Blogger Beta

I was finally given the go ahead to upgrade to Blogger Beta but there are some issues including that comments are broken you may have noticed.

I'm working on getting it all fixed and will post an update at that time.

Update: Comments are fixed. I'm going to now try and add tags/categories as that was the feature I wanted to most.

Update 2: Labels work in each individual post so I'm not going to try and add them in the sidebar.

Update 3: It's going to take a while to get the labels in the sidebar because of two reasons. The first is that I publish to my blog via FTP so the GUI template editing is not available to me. Second, the beta blogger templates have a new style of coding with these "widgets" that you call. I tried using the widget code in my template to call the label list and it did not work. Does anyone know how to get get the label list in the old style template?

It also appears that adding the labels is causing all my previous post to go out on my feed. I apologize to anyone who is subscribing to my blog and is getting blog reader spammed.

Update 4: Looks like there is currently no code to add the labels to the sidebar using a "classic" template. I have two options:

1. Switch to a beta template and customize it to look the same as my current template.

2. Manually code the labels list. This means I'll have to manually update it every time I add a new label.

Hmmm. I'll see if I can get Iriewoman to help me with this. She has mad web coding skillz. For now, if you want to browse all the posts of a particular label, you'll have to find a post that already has that label and click the link.

"Blogs of Note"

For some reason my blog made it on the blogger.com "blogs of note" list. I have no idea how or why this happened but I'm not complaining. I have temporarily enabled comment moderation because I'm getting some pretty hateful comments on my political posts. You can still comment but it will not post on the blog until I approve it. Once this traffic dies down I'll revert it back.

Maybe now I'll get a coveted invite to upgrade to the new Blogger beta. I really want the category/tags feature. Are they doing this yet?

Update: The hateful comments were really coming from 2 or 3 people. After that things mellowed out and I'm encouraged to see thoughtful debate happening. This has been quite a day on my blog :) I'm loving all the comments and emails.

Update 2: Here is more detail on the "blogs of note". Seems that staff at blogger pick them and it's one per day. My day was October 17, 2006.

Blog Stuff

A couple of new things about my blog:

I've added a little section on the right called "What I'm Reading" and I'll try and keep that current as well as posting my thoughts on each book when I'm done reading it.

The other thing I'm going to do is post about the city I live in: Eugene, Oregon. I love the Northwest so I'll share my thoughts and news about Eugene, about Oregon and about the Northwest.

I'm waiting for the blogger.com upgrade to filter down to my account and then I'll be able to categorize (tag) each post which will be nice.

My Favicon

I created my first favicon which is the little icon in the browser address bar (look up). It's a challenge to make a graphic image that is 16x16 pixels. It could be better, but it does the trick for now.

Credit to Lee Asher for calling me "d5" a few years ago.

....and this time I mean it ...

I really want to be able to follow through and keep a consistent blog. So here I go again.