Southwest Virginia Blogs

RSS feeds are a simple way of allowing people to be notified of new content on your website. Using news aggregators like Newsgator and Bloglines, browsers with built in feed capability, or add-ons like Firefox’s Sage, your visitors can be notified whenever you post new content. Most blogging software like Blogger and WordPress creates these feeds for you. All you need to do is make sure that your feeds are visible and functioning. Are your feeds working?

Try subscribing, can you read them? If you’re having a problem subscribing, check your site source code. There should be a little bit of code in your head section that allows browsers and feed readers to identify your feed. It probably looks something like this:

<link rel="alternate" type="text/xml" title="Atom 0.3" href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/HighDesertWanderer" />

In both Firefox and IE7 you should also be able to identify a site with an RSS feed by the small icon displayed in the URL bar. If you don’t see that icon, your site might not be allowing your viewers to see your RSS feeds.

If your RSS feed is visible, but not readable, your problem likely originated with your blogging software. Try writing another post. It sounds like a stupid solution, but this will prompt the creation of a new RSS item and might also clean up any errors in the existing feed. If this doesn’t work, check your last 10-15 posts. Did you use any odd HTML, or special characters? Since your feed is created from your blog posts, removing any garbled code from your posts might fix your RSS. If the problem persists for more than 10-15 posts, consulting an expert would likely be your next option.

Verifying that your RSS feeds are working properly and visible to your readers is important. The people who subscribe to your site are people who have come to your site before, and want to visit again. You just need to let them know when!

Somebody e-mailed this to me this morning. I couldn’t resist posting it.

A helicopter was flying around above Seattle yesterday when an electrical malfunction disabled all of the aircraft’s electronic navigation and communications equipment. Due to the clouds and haze, the pilot could not determine the helicopter’s position and course to steer to the airport. Seeing a tall building, he flew toward it, circled, drew a handwritten sign, and held it in the helicopter’s window. The pilot’s sign said “WHERE AM I?” in large letters.

People in the tall building quickly responded to the aircraft, drew a large sign, and held it in a building window. Their sign said “YOU ARE IN A HELICOPTER.” The pilot smiled, waved, looked at his map, determined the course to steer to SEATAC airport, and landed safely.

After they were on the ground, the co-pilot asked the pilot how the “YOU ARE IN A HELICOPTER” sign helped determine their position in Seattle. The pilot responded “I knew that had to be the MICROSOFT building because, similar to their help-lines, they gave me a technically correct but completely useless answer.”

I’ve been playing with a new WordPress theme for this site for a while. It’s seems to be ready, so I’ll put it up shortly. Please forgive any chaos that ensues when it first goes up. No matter how much you test a theme, when it first goes live there always seems to be some little quirk. More often than not it’s a browser not wanting to refresh properly, but I’ve been known to make an error once in a while.

I saw a story on this last month, but someone sent me this link with a video on the bottom of the page. Read the story, then watch the video. See why Dick Hoyt is a true father.

Eighty-five times he’s pushed his disabled son, Rick, 26.2 miles in Marathons. Eight times he’s not only pushed him 26.2 miles in a Wheelchair but also towed him 2.4 miles in a dinghy while swimming and Pedaled him 112 miles in a seat on the handlebars–all in the same day.

Dick’s also pulled him cross-country skiing, taken him on his back Mountain climbing and once hauled him across the U.S. On a bike. Makes Taking your son bowling look a little lame, right?

Go out and vote (Republican)! I won’t tell you who to vote for (Republican) but you need to go out today and vote (Republican). It’s the process (Republican) that’s important. Isn’t political freedom great! (Republican)

Voting was surprisingly brisk this morning in Giles County. I had 15-20 people in front of me in line at 7:15 a.m. Did I mention that you should go VOTE!

Reading over this post, it seems that my political affiliation (Republican) may be leaking through.

The resonant sound of me beating my head against my desk. If you require the services of a graphic designer, here’s how it should go:

• Have a meeting to define the project.
• Define the project.
• Pass definition of project to designer.
• Designer creates product as defined, supplies you with proof.
• Make corrections and/or approve of design, (keeping in mind that it should fulfill the need defined in the first two bullets).
• Project is completed.

Doesn’t that work nicely. A beginning (defining project), a middle (design project), and an end (approve and complete project). Projects seem to work best this way. The way they sometimes go is more along the lines of:

• Pass definition of project to designer.
• Designer creates product as defined, supplies you with proof.
• Have a meeting to define the project.
• Define the project.
• Make vague and confusing corrections to design based on flawed definition, (remembering to blame the designer for doing what you asked him to do in the first place).
• Designer makes corrections, supplies you with proof.
• Berate designer for not meeting the new definition of project (which you still haven’t supplied him/her with)
• Repeat last three steps several times.
• Approve of project
• Pass definition of project to designer. (Confirming to him/her that while the project is approved, it still fails to meet definition in some key area, thus justifying your threats of non-payment).
• Project is completed.

What an annoying mess. In the end, the project will be completed, I’ll get paid (well), and I’ll move on to something else. I really should stop dealing with this client, but they’ve been good to me in the past and it’s hard to break out of a relationship like that, dysfunctional as it may be. Their last two projects have gone this way. Both times they’ve supplied me with complete and thoroughly detailed plans for projects, only to scrap that plan midway through the project.

Thud. Thud. Thud…

I saw a couple of videos of the Nelson brothers dancing. Jan from Cascade Exposures sent me a link to this piece as well. I can’t think of any modern dancers who can come close to this.

John over at Argghhh! and Blackfive looking for your support… financial support for Project Valour-IT!

Project Valour-IT, in memory of SFC William V. Ziegenfuss (Captain Chuck Ziegenfuss’ father), provides voice-controlled software and laptop computers to wounded Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen and Marines recovering from hand and arm injuries or amputations at major military medical centers. - Blackfive

Non-military bloggers are advised to choose a military branch to support. All I have to say is Go Army!

Althouse linked to a story about the world’s largest skateboard ramp. More than a little nuts. I’d never consider riding a board down that… Rollerblades maybe, but not a skateboard.

Champion skateboarder Bob Burnquist is taking extreme skateboarding to a new level on the Mega Ramp in his backyard. - New York Times Video

The really absurd part of this is how much money it cost. Rather than buying a good sized house, he built a skateboard ramp. It’s all about priorities I suppose.

IE6 is giving me fits today. Something that seems to have been included in an automatic update last week is causing IE6 to fail on a site that I work on. Pages not loading, forms not loading, freezing up after loading, a whole list of problems. Driving me nuts. It only effects IE6, and not every computer seems to be effected. No idea what’s going on here. If I don’t see a solution soon, something is going out a window.

Sidenote: If you’re less than 150 lbs., and would in some way fit out of a 2′ x 3′ window, you might not want to walk into my office right now.

Why does Microsoft include a web browser with their operating system? Due mostly I think to Microsoft’s insistence on making IE an integral part of their operating system, IE is and has been one of their biggest security vulnerabilities, yet they keep including it. Why not let Firefox or Opera, or anybody else have the browser market. What would it cost them? It’s not like they charge for the browser. If they stuck to making a stable reliable operating system, and skipped all of the other junk, I think they’d have a better product. If nothing else, they could split it away from the Windows OS, making it less integral, and therefore less of a security risk.

Just blathering today. I don’t know whether it’s IE7’s release or just a coincidence, but I’ve been dealing with a lot of MS fanatics this week. How do you tactfully explain to someone that MS Word isn’t an appropriate piece of software to design with? I had trouble not using obscenities in my explanation. I know it’s been a long week when my verbal filter isn’t working very well.

Now this is something I’ve been waiting for. Firefox 2 Released! I haven’t tried it yet, we’ll see how it goes. Unlike IE7, I haven’t tried any of the Beta versions yet either.

Update: Everything seems to work as expected. They rearranged some things, combined the theme and extension windows in one for instance. Several of my extensions don’t work, but most of those are made obsolete by new features in 2, the spell checker for instance. Didn’t expect a failure, but it’s nice to see that everything seems to work.

Guns buyback has no effect on murder rate - National - smh.com.au

“Homicide patterns (firearm and non-firearm) were not influenced by the NFA, the conclusion being that the gun buyback and restrictive legislative changes had no influence on firearm homicide in Australia,” the study says.

“I have been collecting data since 1996 … The decision was we would wait for a decade and then evaluate,” she said.

The findings were clear, she said: “The policy has made no difference. There was a trend of declining deaths that has continued.”

Half a billion dollars and no statistical improvement in the homicide rate. Apparently, criminals don’t believe in complying with gun control laws. I have to admit, that doesn’t come as a huge surprise to me. I predict that this lesson will be entirely lost on American politicians.

h/t Instapundit.com -

Instructivist writes about Dead horses and educationists.

Dakota tribal wisdom says that when you discover you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount. However, the educational establishment often tries other strategies with dead horses, including the following:

1. Buying a stronger whip.
2. Changing riders.
3. Saying things like “This is the way we always have ridden this horse.”
more…

After reading the whole list, can you think of any that he missed? How about “Shoot every other horse in sight, thus lowering the bar for your particular dead horse”? Any others?

I’m not a big fan of Microsoft, but I’ll give them this, their fans are really, really loyal.

Someone I e-mail on an almost daily basis recently suggested I change my e-mail client to MS Outlook from Mozilla Thunderbird. Their reasoning? All of the e-mails she received from me were being flagged as spam and filtered by Outlook.

I suggested she should change her filter settings so that it didn’t filter people in her address book: done. Make sure I’m in the address book: done. No change, I’m still being filtered. I suggested that her Outlook seemed to be having a problem: Can you change to Outlook to stop it from doing this?

Hmm… You software isn’t functioning properly, so you want to alleviate your problem by having me install the same software that’s not working for you on my computer. Let me think… No!

Sad maybe, but very loyal.

Now this idea is genius!

IMAO: Guns, What Can’t They Do?

A blogger was talking about the problem of having to check expensive camera equipment and then having it lost or stolen, and then one of his commenters came up with the solution: Guns!

Check a starter pistol in with your camera equipment! Then the rules say that the case must be locked and the airlines will be extremely careful to make sure you get your case back safely.

Now this idea is genius!

IMAO: Guns, What Can’t They Do?

A blogger was talking about the problem of having to check expensive camera equipment and then having it lost or stolen, and then one of his commenters came up with the solution: Guns!

Check a starter pistol in with your camera equipment! Then the rules say that the case must be locked and the airlines will be extremely careful to make sure you get your case back safely.

I’m seeing some odd similarities between my recent experiences with horses and the Senatorial campaign here in Virginia (Jim Webb is running against George Allen.)

This morning I spent about twenty minutes trying to find two horse in a large pasture. It was dark and foggy, and the horses are dark brown. They chose this morning to ignore my calls and wait for me to find them. At least once I passed within thirty feet of one of them without knowing it. She remained quiet. Only after I found her did she whinny, quite loudly, right in my face. Once found I found them, I removed their muzzles (keeps them from overeating) and let them enjoy the rest of the day in peace.

Politics around here seems to be going the same way. Lots of darkness and fog, not much in the way of useful noise. I have no idea what either of them stands for, they just keep blathering on about how bad the other one is. I have no idea who to vote for because from what little I hear, they could both stand to be muzzled.

Listening to Pandora as I work. Not really paying attention to what comes on. Then the words of the song slowly filter into my brain. It’s Hard To Kiss The Lips At Night That Chew Your Ass Out All Day Long - The Notorious Cherry Bombs. When I stop laughing I’ll get back to work.

There’s an interesting idea for making a online shopping site out of a WordPress installation over at serialdeviant.org(y). If I had anything to sell, I’d be trying that out. Not much market for High Desert Wanderer memorabilia at the moment.

h/t problogger