I am, so far, not the blogger I want to be. I truly intended to blog on a regular (weekly? semi-weekly?) basis, but other things are getting in the way.

And yes, Simran, I realize I am still using Blogger, with the WordPress folder full of goodies still sitting on the desktop of my Macintosh. I just haven’t had the guts/time/will to set up my GoDaddy server space with WordPress. I really, really want to. It will put me in better touch with my blog, and possibly induce me to change to a more interesting template. (At least the set of default templates in WordPress is a bit more interesting than the Blogger defaults.)

Well…soon. I did purchase a nice Moleskine reporter-style notebook (a very cool notebook, used by Moleskine nerds) last week at James Madison University, when we visited there with our daughter. And I have written in that thing.

In fact, I’m going to use notes from that notebook right now to write a blog entry on the changing media landscape. (No, not a rant against the RIAA this time.)

Categories: blogging, blogger, wordpress, moleskine

One other reason I haven’t been blogging a lot lately is that I want to try to migrate my blog from Blogger to WordPress.

I’ve downloaded the WordPress software, and I have my own domain and my own hosting space. When I publish on Blogger, it goes to my domain, davesmidlife.com.

I’m just deathly afraid of losing all my blog posts and comments when I move everything to WP. I’m going to just have to bite the bullet soon and jump in.

I’ve figured out how to use Blogger pretty well, which means I’ve bumped right up against its limitations. I’m ready for something that will give me a bit more control, and I think WordPress is it.

I’ve gotten a little bit of help and advice from Simran in India, who has moved his own blog to WordPress. Maybe I can get him to guide me along the process in the next few days.

Categories: blogging, blogger, wordpress

If you (or anyone on the internet) is reading this post, it means that my problem is solved.

I recently set up my own domain for the purpose of containing my Blogger blog. I set my account in Blogger to send files to my new site via FTP. Happens automatically every time there’s a new post, an edition, or a comment.

Problem is, nothing shows up on the old Blogspot address after the date I moved to the new domain. That makes sense: I moved everything over to the new address (davesmidlife.com), so no new posts went onto Blogger.

Anyway, this afternoon I was trying to figure out a way to post a redirect notice on that latest post on the Blogger blog. To do that, I assumed, I needed to change my Blogger settings to publish at the blogspot.com address, and then (so my plan was) I would go back to FTPing to my new site.

Now nothing seems to publish. I have my login settings for my own website set correctly (I triple-checked), yet Blogger always gives me an FTP error (login incorrect) whenever I try to publish.

So I’m writing this post mainly as a test to see whether I can publish to my own blog once again.

I am truly about ready to migrate this whole thing to WordPress, like the rest of the world seems to be doing, so I don’t have to deal with the bizarreness of Blogger anymore.

Grrr!

(Later on I find that my problem was a DUHHH… problem: I kept entering the wrong password for my FTP login. There seems to be a rather steep learning curve for me when it comes to blogging, but I’ll get it sooner or later…)

Categories: blogging, blogger

Yesterday I bought a new domain name and set up my own website for this blog.

From now on, dear readers (all four of you), please point your browsers to the following URL: davesmidlife.com. And if you point to my blog in your own blog, I would be most grateful if you could change this address in your links.

I have been thinking that I might want to explore working with WordPress, but I really wanted not to have to direct people to another URL. Since there just aren’t that many people pointing to this blog (yet), I figured I might as well go ahead and set up my own domain/website.

If you are thinking about using your own domain name for a Blogger blog, here is a good article by Sarah Lewis at Dave Taylor’s site, telling you exactly how to do this.

Categories: blogging, blogger

(I’m on a geeky roll with this blogging stuff. Figuring out del.icio.us tags and categories has been a major breakthrough for me!)

I need to acknowledge the blog where all this category stuff and hacking Blogger and all is explained very clearly: Freshblog: Blogger Hacks, Categories for Blogger and other Blog Tips, Tricks & Tools. John’s series on Blogger Hacks is oh so very helpful.

Categories: blogging, blogger, categories, tags

I discovered, after posting that last post on the trouble I’m having with categories in Blogger, that the tools I used are working just fine.

So I should point to those self-same tools. There are essentially two tools on my bookmark bar in Firefox right now that are doing the job.

The first is a “Technorati del.icio.us” button by Ted Ernst that makes it very easy to put del.icio.us tags into a blog post.

The second cute trick is the “post to del.icio.us” button. I got this one from del.icio.us itself. Quick Online Tips has a list of these things, including some improvements. The Mozilla team also seems to be working on an extension that will do this.

So when composing or editing a post, you use Ted Ernst’s button to create your tags, and save them in your post in Blogger. Then, while viewing the post page (not the whole blog!), you click the “post to del.icio.us” button, which takes you to your del.icio.us account. Then enter your tags in the box provided, and you thereby associate these tags with that particular post in del.icio.us.

When somebody clicks on a category link in your blogpost, they will be taken to your del.icio.us account, showing all of your posts associated with that tag. Pretty neat!

Serious bloggers may scoff at my “gee-whiz” attitude toward all this, but after two days of searching, I find that simplistic, “gee-whiz” explanations can be very helpful for people who are not initiated. Indeed, it’s a feature of technological language that it can be very exclusive, but that its exclusivity isn’t seen as such by people who have learned what everything means. Once you’re inside, you forget what it was like to be outside.

One question for somebody: where did that domain name del.icio.us come from? What’s it mean?

Categories: blogging, tags, categories, blogger

This week I have done several things to improve my knowledge set about blogging, podcasting, and RSS.

I’ve had this Blogger blog since mid-December (not very long, actually), but only in the past two or three weeks have I started to figure out how blogging is different from just typing my thoughts into an open journal. That is, I haven’t really used links all that much, which is why only four of you people in the world are reading this blog right now. The other 27 gazillion people don’t know it exists.

My podcast, The Word Nerds, is hosted at LibSyn, which has made it very easy to do. The downside is that I haven’t ever really figured out how to actually make a podcast, since the LibSyn RSS engine did all the work for me.

Friday, though, I set up a new podcast feed for my German 4 class. The kids are each going to produce a 5-minute podcast in the German language about one of their interests. (I won’t link to it yet because it has nothing but dummy content right now.)

I built the podcast by setting up a Blogger blog under my own account, setting the settings for German language, pointing to a media file that I’ve got hosted at LibSyn, and then using Feedburner to convert my Atom feed to an RSS2.0 feed. Lo and behold, it worked fine (except for a brief hiccup with Feedburner late in the day yesterday).

So even though I haven’t hand-coded my own RSS, I do feel like I had more of a hands-on experience setting up this student-project podcast.

In the meantime I’m trying to figure out how to use categories and tags in Blogger. Since I’m such a rank newbie in blogging, I feel overwhelmed. Blogger doesn’t natively support categories of posts, but I like it otherwise. I’ve seen a number of Blogger blogs that seem able to categorize posts, but for the life of me, I haven’t figured this one out yet.

I did claim my blog feed (actually, all three of my blog feeds: this one, the German class one, and The Word Nerds) in Technorati, but I haven’t yet wrapped my mind around what that does for me.

And yesterday I set up an account in del.icio.us. But once again, I haven’t figured out what that’s going to do for me. I understand that I can keep bookmarks in my del.icio.us account and get to them from anywhere on the Internet, but I can’t grasp how that will help me categorize my posts.

I’ve seen one solution that suggests establishing a different blog in Blogger for each category, and then pointing to those from a “main blog.” But that seems awfully clumsy to me, and I just can’t see starting a whole new blog (and copy/pasting templates and such) for each and every category that might occur to me.

A better solution seems to be to use either Technorati tags or del.icio.us (God, that’s hard to type!) bookmarks to establish categories. A bit of searching led me to a couple of really good explanations of the concept by sam bot (a great conceptual overview) and Blogger Hacks - The Series - Freshblog. Some judicious studying of these two will, I hope, guide me to a better understanding.

Categories: blogging, podcast, categories, rss, blogger

Having podcasted (The Word Nerds) since March ‘05, it’s probably time that I started blogging. My 16-year-old daughter’s been doing it for about three years (not knowing it was called blogging).

The moment anything like this is started is just a snapshot moment, a place to put your boat in the river of time. I’m home from teaching school today for the second day in a row. The mid-Atlantic region got a little ice storm yesterday, so school was cancelled. And since I don’t teach in the same district my daughter attends, she’s at school and I’m at home.

We are sometimes guided by strange provocations. Having gotten bored with the handful of podcast-related podcasts to which I’m subscribed, I decided this week to explore. So I subscribed to Dan Klass’s Bitterest Pill. The first couple of episodes of his show that I heard featured The Butties, a great Beatles cover band that has released a wonderful CD of Christmas tunes done in the style of the Fab Four.

Wanting to buy the CD, I went to Dan’s blog; wanting to post a comment, I clicked the comment link and discovered that I had to set up an account. And since “setting up an account” means setting up a blog on Blogger, here I am.

And happy about it, too, I must say! I will eventually get the hang of this blogging thing, but for now I just note that I’ve started my Midlife Blog a little past the mid-point of my life, at age 52-and-a-sixth (well, as of next Thursday).