’s in the last month. And by looking at my blog post counts (to the left) for the last few months, you can see blogging has declined. But I’ll blame the low blogging on 3 things: Twitter (but I am micro-blogging), busier at work (to tired at night to blog) and being sick this season.

Thanks to Julia Roy for pointing it out to me (via Twitter).

So I’ve really been trying to use Twitter more. I read and tweet more at my computer than when I’m out. When I’m out I tweet some but don’t generally read. I do have it set to get a text message on my phone automagically if someone tweets my name. If you don’t know what Twitter is:

I waited so long for WordPress For Dummies, by Lisa Sabin-Wilson, and it was well worth the wait. I had been wanting to learn WordPress and had been a fan of Lisa’s blog so it was just what I needed as a motivator.

It’s a “Dummies” book so it’s got that easy to use format. And it’s a reference book so most of it is not meant to be read linearly. If you’ve always wanted to set up a blog or switch to WordPress this is the way to go. It explains it from the basics up to the advanced. It’s step by step and it’ll get you running on your own host or at WordPress.com with ease.

It covers Migrating to WP, 10 Great Free Themes, Ten Great Plugins, Using WP as a Content Management System, Understanding Templates and Plug-ins. It covers pretty much everything you need to know but those are the chapters I’ve read the most and use for reference. If you don’t know anything about PHP you’ll painlessly learn the bits that you do need to know for modifying templates (this is optional) and you’ll have picked up enough for when you want to use PHP for other “web stuff”.

As I’m writing this post, I’m flipping through the book seeing if there is anything I’ve missed mentioning. There are so many areas of WP that I haven’t explored yet, I’ve read about them in the book and I can’t wait to try out some of the other features!Just about everything I’ve needed to know was in there, the only thing that I couldn’t find was detailed info on custom-fields which was (probably correctly) considered too advanced for a Dummies book.

There are 3 different flavors of WordPress (they host, you host, and multi-user) and they all share multiple features so just pay attention to which flavor she’s talking about and you’ll be fine.

It’s an awesome book! If you want to set up your own blog, self-hosted or not, WordPress is easy to use and WordPress For Dummies is the book to use.

I’ve always been a huge fan of Movable Type, but I’ve been playing with WordPress on and off lately and I think it might become my new blogging platform for anything new I create. I’m not sure if I’m willing to export and import my old blog and lose a bunch of Google results because the pages aren’t named the same or because of something else unforeseen.

Here’s my whole comparison wrapped up in to two sentences –

I think WordPress is easier to setup and it’s also easier for beginners to do advanced things with WP than Movable Type. From the other side, I think that doing really advanced things is easier with Movable Type, while doing ultra-advanced things are probably equal between the two.

The biggest thing I don’t like in WordPress is how dynamic things are and if your web host goofs something up, the dynamic stuff chokes which would be your whole site; I’ve seen this happen with several different hosts. In MT I kept my main page and individual page posts static, and the rest dynamic so at least the whole thing didn’t crash. Also, the dynamic-ishness of the pages slows things down a little. But it’s so very easy, I can’t even tell you how easy it was to do an upgrade (one tip: if you modify a default template to use, be sure to rename the folder it’s in and you won’t accidentally over-write it when you upgrade). On the other hand, when I post something to WP it’s very very quick since it’s not rebuilding things. That’s really nice to be done as soon as you post.

So far it’s also been much easier to do (incremental) upgrades with WordPress. It’s actually so easy, I’m surprised they haven’t added a few other steps which would make it one-click. It’s really disabling the plug-ins, copying the new directories over the old and reactivating the plug-ins; I’m sure this could be made one-click to “halt” the plug-ins, copy from the path that you specify, clear the cache and start the plug-ins back up.

WordPress.com is a place where you can have your own blog, it’s got lots of great features and it’s free! They do have some advance features you can pay for like your own custom domain name, more disk space and other great features.

Here’s the newest great part: they used to only have free storage of 50 MB of files and they just upgraded your free space to 3 GB (that’s 3,000 MB) so that’s a heck of a free upgrade! It’s not that 50 MB is all that small, but a bunch of photos from your 8-megapixel camera and you can fill it up pretty quick, 3 gig is a very generous amount of free space. Now they are selling 5 GB upgrades for the old price of 1 GB upgrades. If you already purchased a storage upgrade they’ve automatically increased the storage space.

One of the many reasons I’m liking the WordPress community more and more…

I’ve got a few posts about WordPress that I’ve never finished up (including a book review). So I plan to post them and get them out of my drafts folder. I’m writing this down so that I’ll remind myself to finally get this done

Aren’t you excited!?!I’ll probably take my tree down too…

I’m sure someone out there can help me with my problem, but I don’t know what to call it so I can’t Google it. I’m trying to create some banners that are 865×180 pixels (the specific size doesn’t matter, that’s just what I’m using today). I’ve got lots of images that are way bigger than that so I need to be able to zoom in and out and see what it’ll look like if I crop it. I’ve been doing it with some other tools, but my zooming scales are limited with Graphic Converter (I need some in-between scales) and with iPhoto (I do want to do this on my Mac) I’ve got no decent way to see what the crop will look like. Graphic Converter almost does it, because if I’m close (but bigger) I can paste it in a smaller window and fine-tune it; but when I want to look at an image at 20% or 30%, it’s not an option,

Obviously, I’d prefer to not have to get an ultra-exspensive tool for this. But there’s got to be a better way than I’ve been experimenting with. I’m hoping a flash tool that I upload my photo to and it zooms around for me. Or maybe just using a tool in a way I haven’t tried it yet…

So it’s snowing and we’re supposed to get a lot tonight (the “don’t park in the street” siren already went off). I’m geeked about that since it doesn’t seem like Christmas without it.

But I’ve noticed I’ve still got a fall theme up on my blog so I’ll be changing that to a Christmas theme that I’ve used before (if I can find all the parts). I’ve been learning WordPress and so far I’ve learned it’s SO much easier to change themes in WP than in Movable Type…

So it looks funny over the next hour or so, I’m working on getting out the fall colors!

It’s been 4 years today since I started blogging. It wasn’t really a plan. I had just looked into it for a bit and one day I had something to say and kept going…

I think this will be post number 1677 (that averages to a little more than 1 posts a day) and 2,299 comments.

Thanks for listening and commenting everyone!!!!! And if you’ve just been listening, speak up and say HII’m also guessing I’ve had about 1,000,000 spam comments deleted with via my different filtering systems (about 30,000+ spams deleted by hand).

I need a better way with MovableType to reply to a comment and also post the reply to the web site at the same time. (Anyone?)

I have started running some Text Link Ads on the left side of the page. I apologize that I ‘sold out’ for that, but I’d much rather have someone else pay for my hosting than pay for it myself

Most of the other ads on the site I pick what goes where, but I make so little on those, most will be gone soon. Most of little bits of money I make from ads are from Google or Amazon (and the Amazon ones are really hit or miss). Many times when mention a book or movie or something and you follow the link to Amazon or Buy.com, Wal-Mart or iTunes and you shop there, I make a few pennies (or more) from your purchase and you shouldn’t have to pay a penny more. Not all of the links are affiliate links, just when it’s something at one of the places I’ve signed up with, otherwise it’s just regular link.

I’d just love to figure out how to make enough on-line from ads while sitting on the beach in Costa Rica. So consider these part of the “Gary Should Move to Costa Rica Fund”!

Actually, if you’re shopping this holiday season and are going to shop at any of the above stores anyways, just follow any of my links to get to the only store of your choice and you can support my Costa Rica fund instead of letting Amazon (or one of those other guys) keep that commission?!?