Fits and starts

I've been having trouble getting into Blogger for some reason. I have no idea how I managed it this time, but I'll try again later to see if I can begin posting again. What a pain!

The labeling project

I've pretty much finished with labeling the posts on my blog. It wasn't that hard, as I've just been on fifteen months and had only 345 posts. As others have said, it's hard to decide what terms to use to make the labels useful. After I made the first pass, I went back and reviewed the labels that only had one or two references. I combined those with others that are more frequently used. I figure the reader can pull up a generic term like "art mediums" and then search the results for "oil pastels," "oil paint," "colored pencils," etc. "Watercolor" has a category to itself, as do other subjects I've mentioned several times. I managed to cut down my original label list to around 70 terms. I think it's pretty functional. Has anyone made any interesting discoveries using this tool?

Updating labels on Blogger

If you have my blog on Bloglines, don't be misled by the number of new posts listed. Blogger has added a new labels feature that allows visitors to check out multiple entries on the same subject on the blog, so I'm going into the archives and adding labels. Each change requires me to re-publish the blog, so it appears on Bloglines as a new entry. It may take a couple of days to finish, unless I get distracted. You can bypass the updates on Bloglines and click on the blog title line to get to the newest posts.

Clever blogger

I decided to be clever this afternoon and inserted some hacks described in the help section of Blogger. Oops. I don't know what I did wrong, but nothing worked except the main page. For awhile the archives were a jumble. I had saved the template to a Word file before beginning, but the backup didn't work either. I finally created a new blog under another name and copied the template section that wasn't working. After deleting the screwed-up part, I pasted the copy into my blog . Whew! It's not the first time I've gotten in trouble with a web site. I'm no hacker, just a cut-and-paste kinda person. Better stick to watercolor.

Raiding the pantry

Busy, busy times! I'm finding it hard to blog every day. I've decided to raid my Yahoo! group and publish some of the essays I posted there starting in 2001.
They're on topics I like to write about and most of my blog-readers haven't seen them. I'll edit and update as needed. The first one is in my next blog post.

Moving from Yahoo to Bloggerville

When I first set up my website in 1998 one of the features I liked the most was the Guest Book. I heard from people all over the world, who shared ideas about art and more with me and the visitors to the GB. Eventually, however, a few pests began to spoil it by posting spam and porn messages. There were also a few cryptic messages that looked like code. What was that all about? I have no idea. I deleted the offensive messages, but then I got worried about spammers harvesting the email addresses of innocent visitors to my Guest Book, so I shut it down.

I missed it so much that I started a couple of groups at Yahoo and that was great for awhile. But that, too, got a little burdensome, with members having to sign in and out, set email preferences and so on.

When blogs first started, I thought they might be the ideal way to talk to my art friends without setting up a complicated newsletter program. So I'm finally getting started. Eventually I'll link to my website and I might retrieve the articles I wrote for the Yahoo group. I'm inviting my Yahoo friends to join me. You're welcome, too.