Blogging for the Environment

October 15, a week from Monday, is Blog Action Day, and the theme this year is the environment. If you have a blog, use that day to post something related to the environment, in whatever way, shape, or form you prefer. So far, over 7,000 blogs have signed up to participate, with more joining every day. (Not that you have to sign up or anything, but it helps them measure the impact.)

If you're thinking 7,000 blog posts isn't that much in the big scheme of things, Blog Action Day estimates those posts will reach nearly 5 million readers. Putting environmental issues in front of that many people can have a huge effect on public consciousness, and awareness is always the first step in change. So who knows what big things may be set in motion by the combined efforts of individuals sharing their ideas. See the Blog Action Day blog for more on how bloggers can change the world.

LiveBlogJournalSpot 2.0

For any of my LiveJournal friends who are subscribed to my LJ feed, I recommend switching to the new version here. This one is based on a FeedBurner version of my feed, which means I can maintain more control over it (which is what I should have done originally, though I didn't understand how LJ syndicated accounts worked then). In particular, this one is sorted by published date, rather than last-edited date. This is more convenient for the most part, especially right now since I'm still going back in time and labeling a lot of old posts which you all don't really need to be seeing in the updates.

Thanks to Sorcha for helping me set this up (since LJ now requires you to have a paid account in order to add syndicated feeds).

New Name, Same Stuph

Thanks to one of Blogger's spiffy new features, I now have a new domain name for my blog. WhistleDance.net will now get you here, but you don't even have to bother updating your bookmarks if you don't feel like it. The old BlogSpot address still works too, so it's all the same. This can be either extremely exciting or a major yawn. Take your pick.

Of course, I realize I haven't been posting a whole lot here recently. Maybe that'll change soon. Maybe not.

Finally!

One of the ironic things about working at Blogger is that I had to wait an awful long time to get to switch to beta, because I've got an unusually large number of blogs of various types that weren't all supported initially. I just now got to convert everything, though, and I'm pretty excited. First off, I'm going to mess with the template a bit to get it converted over to Layouts. So if things start looking a bit different, that's why. I'm going to mostly just reproduce the same design for now, but I'll probably get around to doing more interesting stuff later.

Google Reader

Google's new feed reader launched today. Go to reader.google.com and sign in with your Google account to check out the spiffiness. Those of you who are used to feed readers know what to do with it. For those of you who don't know what I'm talking about, this is a fine opportunity to find out. You can use a feed reader to to subscribe to blogs (or similar sites) and get all the updates for all those sites in one place, cutting down on the amount of time you need to spend going around and checking all your friends' blogs just to see if they've updated or not. Very handy. If you want to subscribe to my blog, the address of my site feed is: gwaldon.blogspot.com/atom.xml.

Wanna see something spiffy?

Click the comments link on this post. Blogger comments have been revamped. Congratulations to CW and the rest of the team. It's pretty cool.

LiveBlogJournalSpot

Reading all the discussion about Six Apart acquiring LiveJournal made me think of going back and finally figuring out how to get my blog syndicated on LJ, which I did. So all you LJ-types out there can go to this page, add it as your friend, and then get my updates that way.

For anyone interested in how I did it, you need an LJ account first. Then go to this page and enter the site feed of your blog in the form at the very bottom. Unfortunately though, you don't get any control of the LJ version of your feed once you do that. So you can't format it nicely, disable comments, or anything. But I guess that makes sense in a way, since you could be adding anybody's site feed in there, not just your own. And I'm glad to see that there's a way to do this, i.e. make LJ a general feed reader. I had always assumed it must be possible somehow, but I didn't know how.

TMBG Blog Mention

They Might Be Giants now have an album of Venue Songs available for download. On their last tour, they wrote a new song for every place they played. Great album. And I was tickled to find the following in the Towson, Maryland song:

As you navigate the rotary on the way to park your car by the theater,
I'll hold your sweater, my leg is in a bear trap, I'm unable to attend,
But I applaud you and I'll jealously read your blog after the show.

Cool :-) Blogs are good for that sort of thing. I wonder how many people at that show caught the reference and ran home to blog it afterwards.

NaNoBlogMo

Biz came out with a new Blogger Knowledge article today, in preparation for National Novel Writing Month: Blogging Your Novel (Part One). I'm working on Part Two, which will appear next week. I've also created NaNoBlogMo, a new blog to gather together participants who want to blog their novels. It'll be a place to browse through and see what everybody is writing about. And if you're going to be blogging your own progress through November or posting a completed novel, you can fill out a form there and I'll add you to the listings. (Assuming I don't get entirely swamped -- we've already had a lot of submissions just since this afternoon.)

Call Me Morpheus

I've recently been doing a series of how-to articles on Blogger Hacks -- cool tricks you can use to get Blogger to do spiffy new things. This week, I got to write a guest column about them all for Blogger Knowledge. Check it out: Hacking the Blogger Matrix.

Update: This is turning into a fairly popular article. It even showed up on BoingBoing. There was also a WebUser UK article about it, though I was rather disappointed in how they referred to it as hacking into Blogger, which sounds rather more evil than anything I intended. Anyway, it's fun to see people noticing and commenting on it.

Disclaimer: While I do appreciate all the comments and emails from people about this, I will probably not be able to respond to them all. Also, please note that I don't take requests for particular hacks, or for tech support. (If you have general Blogger/BlogSpot questions, please check out help.blogger.com, or write to Blogger Support.)

Reviewing Stuph

So the Weblog Review decided to review my blog. It got a 4/5 (with an extra quarter of a point because I'm a TMBG fan) and a summary of "a nice blog by a nice guy." Not a particularly gripping tagline, that, but oh well. It was interesting reading a review by a complete stranger. He obviously read (or at least skimmed) an immense amount of my blog, which is impressive, but he definitely pulled out different things to focus on than I would have. And I think he was too impressed with my template (which is mostly just a Blogger default). But still, I was amused, in an egocentric kind of way.

West Coast Snails and a Blog Surprise

Last night was the joint spring show for the Cardinal Whirlwinds and Double or Nothing (square dance and swing, respectively). I was pleasantly surprised to see on the program that Neal had choreographed dances to two They Might Be Giants songs for DoN: Snail Shell and Lie Still, Little Bottle. I was rather uncertain about what they would dance to the former, but it turned out to be a west coast swing. They didn't really have any flashy new moves for me to pick up, but they did do something that looked kind of snail like. With one couple dancing in the center, another couple came up to join them. The new guy took the first guy's place, but the new girl just put her hand on the first girl's shoulder and danced behind her. A few more girls got added on this way, so it was always just one guy, but with an accumulating string of girls. It reminded me of a snail growing multiple rings on its shell. Very cool.

The Whirlwinds had some fun dances, too. I especially like the two clogging numbers that the girls did. On the second one, Caitlin played her fiddle and clogged. I'd seen that before, but it's always a hoot to see it again.

The theme of the show was "The Dancing Game" and the skits in between dances involved Evan getting set up with various girls on a dating show, the dates then being represented by the dances. There were some pretty funny skits, but I was particularly tickled by an unexpected blog reference. Evan had just been accidentally matched with a guy for one of the dates, which lead nicely into the Whirlwinds' Gender Bender square dance. Afterwards, Evan's friend asked him how the date was, and Evan replied "Well, he certainly swept me off my feet. But then I read his blog and he just doesn't seem like my type." Yay to blogging, for working its way into a dance show!

Notice Anything Different?

Find out what all the excitement is about here. The new look to my blog is one of the brand new Blogger templates that I'm using until I get around to redesigning my old one. Click my comment link below to check out the new commenting system. See my profile. If you're a Blogger user, go log in and check out all the other fun changes. Happy Blogger Day!

A Domain to Call My Own

I've been thinking that it might be fun to get my own domain name. Unfortunately "graham" isn't available anywhere (.com, .net, .org, etc.). I could get "gwaldon" or "grahamwaldon" .anything, but those aren't really that interesting. Something like whistledance.net might be cool -- that has a nice ring to it. I don't want to bother trying to work in anything about "page of stuph," because that was literally just a dummy title I chose when I created this site, and I never got around to thinking up anything better. So I'm still considering. Anybody have other suggestions?

Syndication is Dead! Long Live Syndication!

(Those of you who aren't using my blog's RSS feed can ignore this post.) This is going to be the last post on this RSS feed. From now on, my blog will be syndicated here: http://gwaldon.blogspot.com/atom.xml. I was sort of dragging my heels for awhile before switching to the new Atom format, mostly because I was annoyed that my news reader didn't support it. But now I've got the beta version of NetNewsWire, which works with it, so that's all good. I also discovered that Bloglines, a web-based aggregator, supports Atom, plus they even have a nifty little program you can download to check for updates for you. That's pretty cool. Anyway, I finally decided to switch over. If you're not sure whether your news reader supports Atom, you can check this page.

Grahamster

Wow! My blog is blog of the day, over at Feedster. Thanks, Betsy!

Experiences of the Quena Kind

Quena has a blog! Finally! I've been working on her to do that for ages. I'm looking forward to tales of Costa Rica appearing there in January, and of course just the general blogging of Quena happiness. Go read Experiences of the Quena Kind.

Blog Design Part III

Okay, I'm taking the easy way on this right now. I definitely wanted to switch to this layout, but I'm still going to sit down and think about colors again sometime. This is good for now, though.

More Design Stuff

I do agree with everybody that the two columns were a bit much. However, Hugo commented that " 'blogging' should not become 'webbing' as it surely will if double side-bar content also requires regular updates." That sort of indicates why I was considering making the side blogs more noticeable -- they've actually been there and been regularly updated since January. But that doesn't matter too much. I'll stick with the single sidebar.

For the people so far (Mom and Lacey) who like the original: I do think it's been a nice enough design for a little while, but it's just been feeling a bit too flat and dimensionless to me. I like the new designs because they have a bit more of a presence, and are less like a flat sheet of paper.

As for color: The addition of another background color goes along with the whole adding-dimension thing. The original color scheme was really sort of random when I chose it a year or so ago, though it seems to have worked out pretty well. So I kept some of the yellow and tried to work off of that. I would have thought making it more colorful would have increased the "friendliness," but maybe apparently some people see the blue differently. Here are a couple more modifications to the color, as suggested by Tina. I like them, but I think I'd be less inclined to actually use them.

Choice 5

Choice 6

[Back to original]

I'd be curious to know what colors people would actually associate with me, leaving aside the current state of the webpage. Tina and I were talking about this a bit tonight. We would both pick darker colors for me, but that makes web designing tricky because I prefer mostly light colors for webpages. Hmm.

Okay, I promise I'll just shut up and pick one soon enough. It's just fun to play designer a bit for a while, even if it's nothing really very fancy.

Blog Designs

I've been playing a bit with the design of my blog this weekend, and just to be interactive about the whole process (user-centered design and all that), I thought I'd put a few examples up here and ask for input. I'll leave the original page as it is here for comparison. There are two types of changes here. One thing I did was to put a side bar on each side. I liked that because it got more content up towards the top, but I think it might also make it look too crowded. The other thing I did was to change the color scheme a bit. Here are the pages, according to changes:

Original	Same Colors	Different Colors
Two Side Bars	Choice 1	Choice 2
One Side Bar	Choice 3	Choice 4

So anyway, there they are. Leave me a comment or send me an e'mail and let me know what you think. You can vote for one of those choices (or even for the original, I guess) or suggest other modifications to make to them. I'll also mention that I've tested these on three browsers so far, but only on Mac OS X. If something looks screwy on your computer/browser, let me know that, too.