AllanThinks

Four Posts

In less than 24 hours. Imagine that.

Let's see how long the blogging mojo stays around this time.

So...

This afternoon, I was playing around a bit with the design of the blog. I haven't changed anything about this blog in ages. The Typepad Dashboard is a lot different than it was the last time I did anything to the design and layout. It's going to take a lot of study and practice before I do anything major.

One thing I noticed when I was going through my sidebar content was that my blog roll was gone. So I tried to go to Blogrolling, where my blog roll was hosted, only to discover that Blogrolling ceased operations last November. The last remnants of it will disappear on April 1 of this year, so if you used Blogrolling, you should remove any code related to it from your blog template.

I'd like to create a new blog roll, but am not really sure how to go about it in the new Typepad. Are there any other third-party blog roll servers like Blogrolling out there? Do you use one? If so, which one, and why?

Let me know in the comments.

It Never Fails

Every year, around the holidays, almost all of the search engine traffic to this blog is directed to a post I made 5 years ago today about my late mother's cream candy recipe.

I get a small trickle of hits on the post throughout the year, but sometime around October, the numbers begin to rise, and by this time traffic is spiking.

So, welcome visitors. I hope the recipe is what you are looking for, and I wish you success in your efforts to make  Kentucky Cream Candy.

Well...

I seem to have missed my blogging anniversary. My fifth anniversary.  On July 2, 2004, I created a blog over at Blogger, but quickly became frustrated with the interface. So on July 19, I created a blog here on Typepad and imported my very few posts.

The next day, I published my first entry here at what was then known as Inside Allan's Mind.

I guess the fact that I let it all slip by me is an indication of how unimportant this blogging thing seems to me after five years.

Maybe I should euthanize this blog like Mike did his. Or not.

Ha!

My blog has been visited over 2000 times so far today. Almost all of those visitors have come from a Yahoo Image search on 'Miss Universe'.

I posted something relevant to that almost 4 years ago, and that is what they are coming to see.

Pervs.

I dedicate my 1000th blog post to the woman I love.

Just Testing

Just testing Typepad's new iPhone/iPod Touch interface.

I don't know how often  I will make use of it, but it is very cool.

It's one more reason to love the iPod Touch. And there are already many reasons to love it.

I don't think I have ever published a blog post on February 29.

Until Now.

Happy Leap Day every one.

Fob

Clicking the image will take you to its Flickr page. You can see a larger version there.

Exposure:  0.017 sec (1/60)
Aperture: f/22
Focal Length: 105 mm
ISO Speed: 100
Exposure Bias: -4/3 EV
Light Source: Flash

Sorry for the lack of posts. We've been very busy preparing for a gathering of friends here next weekend. There is still much to do.

I try to take a photo or two every day. You can always see the latest on my Flickr photostream. 

For those of you who use RSS Feed readers, my latest photo uploads are fed here.

Mike is in town for the UK-LSU game, so I will be attending the game with him. It's perfect football weather, and despite the fact LSU (the #1 team in the country) is likely to win the game, I plan to enjoy the day.

I hope your weather is just as good, and that you have a great weekend.

This is a first for me.

I received my first ever Internet flame today.

Ali, Jo Ann, and I had returned home after attending the UK-Vandy basketball game. Vandy won the game, which kind of took the shine off of my day.

I sat down at the computer to check my email and a few of my regular haunts. For some reason, I decided to check my Statcounter log (something I rarely do). I noticed six entries in a row, all from the same referrer source.   The URL was from the San Francisco Bay Craigslist.

I was curious why people would be visiting my blog from such a place, so I clicked on the link.

Here is the text of the message in case it has  already been deleted.

please help me (capitola)

---

Reply to: pers-265507811@craigslist.org
Date: 2007-01-20, 12:46PM PST

write these people and help shatter their goofy east coast addiction to themselves and not each other.

Or is that my bnitter west coast attitude?

either way...allan seems like a moron with a camera and camera people suck chuck.,

http://www.allanthinks.com/allanthinks/

• it's NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests

Posting ID: 265507811

My jaw dropped when I read this. I've had Internet accounts since 1986 and this is the first time such a thing has happened to me.

I been around long enough to know that the Internet is full of angry, unhappy, and troubled people who take delight in flaming and harassing others. But as I said, I've managed to avoid this sort of thing for 21 years.

In the couple of hours since I discovered this, I've received 34 hits from Craigslist. None of the visitors have left a comment, so I guess none of them took offense to my writing or photography.

So, welcome newcomers! Thanks for stopping by. I hope you find something of interest here, and I hope you continue to read my weblog.

I emailed the poster of the message and politely asked them why they had posted it. I doubt I will receive a reply.

A New Day. A New Decade.

Click image for a much better view.

Today is my birthday. I am 50 years old.

I was planning on taking a goofy self-portrait to mark the beginning of the second half of my life, but I had a better idea.

I decided to change the look of my weblog by creating a new banner. This is a shot of the screen as I was putting the finishing touches on the banner in Photoshop.

My Stenographer is a Crack Ho.

But I think she is in rehab now.

Last month I wrote:

I've had ideas pop into my head, and dictated blog entries to myself in my mind, but when I sit down at the computer, I'm unable to put a complete sentence down, let alone an entire blog entry.

I seem to be doing better at both dictating entries to that stenographer in my head, and transcribing her notes into blog entries.

I guess I should thank Flickr for that. Since the first of the year, Alison and I have been participating in a project there called My 2007 Daily Photo Diary, in which we take a photo each day that we feel represents our day, or its highlight. Although a written explanation of the photo is not required, I have felt compelled to provide commentary on the photos I post.

After a couple of days doing this, I realized I was once again writing with some ease. I've even cross posted a few of my entries there to this blog.

Doing this every day for an entire year, at first seemed daunting. A challenge. But I think it is a challenge I am up to. I'm sure going to give it a shot.

I actually have things to say. I just don't know how to say them.

Click image for a much better view.

So here's a photo to keep you coming back until I develop the discipline to write something every day.

I think this might make me the cream candy king.

	Num	Perc.	Search Term
	3	30.00%	cream candy
	2	20.00%	ky cream candy
	1	10.00%	fat grams, frito-pie
	1	10.00%	how to make cream candy
	1	10.00%	the bonnie bonnie bank of loch lomond
	1	10.00%	pulling candy
	1	10.00%	kentucky cream candy
	10	100.00%

Search strings that have led people to my blog today. It happens every Christmas.

Identity

About a year ago, Ali and I registered domain names for ourselves. AliThinks for her, AllanThinks for me.

The registrar we used offered a decent price, but as it turned out, they didn't offer much in the way of service. Our new domains never seemed to propagate through the Internet like we thought, and never really seemed to stick to our blogs like we had hoped.

We forgot about it for several months. In the spring, I transfered my domain to another registrar that I had heard about from a fellow blogger, but I still couldn't seem to map the new domain to my blog. I thought I was following all I had learned from Typepad and the registrar, but nothing seemed to work.

So, once again, I let it go and forgot all about it.

About six weeks ago, Ali brought the subject up again and we decided to finally do something about it.

She transfered her domain to a new registrar that Typepad had in its recommended list, and I did the same. Once the transfer was confirmed, we again made the changes to the DNS settings recommended by Typepad, and finally everything fell into place. We were finally able to map our new domains to our blogs.

So now you can reach this weblog by typing nothing more than allanthinks.com into your browser location bar. This should make it easier for the couple of people I see in my logs who everyday search Google for AllanThinks.

If you have my blog in your blogroll, feel free to change the link to the new domain of allanthinks.com. Or not.

The old address of allanthinks.typepad.com will still work. But the new address is more succinct, and should make getting here easier for all.

Elemental Design

Click image for a much better view.

Sorry for the lack of posts lately, but I suck as a writer and really haven't been able to write anything.

I've had ideas pop into my head, and dictated blog entries to myself in my mind, but when I sit down at the computer, I'm unable to put a complete sentence down, let alone an entire blog entry.

I think I should just stick to what I do halfway decently. Take photos.

I haven't forgotten how to blog.

Click image for a much better view.

I'm still recovering from the trip to France and Scotland, and the inevitable cold I seem to get every fall when I make such a trip.

I have been slowly working my way through the couple of hundred photos I took while there. Most of them are crap, but there are a handful that turned out okay. I've been editing the ones I feel are worthy of public exposure.

This one is another view of the rainbow we saw over Loch Lomond.

You can view the others I have posted so far here.

I should be back in form in a few days.

We're having a great night.

We are out with friends drinking beer, eating wings, and watching the election returns.

Alison is live blogging the election returns.

Go read it.

Nae on the 'aggis!

Click image for a much better view.

Alison, the kids, and I drove to Edinburgh to do a bit of sightseeing and to have lunch with fellow blogger Katherine on Thursday.

We were to meet at 1 p.m., but it was a bit later than that before we got together, as we were waiting for one another at adjacent buildings. [The Royal Museum of Scotland and the National Museum of Scotland are not the same thing. - Ed.]

Katherine took us to a very cool retro restaurant called Monster Mash where we ate and chatted for a while. Ali and I both ate haggis with neeps and tatties for our lunch. I took the above picture of Ali's lunch and of Katherine seemingly expressing a negative opinion of our choice.

She really wasn't. She was just turning to speak to the kids. But she did pass on the haggis since she is a vegetarian, and I can't think of a dish that is less vegetarian than haggis.

After lunch we wandered around town a bit and then Katherine headed home. We made our way back to the car and returned to Drumclog.

The weather was really nice that day, if a bit cold. We had a great time and have decided we want to return to Edinburgh for a longer visit in the future.

Thanks for all the fun Katherine. It was so great to finally meet you.

Dear reader,

Please look carefully at the web address in the URL field of your browser. It should read ‘http://allanthinks.typepad.com‘. In case you see a web address containing the word ‘bitacle’ or ‘bitacle.org’, you’re not looking at the original page on which this text was posted. If this is the case, the text you are reading right now might be incorrect or out of date. After I place a post on my weblog, I always try to keep published information up to date, or incorporate additional information, which I receive from readers. You will never find this information on bitacle.org.

Bitacle.org copies the content of weblogs without permission of the author, the holder of copyrights or the licensee. By visiting bitacle.org, you create income for the people who run bitacle.org, at the expense of me and other owners of a weblog, without permission and often without respecting copyrights and/or terms of use as in a license. So please, next time you want to view my posts, do so by using the web address of my weblog, which is ‘http://allanthinks.typepad.com‘. Please make a bookmark of my weblog’s address, if you would like to visit it again.

Thank you!

---

This post is stickied and will remain at the top of the page for a while. This was suggested by the folks at Stop Bitacle.org. Hopefully if enough bloggers do this it might put pressure on bitacle to stop stealing content.

Crikey!

You people sure are wordy. Checking my Bloglines feeds last night, I discovered eleventy bajillion (not a real number, but representative of how darn many new articles I found) new entries.

I did my best last night and this morning to read them all. I ended up skimming over many of them, and refrained from commenting on any of them, despite wanting to comment on so many of your entries.

We still haven't unpacked our bags, so we have much to do today. Hopefully, once the chores are done, I will be able to keep up with all y'all once again.

More about our trip later.

Typepad is great. Except when it's not.

Comments left yesterday by several of my constant readers have disappeared due to a problem at Typepad.

The Typepad posting application was down for most of yesterday while repairs to some database were being done.

Apparently, any changes to a blog during that downtime were likely lost, and I lost three comments.

Poof! Gone!

The comments did publish, and I read them last evening. I even have email notifications of them, but those comments are now absent from the blog.

I apologize for that. Rest assured that I did read your comments and appreciate them so very much. I will reply to them via email as soon as I have another free moment.

Another ch-ch-ch-ch-change

Subscribing to the RSS feed for AllanThinks should be quicker and simpler now that I have consolidated all the available feeds via Feedburner. The two or three different links I had in the sidebar to do this have been replaced with a single icon:

Clicking it in the sidebar will take you to a page where you can easily add my feed to your favorite online or offline feed aggregator, such as Bloglines and Yahoo.

If you already subscribe to one of the existing feeds (Atom, RDF, or XML), you should not have to change a thing. Cooperation between Typepad and Feedburner made the transition automatic and transparent, and all feeds should be synchronized.

Beside making it easier for my readers to subscribe to the blog, this change will make it easier for me to keep track of who my regular readers are.

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes

I spent some time this evening cleaning up the sidebar of the blog. I removed a bunch of links listed under Other Stuff and reordered what was left.

I also moved my blogrolls to a page of their own. They can be accessed by licking the link under the heading Bloggy Goodness.

I've received some comments recently indicating that my blog was slow to load. I hope the housecleaning will speed things up a bit.