In case you didn’t notice over the weekend, I’m now back from my trip through Arizona and part of New Mexico, and I have the pictures to prove it. More info on all that in coming days.
Before getting back to regular blogging, though, I wanted to say a big THANK YOU to my co-bloggers, and particularly to Tim J, who did an outstanding job filling in!
Kudos, guys! Y’all don’t know how much I appreciate it! Your posts are welcome here, any time!
Howdy, folks!
Blogging will be a bit . . . unusual . . . the next two days (Thursday & Friday).
I’m taking a roadtrip through SoCal, Arizona, and as far as western New Mexico.
At least that’s the plan.
As a result, I may not have access to the Net–at least not the ordinary way.
I have, however, been preparing for this by getting myself set up with moblog (mobile blogging) capabilities–at least as far as the tech I have available will allow.
So, here’s what to expect: I’ll probably send a few camera phone shots. Probably won’t be able to do much explaining on what they are in the posts themselves, but I have a backup for that.
The backup is this: I now have an audioblog. You can access it by going to jimmyakin.blogspot.com. There I’ll try to post entries by mobile phone which you can listen to in .mp3 format. In these I’ll try to explain what’s in the camera phone pictures I’m sending, as well as other thoughts that occur to me along the road.
I may even find a wi-fi zone where I can do a more traditional post or two.
In my absence, I’d invite my co-bloggers to let fly with anything they may have that they want to say. (Thanks, guys! And don’t worry about scheduling. Just publish as soon as you write them.)
Folks can also use the combox to this post as a free-form discussion on . . . . well . . . anything y’all wanna talk about (but keep it within the rules).
Have fun, y’all!
Okay, folks. As an experiment, I’ve upped the number of days of posts that the top page has from four to seven.
I’ll let it stay this way for a few days and then decide whether to leave it this way.
Lemme know what you think of this and if it causes problems.
Yesterday’s post on blog design raised some issues in the comments box that I thought I’d solicit some additional feeback on.
1) Some readers were of the opinion that they’d like to see more posts on the main page before they drop off into the archives.
This can be accomplished several ways. One way is for me to simply tell the software to display more of them. Currently I’ve told it to leave 4 days worth of posts on the main page, but I can up that number if desired. For example, I could leave 5, 6, or 7 (or more) days worth of posts on the front page.
I can also tell the software to leave a specific number of posts (instead of a specific number of days) on the front page. Currently there’s probably an average of 17 posts on the top page at any time, but I coud tell it to have 20 or 25 or 30 posts on at all times.
A downside of upping the number of posts is that, as things currently are, it would make the top page LONGER and possibly make it take MORE TIME TO LOAD for some folks.
This leads to a second issue:
2) Some folks suggest that I use the extended post feature more often. Currently I tend to use it only for really long posts (like ones with multiple pictures in them), but it could be used on a more frequent basis–say, any time the post runs more than 2-4 paragraphs.
The upside of this is that it would make the top page vertically tighter.
The downside is that it would make folks click more links.
Someone suggested having the format be Title:Summary:Extende Post. I’m not sure how that would work. I’m not sure that I’d want to do a summary of the post before the "Continue Reading" link. If I did, it’d probably be a single sentence or phrase as a slug line to get folks intrigued enough to click the link. Perhaps that person or others could suggest more on that is envisioned for that possibility.
Another way to tighten the page vertically would be for me to use longer paragraphs so that there would be less white space between them, but that is SOMETHING I WILL NOT DO. I’m frustrated by seeing others use absurdly long paragraphs (in books, in articles, and on the web), and I am conducting a personal crusade against this tendency as I believe that shorter paragraphs are easier to read than longer ones.
So.
Whadda folks think? Should there be more posts on the top page (accomplished by the day or # of posts methods–and if so, how much more?) and should the extended post feature be used more?
If Jesus were a blogger, what would he blog? That question and others were recently asked at a Christian (read, Evangelical Protestant) blogging conference:
"What would Jesus blog?
"That and other pressing questions drew 135 Christians to Southern California this weekend for a national conference billed as the first-ever for ‘God bloggers,’ a growing community of online writers who exchange information and analyze current events from a Christian perspective.
"The three-day conference at Biola University marked an important benchmark for Christian bloggers, who have worked behind the scenes for years to spread the Gospel and infuse politics with religion.
"Topics included God bloggers’ relationship with the traditional church, their growing influence on mainstream politics and how to manage outsiders’ perceptions.
"Some predicted bloggers could play a role in reforming the modern church by keeping televangelists and other high-profile Christian leaders honest."
The most intriguing metaphor used by the God bloggers was given by Joe Carter of The Evangelical Outpost, in which he compared blogging to Martin Luther’s 95 theses. In that spirit, it sounds like we need a Counter-Reformation of Catholic bloggers. If Mary were a blogger, what would she blog? And when will St. Blog’s Parish have its own conference to discuss that and other questions of Catholic blogging? We could call it The Saint Bloggers.
So yesterday I get an e-mail in my box with the cryptical headline:
usability guidlines for blogs — please help us (your readers) out
The text of the e-mail consists of a repeat of the headline followed by a link:
From this I would gather that the reader who sent it has a beef to gripe with my blog which he expects to be remedied if I read and follow the usability guidelines to be found at the link.
So I took a look at ’em.
They’re some thoughts by Jakob Nielsen, a Dane who has made a name for himself as a web usability consultant.
Now, I’m all for usability. It’s one of my favorite things. In fact, I regularly lament the lack of usability I encounter on the web, in software, and in life. Truth be told, if things aren’t usable then I’m liable to up and not use them! So Jakob Nielsen and I should be natural allies.
Unfortunately, not all values in life can be subsumed under the rubric of usability, and you’ll get a sense why if you visit the link and take a look at Nielsen’s site. It may be usable from a coding perspective, but it’s grating on the eye. (Screen widths being what they are today, having a right- or left- or both-hand margin available is a GOOD thing rather than let the text flow all the way across the page. San serif fonts also can’t be used for extended lengths of text; they’re best for headlines but will also grate the eye if they run on for too long.)
So despite what natural allies Jakob Neilsen and I should be, I’m starting to wonder how much of an expert he really is from the way HIS site is designed.
Then I start reading the content, and notice that he repeatedly refers to "weblogs" without even noting the existence of the more common term, "blog." He eventually surrenders to inevitability and starts using "blog," but he does so without explanation, which is odd since he feels the need to inform his readers–in his very first sentence–that "Weblogs are a form of website." He also states:
[W]eblogs are part of an ecosystem (sometimes annoyingly referred to as the Blogosphere).
Hoo-kay.
Jakob Nielsen’s credibility as someone to tell me about blog design is rapidly diminishing at this point. Even if one is initially put off by a word–like "blogosphere" or "apologetics" or what have you–if you really become an expert on it then you get so used to hearing the term that you lose your initial negative reaction and surrender to the fact that it is, in the end, the standard term accepted in the community.
In other words, you get over it.
The column was released yesterday, Monday, October 17, 2005, and at this point for an alleged expert in web design to be publicly complaining about the annoyingness factor of the word "blogosphere" tells me that he either isn’t that familiar with blogs–or "weblogs," as he calls them–or he is an unusually persnickety individual who is overly attached to his own ideas. Y’know: The kind of person who joins propane-accessory sales comedy troupe and insists on continuing to call it "The Propane Maniacs" when the rest of the group has decided that "The Propaniacs" is the more felicitous name.
Nevertheless, let’s see how JimmyAkin.Org stacks up compared to his top 10 rules of "Weblog Usability." What follows in boldface are Nielsen’s critiques of the design of many "weblogs," followed by analysis of how JA.O fares.
So it seems that I’m in at least substantial compliance with all of Nielsen’s rules (not that they all have to do with the usability of the blog) EXCEPT for #8 and, perhaps, #3.
Which makes me wonder what kind of beef with my blog is had by the reader who e-mailed. Unless he’s got a strong thing for clear post titles or wants me to do apologetics all the time (in which case, forget it; the blog would be deadly dull), I’m not sure what he’s after.
Just one of the mysteries of life, I guess.
Y’all may be familiar with current attempts by the United Nations to hijack the Internet.
It’s a bad idea.
Sorry, folks!
It was one thing after another yesterday, and I didn’t stop having meetings with people (in person or by phone) until late in the evening.
Was therefore unable to do my usual blogging.
Blogging should resume tomorrow.
In the meantime, enjoy the archives!
A momentary lunchblog.
For those who might be wondering why the comments on the Spiritual Help After Miscarriages post are now hidden, the reason is that there was an egregious Rule 20 violation unfolding in the combox and the quickest way to solve the problem was to hide the comments.
My thanks to those who argued against the Rule 20 violation. My apologies to those whose comments could have stood if not for the Rule 20 violation.
For the individual committing the Rule 20 violation, you may not be familiar with the rules I operate this blog under. Rule 20 exists for a specific reason and that reason is definitely in play when someone writes in with an event which is, by his own admission, one that has been emotionally devastating to him.
If you want to disagree with me, fine, but do it via e-mail. Don’t go <expletive>ing on the pastoral comfort I’m trying to provide to a devastated individual.
I have never understood the willingness of many to handle many of their financial transactions online. Everything from banking to paying bills was possible but, with the exception of occasional online shopping, it didn’t interest me. Why solicit trouble?, I thought. This story shows my concerns were well-founded:
"Bank customers know to shield their ATM passwords from prying eyes. But with the rise of online banking, computer users may not realize electronic snoops might be peeking over their shoulder every time they type.
"In a twist on online fraud, hackers and identity thieves are infecting computers with increasingly sophisticated programs that record bank passwords and other key financial data and send them to crooks over the Internet.
"That’s what happened to Tim Brown, who had account information swiped out of the PC at his Simi Valley store.
"’It’s scary they could see my keystrokes,’ said Brown, owner of Kingdom Sewing & Vacuum. ‘It freaks me out.’"
Freaks me out, too.