I think I’ve finally got the site tweaked the way I want it. I just finished tonight.

I added the “Most Popular” plugin to the sidebar and tweaked the colors and background to be a bit less harsh on the eyes but not too dark either. The blogroll has been updated and I also added the “related posts” plugin to the post pages.

I also created a page to pull in the most recent 25 del.icio.us posts.

I’m not sure if any of this makes a difference. Studies show that sidebar clicks are almost non-existent, but if you wanted handy stuff on the sidebar I think I’ve got it there.

Because this site is my gift to myself and my sandbox for learning how to do Wordpress stuff, I’m opting not to put ads on here. Besides, whatever would I do with the nickel or so they generated? LOL.

Anyway, tell me what you like, don’t like, wish I had, wish I’d get rid of…any and all suggestions are always welcome.

It’s time for a blog makeover….for now, generic, but hoping to jazz it up in the days to come.

Denise posted today about “blogroll angst“, which caused me to take a second look at mine and in the process, realize that almost nothing on the blogroll is current.

Interesting questions she raises. How do you manage your blogroll? Before moving to Wordpress I was using Blogrolling.com. Wordpress can import blogrolling.com files via OPML, but it still means actually taking a moment and importing the updated list. I use Bloglines to read feeds and can export an OPML file from there, but would still have to categorize everything according to topic, a job that seems a bit overwhelming at the moment.

Why have a Blogroll? Well, many of the blogs I currently read were found via someone’s blogroll. I know that at least four came from Denise’s. So her blogroll offered an opportunity for me to read blogs she likes or thinks are worth reading, and that would be the case with mine as well, IF I actually took a minute and kept it up.

Any ideas for easy blogroll maintenance?

Also, over on I Speak of Dreams, Liz has a call to “Blog it Forward” by choosing someone from your blog and encouraging others to go read it. Great idea! I’ll be posting my response to that challenge in a separate post, right after I’m finished freshening up my blogroll.

Technorati Tags: blogs, blogging, community, blogroll, blogroll angst

Since it’s spring and the flowers are starting to bloom, I decided to update the header after getting a really nice photo of some lavendar…

I wish it were this easy to redo my house!

The class: Technology
The grade: Sixth
The kids: High-achieving honors students

Just imagine the things you could do with this class!

If I were teaching it, they’d get to:

• Build their own website
• Learn to blog
• Create an online calendar to track homework and schedules
• Learn digital imaging
• Explore and research a chosen topic
• Find their way around computer hardware and software and begin to learn key terms for evaluating products

The possibilities are endless.

They could:

• Create their own online newspaper, each covering topics of individual interest.
• Build a community and learn how to be good citizens online.
• Be excited about the possibilities the Internet holds for each individual, beyond the obvious allure of MySpace.
• Have a mock political campaign and election, complete with photo/audio/video, bloggers, and ‘traditional media’.
• Create a podcast

Wanna know what the first assignment was?

And people wonder why our kids lag? So my girl who has had her own laptop for a year and a half and can put together kick-butt presentations in no time at all, who has her own Flickr account and Blogger blog gets to write an essay on the history of computers — an essay that will be obsolete by the time she’s finished, because as she observed, “By the time something is in the stores something better has already been made.”

This is so frickin’ frustrating.

Technorati Tags: education, middle school, technology

Update: Dancergirl has some pretty strong feelings about it, too.

I had a post written.

I decided to split it into two, because the topics were completely different and connected by only one transitional sentence.

One was about the progress of my dental reconstruction; the other was the concluding calendar review.

T interrupted me as I was splitting them to proofread the credits to his film about marching band season.

I came back, went to add technorati tags and hit the wrong button, closing the tab and losing the dental work post.

In an effort to recover it, I managed to lose the calendar post, too.

Grrrrr. They were not meant to be. Perhaps they were just too boring anyway. Tomorrow I will rewrite the calendar post, because the folks behind these sites have been really helpful and nice and deserve some kudos. They’ll probably get better ones when I’m not tired.

The new security update for Wordpress has created some database errors and broken links.  If you click on pages and discover 404 messages, I’m working on it and apologize.

The upgrade went fine, but Bloglines doesn’t seem to be able to find my feed….if you see this in your aggregators, drop a comment here — I can’t figure out what the problem is exactly and the support forums don’t seem to be much help.

The feed is validated, so it’s all very confusing.
Technorati Tags: Wordpress2.0, upgrade, Bloglines, feeds