prairie point

weblog changes

There have been some changes. The journal now has a new appearance and new feeds.

If you subscribe to a prairie point feed, please change it to one of these:

http://www.prairiepoint.net/journal/feed/
http://www.prairiepoint.net/journal/feed/rss/
http://www.prairiepoint.net/journal/feed/atom/

photo album problem

Apologies to anyone trying to view my photo gallery. I am having technical problems. I found out that the comments were not being saved, even though they appear to be. I contacted Gallery and they suggested that upgrading to the new release would fix the problem. I tried that and now it doesn't work at all.

Gallery is a good product but I always have a devil of a time with the installation and upgrades. This is the fourth or fifth time and it has always taken an inordinate amount of time. I should be documenting my work because I have the sneaking suspicion that I make the same mistakes each time. Anyway I have left a plea for help on their support logs and I hope to have it running again soon.

UPDATE - I got it working again. Sure enough, after I finished I remembered that the mistake I had made this time was exactly the one I had made last time I upgraded it!

"one-click"

For a long time I have put off upgrading my Movable Type software. That's mostly out of laziness. If memory serves it took me about three or four hours to install it initially. I upgraded it one time and it went fairly smoothly. Since then I have forgotten practically everything about the whole process. (As I get older this seems to be happening to me more and more, especially with computers and software).

I have been reading about various alternatives to Movable Type. Since I only host one blog the pricing of MT doesn't bother me and I don't have any personal axes to grind with the developers. But I always like to use the best product for my needs. That's another decision to make and another opportunity to procrastinate. I have so many other good things to do with my time.

Nevertheless, I probably should either upgrade or move on to something else. Now I have an offer that may be just too good to pass by. The company that hosts this blog has announced a "one-click" installation of WordPress. That is one of the alternatives to Movable Type that some bloggers have been moving to (Joel and Burningbird, just to name a couple examples).

Of course I should be skeptical about the "one-click" part. Around here Tricia and I joke about the shed kit we bought a few years ago. According to the advertisement it could be put together in "four hours." We knew that it was going to take a little longer after it took us almost two hours to unload it from the truck and carry it piece by piece to the backyard. By the time the four hour mark had passed we had identified most of the pieces on the parts list and gathered all the tools. According to the timeline this is when we should be finished, but we had not even put two pieces together yet and we were already tired and ready to call it a day.

Well, to make a long story short we eventually got the shed built, but it took us about four days instead of four hours. It's become a joke between us now.

So I wonder how many hours this "one-click" process would actually take me?

something fun

Something to pass the time while waiting for election results.

the kitchen

If you are as weary of politics as I am, take a break and check out the IT Kitchen. Lots of great articles and tips on blogging.

the original photo

I got several comments about what I had done to the turk's cap photo. I played around with it using the photo editing software I have, which is Paint Shop Pro. I am less talented using photo editing software than I am with the camera, which is to say that I know practically nothing. But I am trying to learn by experimentation.

Anyway for those who care here is the original photo. Or almost original. I use a 5 megapixel camera so the original image was 36 inches wide. This one is reduced to 7, just slightly less than the column-width of the text. I was going to upload the original but MT would not let me do it.

Also I "compressed" it. The original was 1.5 megabytes. Compressing the image reduces the quality but makes it easier for viewers, who don't have to wait as long for the image to download. I usually crop my pictures and compress them to around 60K. Also when I compressed it I specified a "progressive" format, which makes it come into focus gradually instead of downloading it one line at a time. I do these things for almost every picture that I post to my weblog. Also I usually sharpen them after I have reduced the size, but I did not do that with the image above.

On the other hand I don't usually do any of those things to the pictures I post to my photo album. The software that I use for the photo album automatically reduces them to a specific size. Often I do crop those pictures too if I think they need it but usually that is all that I do to them.

Anyway I appreciate everyone's comments about my photos. I am just fumbling around with the camera and the photo editor both. Someday I hope to have the time to take a class where I can find out how it's actually supposed to be done.

decline and fall

Just about every blogger I know claims that she or he only writes for their own pleasure and doesn't really care if anyone ever reads the blog. But I've noticed that every one keeps statistics on hits and referrals. I'm no exception.

Since I started this blog about fifteen months ago my readership has steadily increased. This is based on statistics measured by Site Meter and also by my own hosting company. However last month for the first time the number of hits for the month actually went down slightly. I thought maybe it was an aberation but based on the results so far, it looks like this month will be even less.

I've been wondering what's going on. Did my readers finally get tired of my humble scribblings and move on? I have to say also that I have been posting a little bit less than I used to, due to other interests. That would naturally bring in fewer people in over time.

I am wondering though about the effect of RSS feeds on my readership. About the time the decline started I began publishing a full RSS feed including the comments. Readers can now peruse an entire entry without ever hitting my site. I don't know how many do this but probably a few.

Around that time or before I began to primarily use Bloglines for my own weblog browsing. This is because I can scan more blogs in a shorter period of time. And I really appreciate the ones with full feeds. Previously I used my own blogroll for visiting other sites, thereby producing a steady stream of referrals from my site. These often prompted a reciprocal visit and sometimes even in my being added to the other sites blogroll. Now I only use my blogroll for the handfull of sites without feeds.

I guess what I am trying to say is that I don't think that the statistics are accurately reflecting the readership of my blog anymore. Of course a lot of those hits were only from Google anyway, many of which probably took one glance and hit the "back" button. So it never was an accurate reflection of readership.

However I keep trying to tell myself that I don't really care how many readers I have anyway.

fun and diversions on saturday night

Via Joel who picked it up from Maria, the fifth sentence meme:

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open the book to page 23.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.

The nearest book is The Guide to Old Roses:

Everblooming roses were unknown in Europe, where only the "Autumn Damask" could be expected to rebloom occasionally in the Fall.

And while I am pointing to things on other sites I have to mention this which I found at Phyllis' site. I cannot stop playing it.

too bad i don't have more to say

I am a grammar god.

I was also really good at diagramming sentences.

taking pictures

I'm still very much in a learning mode with the Canon G5 digicam I got as a birthday present. Even though it has a macro mode I have a tendency to get too close when I am taking pictures of flowers. In the LCD they tend to look okay; only when I download them later do I realize they are not quite in focus.

I always want to fill the whole image area with my subject. I think what I should be doing is back off a little and crop the picture afterward. I have 5 megapixels to play with. I will have to reduce the image anyway before publishing it.

On the other hand sometimes it does work. In the picture of the iris above I only cropped a little on the top and bottom.

I actually have more throwaways with this camera than I did with my old 1.5 megapixel Olympus. Most of the features on the camera are still a mystery to me but one that I have learned to use is the "portrait" focus. This throws the background out of focus which makes a flower stand out more. But it also requires that you keep a steady hand and aim right where you want. It takes me a couple dozen shots sometimes before I get just the right limb or flower bud in focus. There is a manual focus too but I have had nothing but disatrous results with that.

Along with the camera I got an Ultra compactflash card to supplement the small one that came with the camera. At first I thought something was wrong with it because I could not get my card reader to read it. The reader worked fine with the Canon brand memory card. I wrote to SanDisk complaining about their card and they actually sent me a replacement for the card reader.

One complaint I have is that the G5 is actually a little bulky to carry around. I like having something I can put in a pocket when I am out in the field or doing touristy things. That is one reason I don't think I would be happy with a digital SLR and a bunch of lenses. I had an old SLR film camera for years and I almost never used it. I usually carried a point and shoot instead and generally found I was just as pleased with the results.

locking the door

This last week I seem to have been a special target of comment spam. You would think that a blog devoted to gardening would be immune from this. Now that I have the "Recent Comments" list on the sidebar they get prominent exposure on the main index so it is important to get them deleted as fast as possible. I have relatives and even a friend or two who reads this and I want to look a little bit respectible.

After deleting about six this afternoon I finally decided to install the MT-Blacklist. I had avoided it because I thought it would be difficult and up until recently I only had one now and then. Turns out to have been extremely easy to install. I should have done it a long time ago.

I sure hope it works. If it doesn't I will have to go back and close the comments on the old entries. I don't really want to do that. It is a real delight to get a comment on some forgotten article from way back.

blogiversary

Would you believe! It's been a whole year since I started doing this.

rss

It's been raining here since Monday and besides I've been distracted from the garden lately. Kathy, one of the authors of Cold Climate Gardening, has turned me on to Bloglines and rss feeds.

The jury is still out on this for me, but I am beginning to see the convenience of it. It's a great way to browse through your blogroll and see just what is new. The only problem is that some of my regular reads don't seem to have rss feeds. If I haven't visited your site recently, this is probably why. Moveable Type makes it easy, but don't ask me how to start one if you use anything else.

more photo gallery entries

I gathered some of my cat pictures and put them in a gallery all their own. Most of these have been featured in the blog already but I wanted to have them all together. I also started off the garden gallery with a few photos for January.

Still haven't been able to get the "photo properties" feature to work on the gallery. It is supposed to display "EXIF" data, whatever that stands for. It's what they call the information that digital cameras store along with the photos. I know I installed the module for this but perhaps I didn't get the path to it right when I was setting it up. I am not sure I need this anyway. Maybe I will just go back and take it off if I can't get it to work.

Do these pictures look to be about the right size? I am looking for some opinions on this. I don't want them to be so big that it takes a long time to download the images or so that you have to scroll to see the whole picture.

technical difficulties

We have been experiencing problems connecting to the Internet for the last several days. At first I thought it was just that the virus going round now had clogged things up globally. Finally I realized that it was just us and called in the problem. Today someone from the phone company is supposed to be out to check out our line.

taqueria del sol

One of our goals while in South Texas was to introduce my father-in-law to the wonders of e-mail. He's been hearing rumours of e-mail for years and all his children and grandchildren are avid users of it. Now he's acquired an e-mail appliance for Christmas and he needs to learn how to use it. By virtue of the timing of our trip, Tricia and I became his teachers.

We've been expecting this for a while. The snowbird culture that he is a part of reminds me of schoolchildren. They have a very limited view of the world. They learn about new things primarily from each other by word of mouth, but once something catches on it becomes a fad that everyone has to have. So far the Internet has escaped the interest of his clique and there seems to be no imaginable use whatsoever for most other computer applications, but e-mail is catching on.

Which might make the Mailstation a good choice. It's dialup, but all he has to do is press one button and it dials in, sends and retrieves all the mail and then hangs up. It can even be set up to connect automatically at set times.

He already had it set up by the time we get there and has even sent out a few e-mails. What more could there be to learn, you ask? Well actually a lot it turns out. We have to explain the address book, and correct most of the entries he has already made to it. And of course we have to explain spam. Luckily, the machine must have a pretty good spam filter, because so far most of the usual suspects have not shown up. What's mostly showing up are the forwarded e-mails and chain letters.

He has a dozen items in his in-box already and with our help he gets through them all. Most he replies to with one or two words. He's not a verbose kind of guy.

Some of the mail he gets has "commercials" below the actual message. This is the stuff that Yahoo and others attach below your mail and which you probably don't even notice. But it completely throws him for a loop. We go over the explanation for this at least three times while we are there. I guarantee that he will ask about it again some night when he calls.

The trip is not all work though. He has found a wonderful little restaurant just down the road in the town of Donna. He calls it Martha's after the proprietor, but the sign outside says Taqueria del Sol. They have the best migas I've ever tasted.

moblogging

Over the weekend we drove down to "the Valley" to visit my father-in-law. (I assume everyone knows that "the Valley" is the narrow fertile area near the mouth of the Rio Grande). I am "moblogging" this from my laptop over a dial-up connection. After several years of a DSL connection it is interesting to see how slow dial-up can be. Pictures in particular are really slow. I need to remember this for the benefit of my dial-up readers. (Isn't there a way to make pictures load in a way where they "fade-in" instead of loading line by line?)

Tricia's dad calls himself a "snowbird." He's one of thousands of northerners and midwesterners who make an annual winter trek to the southern borders every winter. This is a whole different culture and I want to write about it a little, but I'll wait until I get back and have more time.

what's up with this?

A friend of mine who comments on this blog once in a while forwarded to me an email he received today. It was from a concern called InternetSeer which apparently had gleaned my friends' email address from the comment logs:

On Mon Dec 15, 2003 at 10:08:30 PM EST we were unable to reach your website:
http://www.prairiepoint.net/journal/archives/000005.html
due to the following reason: Connection Refused

We discovered this error during our normal course of website content checking for one of our search engine clients.

I am curious about this service though and just what they may be up to. It annoys me that email with references to my site is going out without my knowledge to people who have commented.

construction ahead

Just a warning. I am going to be doing a little tweaking to this blog layout in the days ahead. I want to clean up the side column a little bit by installing a "sliding tree" menu for the main items. I intend to test everything first in my test blog that I created for this purpose, but there is always a chance - correct that , there is virtually a certainty - that somewhere along the line I will screw something up. So if things look a little weird, you’ll know why.

tidbits

I wasn't even thinking of going near a mall today anyway, but here is another reason - today is Buy Nothing Day.

Robert Kennedy, Jr. has a very insightfull article in this months' Rolling Stone, or you can read the full text of it here. Interesting comments on Schwarzenegger and on Gore, and a blistering indictment of the current administration's environmental policies.

And here's more about Bush trashing the environment - in England this time.

Beliefnet is starting a series on the religious beliefs of the Democratic presidential candidates - starting with Wesley Clark. Via Political Aims.

And a couple of great tools I found by following a link to Broken Clay Journal. Use the New York Times Article Link Generator when you link to Times articles and you won't wind up with a broken link later. And TinyURL is another tool that replaces those long URLs that wrap around lines with a short one that is easier to cut and paste.

searchin'

It seems like every blogger likes to look at statistics and I'm no exception. For instance here are the most popular search terms used by visitors who arrived at my site this month.

tortoise shell cats
cedar elm
spider lily
tortoise shell cat
texas star hibiscus
spider lilies
cat photography
time lapse photos
abraham lincoln mexican war
lincoln and the mexican war
lincoln mexican war
rain lily
esperanza plant
prairie points
cinderella story -ever -after
zexmenia
brazos de dios
dallas women
hummingbird moth
abraham lincoln and the mexican war

By far the most popular post to this weblog has been the one on my cat Julie. I don't know how Google works, but I think that the more hits it gets then the more likely it is to turn up on searches and hence the more hits, etc. So I guess it may stay popular for awhile. I love that I keep getting comments on it months later.

Another item of interest (at least to me) is that sometime during this month the number of comments began to exceed the number of posts. I've never had a huge number of commenters (or readers) so it's nice to see more. I recently decided to give them a little more prominence by showing the most recent ones on the side-panel.

Something else I've been trying to do is corrollate the days my traffic is highest with something. I was surprised to see that my highest traffic during the month occurred during the time when I took several days off from blogging. Does this mean that traffic would go through the roof if I gave up posting altogether? Seriously I felt guilty thinking of people who came here and found nothing new.

blogrolling problem

Now what is going on? Some one has apparently hacked into my blogrolling account and replaced everthing with something called Laura's Blog. I am temporarily taking out the blogroll as a result.

UPDATE: It wasn't just me, apparently; it was everybody who uses blogrolling.com. Thanks to Jason for having a backup and for restoring it.

posting

Not much time to post these days. For the second day in a row the new laptop has been giving me problems. When I tried to turn it on yesterday the power light came on but it never booted up. I called Dell Support and they walked me through a procedure that involved removing and replacing the memory cards. Finally it worked right. Tonight I had to do the same thing again. This is a nice machine but having to dismantle and reassemble it every time I use it is not going to work for me.

On a positive note we have had rain the last two evenings. It's hurricane season and moisture is coming up from the Gulf of Mexico. I usually unplug the computers whenever we get lightning storms which has further reduced my on-line time. The rain has also kept me from spending much time in the garden after I get home from the office, but I know the plants are liking it. As usual it's driving the cats bananas.

weblog as place

When I think of my weblog as a "place" I think of this little rectangle into which I type my words. It seems like I look at this side of it much, much more than I look at the "public" side where the results are displayed. I've never really understood why this box that I type in must be so narrow. It takes up such a small part of the real estate of my screen. At least it's bigger than the comments box.

I've been blogging for about six months and I still haven't quite determined what my relationship is with the blog. I've kept journals off and on for years and I expected it to be somewhat like that but it isn't. At least not for me. At times it seems like producing a column for a newspaper. Although I've never done that so how would I know? Even though I try not to be, I frequently feel pressured to write something. And I am much more particular about what I write than I ever was in a journal. At other times however I feel that I am writing to certain people who I know read my weblog as I read theirs.

To explain how I got into this I would have to go back about two years. One day at work I went into the snack bar to get a soft drink and found a book on HTML that had been abandoned there. I got interested in it and took it home for the weekend. Our ISP provided us with a small amount of space for a "home page." Like most people I had never even thought of using it, but over the next week I started building a site. Tricia had recently given me a digital camera and I needed a forum to display my pictures. It didn't have a lot of words at first. Later, when Tricia and I remodeled our kitchen, I started to document that project. Unfortunately only about a dozen of our closest friends and relatives ever visited any of those pages, and of course nothing linked to them.

I didn't know anything about weblogs then. That came much later after I started to follow links in online news magazines. When I first started blogging myself, I modeled my writing after those political news blogs, but that didn't seem right for me. What I did feel comfortable about was writing about my garden. For years I had been intending to start a garden journal, so I decided to make my garden the main focus. That limits it's appeal. I may never have a lot of readers, but I am having a lot of fun with it.

Part of the Ecotone series on "Blogs and Place."

confluence

From Joel at Pax Nortona I learned of The Degree Confluence Project, which has its goal to "visit each of the latitude and longitude integer degree intersections in the world, and to take pictures at each location"

These are the entries for the four intersections nearest me:

33N 97W       33N 96W
32N 97W       32N 96W

anticipation

I'm expecting a new machine from Dell any day now. After reading the troubles Fred has been having I'm wondering if I made the right decision. This time I'm getting a laptop so I can work out on the patio instead of being cooped up inside all the time.

Actually it's Tricia who needs a new machine more than I do. Her clunker is about five years old and we cannot get it to communicate with the printer any more. It's also very slow on some of the new quilt design software she uses. But I've been wanting a laptop and she wants a machine like this one, so I made a deal with her.

design changes

You may notice that I've tweaked the design of this site a little. It's something I had been wanting to do for a while, but when I got a complaint from a reader that my pictures were not showing up I decided it was time to take action.

Mainly I just wanted a clean, simple look and a consistent look on the main page and the archive pages. The pictures needed to be integrated into the text better.

While I was doing it I went back and edited the way pictures were formatted in some of the previous entries. I've been told that that violates one of the commandments of blogging. If so I guess I'll have to beg forgiveness. If it makes any difference I didn't change any text and it's actually the way I intended the pictures to appear all along.

You'll let me know if any of it doesn't work with your software I hope.

photo upload problems, cont'd

I found the extra photo memory card and tested it in my card reader and it didn't work; so I still have no way to upload photos. Since neither of the memory cards work, I figure that must mean the problem is with the card reader or with an adapter I use to hold the Smart Media cards. My card reader is built into my printer but the printer part still works. I now need to go shopping for a new card reader, I suppose.

reality

I wish I could develop my CSS skills more. I want to apply CSS to other everyday objects, like my car. With a click of a button I could be cruising in my classic Mustang convertible, or hauling compost in an old beater pickup. It could also solve my closet space problem. I could get by with just one set of clothes. I could click a button when I arrive at work and I would look all business in a coat and tie. After my meetings I could click again and be ready to relax in my jeans and Grateful Dead t-shirt.

science fiction

Reading this reminded me of a science fiction novel I read many years ago. I think it may have been something by Heinlein. Earth had been invaded by parasitic aliens who attached themselves to you in inconspicuous locations. For security reasons it was necessary for everyone to go about their daily business unclothed. To my 12-year-old mind this seemed like a really good idea anyway.

no satisfaction

Right now I am really feeling frustrated. I am spending more time working on the templates and the CSS for this weblog than I am writing. I can't get things to work the way that I want. For instance I really wanted to have a floating thumbnail image of Miss Kitty along with a popup image on that post two days back. I got that to work exactly the way I wanted it in Mozilla, which is the browser I normally prefer myself, but I cannot make it work in IE.

I should create a separate site to experiment with but instead I've just been playing with this one. So half the time it looks terrible and then I have to spend time undoing my experiments to make it look presentable. Chances are nobody is looking at it anyway but to acknowledge that would destroy the very notion of writing the weblog anyway, wouldn't it?

On top of the fact that I haven't been able to do any writing, I am also neglecting some of the other things I would like to be doing. I have a couple of other websites I am supposed to keep up for organizations I belong to and I am behind there. I haven't had time to work on my photography as much as I wanted and there is a lot of weeding that needs to be done in my garden. And we've got houseguests arriving tonight for the weekend.

My notion of this was that after a short initial setup phase the technology would become transparent and I could write when and where I chose and it would not just eat up my time. And you know that could be true right now if I would only accept the default templates instead of trying to do somethng else.

new site

I started out using Blogger for this journal. I liked it and it did the job okay, but I started to see its limitations. Movable Type does not do everything I would like either, but it has a few more bells and whistles. Mainly I like that it has a fairly large and active user base, a support forum, and on-going development.

It took me 4 to 5 hours to install it and import my previous entries. There were several glitches along the way, all of which could have been avoided by reading the instructions first. I did seek help in the support forum on one issue and got a quick answer.

The next challenge will be to incorporate some graphics into the templates.

best movie ever made

Over at a weblog called forty.something I found this link to Vertigo Then & Now, a site featuring scenes from my favorite movie. It's amazing how little San Francisco has changed in the 45 years between the before and after in these pictures. It would be interesting to see similar photos from other locations. I bet you couldn't find much that was recognizable in most spots here in Dallas.

morning pages

I've tried journaling twice before. The first time was in college but my attention span was too short then to stick with anything.

Then years later a friend gave me a book called The Artists Way, which prescribed a regimen of writing in the early morning. For three or four years I did that diligently, writing several pages by hand in a spiral notebook right after arriving at work, before checking my email. The idea was to write without any editing or revisions, just putting down the thoughts as they came. I had enough free time then to do that. I stopped when my workload became heavier but even then I still carried the notebook in my briefcase every day for at least another year before I realized the habit was gone.

This is my first attempt at journaling since then. It's different from the previous attempt in that it’s electronic and it's also public. Being electronic makes it so easy to go back, edit and revise, that of course I am going to do that. But of course I want to do that because it's public. We'll see if I really stick with it.

Mozilla

Last week I downloaded the Mozilla browser and started using it, after reading a recommendation in Off the Kuff. I like it a lot. Besides an option to suppress pop-up ads it has a feature called tabs that allows you to open multiple sites in one window.