1. This past week, for the first time, a friend asked me to set up a blog.  Most of you know her as Mary here at poulios.com.  To start, we purchased a domain name using godaddy.com.  Then we set up a blog using wordpress.com.  A few changes to the name servers at godaddy.com to forward the domain over to wordpress and now we have twohig.me for your reading pleasure.   We were also able to set up email for Mary using gmail.  If you’re not using gmail, you should be.  I’ve used hotmail (or whatever they call it these days), yahoo, and other sites here and there, and gmail is easily the best of the bunch.
2. Quicken Financial Life for Mac is set to be released this summer.  For those of you that don’t know me very well, I’m very budget conscious and track my finances at least weakly weekly.  I’ve actually cut back recently to forgo any frustration viewing my investments as they take a nosedive.  Not that I don’t spend my fair share of money on gadgets and drinks (usually not at the same time), but I like to know where my money is and where it’s going.  About 3 years ago when I bought my Macbook Pro, I tried Quicken for Mac 2007, for which I was greatly disappointed.  This, along with Apple’s inability to play WMA radio on the web, caused me to install Windows XP on my Mac using the built in Bootcamp software.  Here’s hoping Quicken Financial Life for Mac will allow me to slowly pull further away from Windows.
3. Back to my blog, I’ve installed a new plugin allowing me to add “asides” to the blog.  Asides are short posts that usually don’t warrant their own post on the blog.  The Facebook status link is a good example of an aside.  Eventually, after I play and test it out a little, this will replace the Facebook status feed.  Granted, the asides will be just as boring, but will allow you to post comments to them.

Well, there you have it.  Remember, just over 4 days until pitchers and catchers report to spring training.  Go Mets!

The past month I’ve made some changes to Poulios.com. To start, about 2 weeks ago I moved the email service over to Google by changing some MX records at GoDaddy, where my domain is hosted. If you’ve never used gMail, you’re missing out on one of the best online email services I’ve ever used. One of the main reasons for moving to gMail was their use of IMAP in addition to POP3. With IMAP, any changes I make to my email (ie, read, reply, delete, etc.), are aggregated on the gMail servers. Then, when I use Outlook or Mac Mail, emails are always up to date. In other words, when I read a new e-mail using Outlook and then reboot using Mac, Mail syncs with gMail and shows me the email as having been read. This way I’m not constantly marking email as read or wondering if I already replied to an email. This will be especially useful next month when I buy an iPhone.

Then, the past few days, I’ve made some changes to the website. First of all, I changed to a new theme called SeaShore and updated the header with one of my own pictures from Greece. This theme has 3 columns, 1 for the blog posts and 2 for additional information, and is wider than the previous theme. Then, using FireFox 3 and the Web Developer add-on, I made some changes to the theme so it looks the same in Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari. There is now a Twitter feed showing my status, 4 random photos from the photo album, links to my social network pages, an updated about me page, and a contact page. I’m somehow trying to get a lot of the features from Facebook onto my site, with my own little style, but it’s going to take some time.

Officially, there have been 85 comments on the first 99 posts. My advanced math skills tell me that’s less the one comment per post. Ouch! There are probably a few good reasons for the low comment rate. I won’t go into a full list, but one reason could be because my blog isn’t made available to search engines and blog aggregators, an option provided on the WordPress admin pages.

After mulling over the article a bit, I found myself thinking I’m a hypocrite. I have my own blog and respond to comments on the blog when I can, but I rarely comment on other blogs. There’s a funny comment on the NY Times blog from a JakeSutton who claims “I think a lot of it actually comes down to basic human shyness. Nobody wants to speak up for fear of sticking their foot in their mouth.” This definitely isn’t why I don’t comment on other blogs. I’m pretty sure I do a good job of sticking my foot in my mouth at least once per day. It’s a personal trait I’ve come to accept.

How do I go about getting more people to post comments on my blog? Is there a need to get more comments on the blog? Should I make the blog available to search engines and blog aggregators? Should I send e-mails to friends after posting to the blog (or teach them how to use RSS feeds)? Should I post about more subjects, like politics? At this point I’m not sure what I’ll do, but I can at least say I hit 100 posts!

On a side note, while I was uploading photos to the site today, I decided to add an RSS feed to my Netflix Queue in the sidebar. This only has relevance to this post as it’s my response to what Connie will be thinking when she reads this. A little over a week ago I put my Directv account on hold until the end of August. I did this to force myself to get out and exercise more now that my knees are relatively healthy, and it’s been working! Until yesterday I was religiously going to Waterton Canyon to ride my mountain bike, heading out along the c470 trail with my road bike, and hitting the gym to lift weights, to the point I had to take a couple of days off my body breaks down. So, as my body recovers from too much exercise and walking among the living, I’m here updating the site. Now, can’t we all get along .

However, the move wasn’t all roses. GoDaddy uses a custom installation tool for third party / open source software called Metropolis, which uses an older version of the mySQL database than the one supported at LivingDot. This resulted in my blog data not to being imported correctly, if at all. All this means I had to custom install the WordPress blogging software on my own using FTP. This was surprisingly easy as it only took about 5 minutes. If only I would have thought of doing this right from the start and not wasting a day trying to troubleshoot the automated install using Metropolis.

Another problem that I knew going into the change was the lack of a photo album software that is either easy to use or provided by GoDaddy. Livingdot provides access to their custom built photo album software which was easy to use. This was the reason I moved the site over to them in the first place, but the cost was too prohibitive compared to other web hosts. So now I’m in the process of using Gallery, which is an open source software that I’m just beginning to understand. An interesting thing about Gallery is it’s ability to integrate with WordPress. We’ll have to wait and see how easy that is. I’m sure I’ll screw up the site a few times before getting it right. Maybe I’ll be smart to do what I promote as a technology auditor and use a test version for trying new things out. It’s going to be a while before the photo album is up and running to my satisfaction, but it will get there. One of my goals is to put a lot more photos on the site from vacations. I’ve already started with the sailing trip in Greece during the summer of 2005.

Anyway, there’s always more to come.