New Kid on the Blog

Both Quilly and Eric have offered me the same advice regarding my blogger layout issues - move to WordPress.... Now I have a bit of a quandry. I like both of their blogs, obviously because of the content but also because of the layout and the feel of their blogs, likewise Sank has started a wordpress blog and left Blogger behind, and again along with his great content has an improved feel to it. But I find change hard! Well, I do in things like this. I've had the same email address for ten years and have stuck with it despite changing providers, i still have my fracme.net address for a webpage I took down three years ago (I never managed to get around to updating the page) and pay the fees to keep the domain name 'just in case'. The idea of changing my blog address is the bit that puts me off - partly because I have a bunch of free address cards and even a couple of freebie t-shirts (thanks to Vistaprint for that) with the old address of fracme.blogspot.com. Hmmm, wha...

There's a whole load of stuff that Blogger won't let me do, which I have just worked around since I started using it in beta form, but which is starting to become pretty annoying. For instance I cannot move any of my formatting around - so all the stuff on the right hand of the page is stuck where it is, which means the amazon carousel which should be further down the page and the facebook link which should likewise have moved down is firmly fixed in place and nothing I do in the customize page can shift it! Also, if there is any html in any of my posts then once posted i cannot edit them, not even in the 'edit html' pane. I discovered this some time ago, so have left various bloopers in over the last few months, but was reminded of this frustration when I tried to edit the post about movies below and to move the boxes (for Gareth Higgins book and Die Hard 4) to separate lines so they don't mess up the spacing. Just a blank pane, nothing doing... Anyone got any a...

Thanks to the old fart for pointing me towards the visual dna website which made the last post possible. i tried to edit the post to include this but blogger wouldn't let me

Actually, that post heading should be framed as a question... I've seen on some blogs that long posts are split with a good deal of the post hidden away until someone clicks 'more' - is there a bit of code that i could add to get blogger to do that? If it were possible then I would be tempted to post that long talk I did yesterday! It went down quite well, so you might like it.... Oh, and yes I did notice how many errors there were in last night's blogposting, but it was late and I feel no compulsion to edit it. This is about as gritty as my blog gets, unlike Jenny Haha talking about wolf crotch ! Which gave rise to some discussion about what Christians might feel appropriate to blog . If you do follow the link to Jenny's site, then make sure you read the comments, funny and thoughtful! And if you are in the mood to surf then pop over to Dr John's blog, always worth a read - particularly as he encourages you to comment (hopefully with more success than m...

Having had two comments about my scary picture on the profile here at blogger, I have reverted to my older picture which doesn't really have me at all, only my handsome son with me sideways with a squishy nose.... Hope this one doesn't upset anyone ;-)

My blog that is! Now i have got everything up and running I am quite pleased with how it has turned out. Unfortunately the only person i have asked the opinion of is my co-conspirator in the podcast world, Brian. Brian has a good eye for this kind of thing and is a graphic designer and generally creative type and he says he preferred the old layout... At least Jem seems to like it...

Following Moog's comment about blogger beta i have now discovered I can switch to beta and i have, hence many of my links have gone astray and the scheme for my blog has changed. This was not unexpected and i saved all of the links i wanted to keep in another file for cutting and pasting later. Beta looks and feels great, it is easy to use, more intuitive, more variety - unfortunately i still can't manage to add two sidebars (one on each side) as none of the available templates support it and i don't know enough to do that myself. Unfortunately, despite having put all of my links in again, played with colour scheme and generally got the blog feeling like i wanted to none of it will save - i have tried a number of times, i have logged out and in again, i have taken out some of the changes and left others, then tried taking out most of them, then just changed the font and absolutely nothing happens to the blog itself - the preview comes out looking just as it should, but no...

I wrot e a few weeks back that i was including a world cinema amazon link in my sidebar with lots of reasons as to why, even if the content might suprise some people, i thought that the benefit gained from opening ourselves up to wider cultural experiences was a good thing etc etc. Well, the more observant will see that the link is gone - mainly because every time i looked at the page there were usually links to rubbishy films and a few TV series which wouldn't really qualify as world cinema except in the sense it wasn't made in England. So that exercise in risk taking proved to be somewhat pointless. Will consider whether to put another link in my sidebar, or (as Moog helpfully pointed out in a comment in the last post) whether i can play in Blogger Beta and put some other links up as and when it becomes available - I have been told upon trying to sign up that Beta is only available on certain accounts...

Just a quick note to keep up the blogging, the sermon from yesterday was received well, despite the fact i thought it was slightly controversial (maybe not, perhaps i was just stating the obvious). I was interested to see Conrad Gempf's take on it - a wonderfully thoughtful way of expressing that the statement Jesus made was a test - good to read a solid bit of exegesis that disagrees with mine! On another note, I'm quite pleased with increase in blog traffic here, but not many comments! I was also interested to see that i was surfed by the pentagon a few days ago - maybe because in one newspaper article which referred to the Iranian President's entry into the blogsphere he was described as 'New Kid On The Blog'. there are a few of us with that name, but i've not found one older than mine yet, so i can at least feel a bit original... Again on another note, i have enjoyed using blogger but am increasingly seeing blogs which say that typepad(?) is more flexible, ...