A Break in the Routine

Today (by which of course I mean yesterday; my days run from afternoon to the following early morning) hasn't exactly been filled with "adventure, excitement and really wild things;" but it has been a bit of a rutbreaker. Just for starters, I was interviewed today by a reporter for the Tucson Citizen. It would be nice if the interview were about my wild success instead of dismal failure, but that's how it is. The reporter was looking for a story on how the recession was affecting people who recently became unemployed here in Tucson, so I emailed and told him. It seems to me that my particular story is kind of noteworthy, not because of me but because of the way it illustrates the larger problem. Every "permanent" job I've had in the past 15 years was with a company that has now gone bankrupt, closed its doors or both. I went back to school to get a degree in a high-paying, high-demand field, and it's currently doing me no discernible good. And I didn't even mention the whole health insurance issue. The article is supposed to run on Friday. I'll link to it when it comes out.


The other thing I did today, besides the dog park and watching Doctor Who, was follow through on the second email from AOL about AOL Pictures shutting down. As with AOL Journals, American Online has made arrangements for a simple conversion process to another service. This one is called PhotoWorks, and it's free. Well, sort of. I read part of the new member FAQ, and there's a catch. The site is run by American Greetings, and they want you to buy something, at least once a year - prints, calendars, custom greeting cards, something. If you don't, your free storage goes away. After that, you would presumably see the image on the left instead of your lovely pictures. I got this result tonight one one of my entries, and I'm pretty sure it was my fault. I had accidentally deleted a couple of images, and copying them back into that album didn't restore the link.

I had already saved everything stored in AOL Hometown (which is also gone now), but had not grabbed this stuff. Fortunately it was extremely simple and quick, at least for the relative handful of pictures I had on YGP/AOL Pictures. I logged in from my Mavarin screen name, which isn't even my main email account, although I treat it as such. It didn't matter. It grabbed everything I had stored from any screen name, including the images that used to grace my earliest entries from my old AOL Journal Musings from Mâvarin. I had already gone through the Blogger versions of most of those entries and relinked to the same images as stored on mavarin.com, but it was still good to grab what was there.

For one thing, I rediscovered some 2004 Tuffy pictures that I didn't seem to have on my hard drive. They were taken with the old Mavica, an early, bulky digital camera with such low-res photos that we used to get twenty of them on each floppy disk, which is what the camera used for storage. Unsurprisingly, they're not great pictures, but I'm fond of them. I still remember the day I took some of them. One thing I did tonight was save them back to my hard drive and clean them up with PhotoStudio. It helped a lot.

My PhotoWorks albums were kind of an odd lot. There was an entire album of someone else's fall foliage shots, and another one of somebody's messes from a discussion I had with other journalers back in 2004. I also had a "scratchpad" album with one photo, a "shoebox" album with 51 photos, a few albums I put together on purpose for various incarnations of AOL profiles and AIM pages, and a bunch of albums named after individual Musings entries. Most of the latter had one or two photos each. Surprisingly, there were also a number of journal-based albums with zero photos each! I'm not quite sure what happened there, but nothing seems to be missing. I deleted the empty albums and consolidated the onesies. From here they could be re-linked to the relevant entries on the Blogger version of the old journal, but as I say, I'd already relinked to most of the same images as stored elsewhere. Just as well, really.

The most annoying part of the process was dealing with a few old Woohoo slideshows. These were the cool AOL Pictures slideshows that had various effects available for the transition from one image to the next. My favorite by far was the "Ken Burns" style, named for the documentary director's technique of panning across still photos while zooming in and out on them. I had one of those set up for a slide show of a 2004 trip to Las Vegas, and another one was on the main page of the St. Michael's website. With the transfer to PhotoWorks, those Woohoos were gone. I had to fuss with the St Michael's page for a while to get the more boring Picasa version of the slide show in place, realign the table it was in, and fix some text that the site's host service, GoDaddy, kept resizing as tiny.

While I was at it, I also put in a bit of time tagging a bunch of the Musings entries. There are over 600 entries, so it's way too tedious a job to do all at once. Another problem with some of the old entries is that spaces between words went missing in a number of places. This used to be an ongoing glitch in the early days of AOL Journals, and the transfer to Blogger seems to have exacerbated the problem.

You may have noticed that I've been fussing with the sidebar for the Outpost in recent days. Blogger recently introduced much better sidebar widgets, now called gadgets. My favorite is the blogroll-style linking lists, one which you can display the most recent entry of each blog and the first image in that entry. I found that very handy last weekend in keeping track of who has posted their Round Robin entries. It's also a very fast way to see what interesting things people are up to generally.

Anyway, I've set up a more exclusive "Recent Robins" list in place of the old static one, listing only the people who played last weekend. If you play along with the next one, "On My Table,", your blog will be added to the list. A second sidebar gadget section, titled "Weekenders," will similarly link to everyone who does one or more Weekend Assignments. Everyone else whose blog I visit with any frequency (or feel that I should) is on one or more of the other sidebar lists. If you're a regular reader and I'm not linking to your blog, let me know and I'll probably add it. I purged quite a few inactive or defunct blogs with my recent update.

Karen

What I've Done, and What I Ought to Do

Ow! Pepper!

Pepper!

Darn it, Pepper!
(She was much less visible than in the first shot here.)

Done:

• Went to church, barely on time, too late to serve at Mass. This was just as well, because last night I stubbed my toes badly on a wooden bookcase, tripping over a certain black dog in the dark. Limping up the aisle with candle in hand probably wouldn't be a good idea. I may have a broken toe or two, but since I can't afford a doctor I'll never know whether this is the case.
• Did a sinkful of dishes. One down, one to go.
• Took a much-needed nap.
• Sat on a bench at the dog park with an acquaintance there, a journalism student, as the dogs tried to work out what to do if they couldn't follow me around the track. They managed to have fun anyway. My new friend, who broke a toe recently herself, said that all they can do for broken toes is wrap them, and maybe have you wear a special boot.
  
• Bought groceries (and first aid tape) and made dinner.
  
• Returned a friend's phone call.
  
• Made minor progress on my unread mail.
• Admonished Cayenne for stepping on my toes. Yes, those toes.
  
• Spent an hour or two editing a version of last night's entry, and submitted it to Huffington Post's Off the Bus pages.
• Fussed around with a few more avatars so I could submit a choice of headshots to HuffPo.
• Experimented with templates and template widths on my test blog and on the Musings from Mâvarin archive blog. Musings now uses the Minima Stretch template, which makes the posting area wide enough to accommodate much larger photos than you see on the Outpost. I've tried to widen the template I use here, but the code is harder to parse than Minima and I haven't been able to make it work properly so far.
• Did another load of dishes. My mistake: two down, one to go.
  

Need to Do:

• More dishes, and clean up the kitchen generally.
• Open the Peachtree Accounting software I bought in 2005 and familiarize myself with it before tomorrow afternoon. Why? I finally have a job interview!
• Catch up with my Twitter feed (okay, so that's more of a question of what I want to do).
• Clear out more email.
• Design more buttons on request, and print out. That can probably wait until tomorrow.
  
• Soak my feet and wash my hair.
• Get some sleep!
  

Karen

Tips for the Great AOL-J Migration

Accidentally cross-posted on the Blogger edition of Musings from Mâvarin because I wasn't paying attention. See the Musings version of the entry for larger versions of each image.

Foolishly, I've made no attempt to back up my old AOL Journal Musings from Mâvarin since the announcement was made in late September that AOL Journals will cease to exist at the end of October. There were three reasons for this:

1. I've been too busy obsessing about the election, the dogs, etc.
2. Past attempts to manually transfer or save my old blog entries have been extremely time-consuming and tedious. I hesitated to renew such efforts, especially because
3. AOL promised that there would be a way to automatically migrate the entire blog to another service. Rumor had it that the other service in question would be Blogger, which would be both sensible and convenient.
   

Well, for once, I win! After a week and a half of anxious waiting for further info on how to transfer Musings onto Blogger / BlogSpot, I got the official AOL mail today, containing the all-important link to use to get started. A mere 10 minutes or so later, all 686 entries (or whatever the exact number is) of Musings were posted and published at http://musingsfrommavarin.blogspot.com/. I've done some tweaking since then, but the basic process was remarkably painless. See Magic Smoke for an introduction to it.

Since many people are probably still unfamiliar with Blogger and understandably nervous about transferring their beloved journals, I hereby offer some handy tips:

1. What you need. You must have a Google account. If you already use Blogger, iGoogle or gmail, you already have a Google account. If not, signing up is quick and painless, and can be done by following directions from the migration pages or almost any Google-related or Blogger-related screen. Your account name is whatever (real) email address you give them.


2. Don't be afraid to just do it. Copying your journal into BlogSpot using the automated setup AOL and Blogger put together does not affect your AOL Journal itself, which will still be there until October 31, 2008 (but not after). Nor does it affect any other blog you already have on BlogSpot or elsewhere. It creates a new blog, based on almost all the data in your old one. (I'll cover the exceptions further down this list.) Just click on the link and follow the simple directions. (Note: Paul reports that this can get glitchy if you try to use the browser that part of the AOL software. Use an external browser such as Firefox instead.)

If your blog's name was unique, for example Flippy Floppy Flump (http://journals.aol.com/yourscreenname/FlippyFloppyFlump), Blogger will offer to keep that title (http://flippyfloppyflump.blogspot.com). If your title is already in use as a BlogSpot URL, you'll need to tweak the web address, but this is easy to do.

3. Almost any template will do for starters. During the migration process, you will be asked to choose a template from a short list, and will have an opportunity to preview each of the options. A template is a standard set of codes that tell Blogger the basic layout of your blog. If you see something you like, go for it. If not, just pick one you don't actively hate. Chances are excellent that you're going to change it in the next five minutes anyway.

4. Follow the directions, and Publish when offered the chance to do so. If there is a problem, check here for further info. Chances are excellent, however, that it will also go through smoothly in just a few minutes. (If you've been posting more than once a day, or long daily posts for several years, it will probably take a smidge longer.) If you're on dial-up, of course, it could take a lot longer. You may want to get the ball rolling and go do something else for a while. Once you Publish, you will see your blog in all its rescued glory. Ta-dah!


5. Ready for a new template? Your new blog will not look just like the old one, but you have many more options for making it look the way you want it. If you like the way it looks using the template you chose during migration, then great! Congratulations! If not, go to the Blogger dashboard (click on the orange B or the word Customize at the top of your blog) . From the Layout tab, choose "Pick New Template." Again you'll see a graphic list of templates to preview, but this time the selection is much greater. If you are used to posting large photos, or largish photos with text wrapped around them, I recommend Simple II at the very bottom of the list. The advantage of it is that it doesn't have a sidebar, which gives you a much wider area for your blog entries. The disadvantage is that everything you would otherwise put on a sidebar will have to go across the top or bottom of the page, or be dropped altogether.


6. Describe the blog and set your settings. You know the introductory text that you had at the top of your old journal? That didn't transfer over, but it's easy to fix. Open your old AOL Journal in another tab or window, and copy the blog description. Back in the other window, go to the Settings tab of the dashboard. On the Basic subtab is a place to paste in your blog description. Or, if you prefer, you can write a new one, or leave it out entirely.

While you're at it, go through the other settings and make any changes you want. If you don't know what a particular option means, you can always leave it on the default setting for now. One of the tabs has an About Me section, which will display on all your blogs unless you choose otherwise. This can also be copied over from AOL if you so desire. Permissions on who can read your journal (or post to it if it's a group blog), who can comment and whether they need to type in capcha letters to do it can all be managed from the Settings tab.

7. Look at the colors! Even with whatever template you selected, you're not stuck with the default colors for page background, test, borders and links. From the Layout tab, selected Fonts and Colors and make any changes you like.

Layout with sidebar.

Simple II layout with no sidebar.

8. Now, what's missing? If you had a list of links or other stuff on the sidebar, it probably didn't transfer over. This is easily fixed, but may be the most tedious and time-consuming part of the process. From the Layout tab select Page Elements. from here you can "Add a Gadget" to include linking lists, quotes, pictures, weather and other cool widgets on your sidebar, or at the top or bottom of your blog. The bad news is that if you want a list of links, you'll have to type or paste them into the gadget one by one. On the other hand, chances are your old sidebar was full of AOL-J addresses that need to be updated anyway. For Musings, I didn't add the links, on the theory that they're too stale and people can get more current ones from the Outpost. Once you've added your gadgets, use your mouse to drag and drop them in an order that makes sense to you.

9. Explore and troubleshoot. Refresh the page on your blog and look it over. Is it the way you want it? Is anything still missing that matters to you? Do the entries display adequately? Are the photos all there? Chances are that if you uploaded photos directly in AOL Journals, they will now be in Picasa, the Google photo hosting service that stores (among other things) any photos uploaded in Blogger. If something's missing, you may need to upload it again from your computer if it matters to you.

10. Decide what to do about dead links. You've probably linked to friends' AOL Journals quite a few times over the years. Now they all link to something that will no longer exist. You have four options:

1. Leave them alone as an archive of what used to be. It's unlikely that anyone is going to click through from that 2005 entry about that quiz you found on Sandy's* blog.
2. Include a sidebar on your blog with the current addresses of your friend's transferred blogs, and trust readers to male the connection.
3. Post a gadget or other note explaining that AOL links will no longer work, with a hint on what the updated URL probably looks like (see Tip #1 at the top of this entry).
4. Go through and update any links that really matter to you, such as the ones in that really popular entry from 2006 you still get comments on.
   

*Name chosen at random.

That's it! That wasn't nearly as bad as you thought it would be, was it? From here there are lots of things you can do to tweak and customize things further, but the tips above should get you up and running, and protect your journal's contents from total oblivion.

Let me know how it goes.

Karen

A Final Indignity for AOL-J Land

From my email of a few minutes ago:

Subject: AOL Journals is closing October 31, 2008
From: AOLMemberInfo
To: that word @aol.com
Date: Tue, 30 Sep 2008 4:54 pm

Dear AOL Journals user,

We’re sorry to inform you that on Oct. 31, 2008, AOL® Journals will be shut down permanently. We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

It’s very important that you save your Journals content before the shutdown. We're working on a way to easily move your Journal to another blogging service -- you can expect an email within the next week with more details about how to do it. We want the transition to go as smoothly as possible for you, so you’ll have two choices. You can either save your information manually and find another place to blog on your own, or choose to automatically transfer your Journal to a different blogging service we’ve selected.

In the meantime, please bookmark the People Connection Blog, where you can find out more about AOL Journals. You can also subscribe to the People Connection Blog RSS feed to stay informed about any changes. We’ll be updating the People Connection Blog often, so please check it regularly.

Thank you for your patience and understanding as we make this transition.

Sincerely,

The AOL Journals Team

Wow.

Mostly I think this is another sign that AOL is on its last legs after years of bad decisions and major changes in Internet technology and culture. It's very sad, for both the people who left and the people who stayed, and a final betrayal for those who stayed. They didn't leave AOL-J, so AOL-J left them.

I just hope they make it easily portable into Blogger. That is, after all, where most people went in the Exodus. And many of them, myself included, still have entries they never ported over, one painful copy-paste at a time.

K.

Weekend Assignment Results: Online Gadgetry

Some of my current Firefox add-ons.

For Weekend Assignment #233: (Virtual) New Toys I asked whether there were any new online toys, gadgets, widgets or gizmos that you've found particularly useful or entertaining. Our response this week was a bit light, but highly informative:

Julie said...

Like Karen, I've tried Twitpic. Kinda cute. Possibly useful. I'm also using a new app called Twhirl, that lets me see my Twitter and FriendFeed feeds on my second display.

Florinda said...

I'm not really an "early adopter" when it comes to new tech stuff, but as far the online world is concerned, I'm willing to give something a whirl if it won't cost me anything and it doesn't require knowledge of coding, so I look for tip-offs on what's new out there. My source of information for new features in the tech products I use most is usually Lifehacker; I'm not sure how many truly essential blogs exist, but this is one of them, if you ask me. In addition, since most of my online life belongs to Google in one way or another, I've found the blog Google Operating System is an excellent independent resource for just about everything Google-y.

(Florinda has a bunch of great tips, actually - take a look!)

Mike said...

Okay, online things. Hmm, I do play around on Twitter, though I am mostly a follower. (That sounds so stalker-ish, I know). I have a Last.fm account now, though I got that for my Ipod Touch and it doesn't seem to be working after the last software update. I have a Flickr account that I will post pictures on occasionally. That is about all that is exciting. The rest of the stuff I have is pretty standard, Google Reader, and...um, e-mail.

Thanks, folks! I know I'll be checking some things out that you mentioned. Meanwhile, I'm tracking something called Widgetbox, which I was invited to by email but haven't tried yet. (It has you classify your blog in one of their "Channels" - e.g. Art, Music, Pets, Women - and so far there's nothing that fits a blog as diverse as this one.) And I've finally dumped FeedBlitz from my sidebar. It was a good idea at the time, but there are so many better alternatives now that everyone has long since unsubscribed from the Outpost on FeedBlitz anyway. Their front page makes it sound still vital and widely-used, even though it's not doing this particular blog any good. If you still find it useful, go for it.

The new Weekend Assignment will follow in an hour or two.

Karen

Weekend Assignment #233: (Virtual) New Toys

If your online experience over the last few weeks has been anything like mine, you may find the new Weekend Assignment a timely one. If not, just fake it!

Weekend Assignment #233: The online world is constantly evolving, to the point where I'm surprised I'm not reading about Web 3.0 by now. Google's service Blogger is just one example of an online resource that's been rolling out new features and gadgets recently. Are there any new online toys, gadgets, widgets or gizmos that you've found particularly useful or entertaining?

Extra Credit: Are there any new online features, gadgets, etc. that you've been disappointed with?

As for me, I've been trying out a number of things lately, most of them related to either Google or Firefox. On the Google front, I've fiddled extensively with their photo organizing and sharing program Picasa, added widgets to iGoogle, and tried out some of the new "Gadgets" for Blogger. For Firefox, I went wild several days ago and installed a number of third party add-ons.

Picasa, as far as I can tell, is basically two programs, an online and an offline one. The offline one, Picasa2, is good for finding out what folders full of photos you have, sorted in various ways to help you get it all organized. From there you can upload to the online service, Picasa Web Albums. If you have a blog on Blogger and have uploaded photos to it, you already have at least one web album, which can be made public if you so choose. Or you can make an album from scratch, copying or uploading photos to it and giving it a name and description. Like this!

Someday I'll be able to take better butterfly pix.

I realize that other people already use Photobucket and Flickr and such, but it's nice to know this one is available, too, and already somewhat integrated with Blogger and Google. It's free, up to a point, but if you upload a massive, massive number of photos, you will need to pay for extra storage. I've been uploading about five photos a night to Blogger for years, and I'm only using 192MB (18%) of my 1024MB of storage.
There's also a more oddball photo sharing service, as I mentioned last night. Twitter, as you probably know, is a sort of mass distribution instant messaging service. Until now, you've basically only been able to enter 140 characters into your "Tweet," including any links. But now there's a sort of spinoff service, TwitPic. You upload a photo, and the link to it goes into your tweet, along with any additional text up to the usual 140 characters. You end up with a photo page (or a series of them really), and your photo has its 15 seconds of stardom on a feed that shows the most recent uploads, appearing and disappearing over a map of where the photos were taken. Neat!

The new Blogger gadgets I haven't fully explored yet. I see there's now an RSS feed thingy, and a "Followers" thing and some other cool-looking stuff. But so far, I haven't been able to figure out how to follow a blog that doesn't have that gadget on its sidebar. (Never mind. It's on the Blogger Dashboard, at the bottom.)

I'm afraid the Firefox add-ons I've tried so far mostly fit into that extra credit question. There's something called BlogRovR, which claims to tell you about the posts you're interested it from the blogs you subscribe to with it. Umm, no. So far, it mostly only wants to tell me about Round Robin entries, and I can't find a way to tell it to look for anything else. There's also something called Yoono, which notifies you of new AIM and Twitter activity, and lets you make little comment notes about web page you're viewing, and supposedly recommends other sites like it. This last bit only seems to work for major sites such as CNN.com or the BBC's Doctor Who site, but it does pick up a few suggestions for Whatever readers. For the Outpost, nada. Well, I didn't really expect anything, but it would be more useful if Yoono actually looked for blogs with similar tags or something. And there's something called Minimap, which I downloaded but haven;t played with yet.

Your turn! Have you come across any online innovations lately that seemed worth trying out? Were they any good? Write about them in your journal or blog, preferably with a link back to this entry, and then come back here and link to your entry in the comments below. I'll be back in a week to share what we've all found. Have fun!

Karen

Formerly Invisible Photos for the Invisible Photo Shoot

Your Monday Photo Shoot: Picture someone or something in the act of lounging about or slacking off. Naps, loitering, general loafing -- it all works. Show yourself, show friends, show pets. All this shoot needs is to have them not doing much at all.

You know what's coming, right? For all the usual reasons, here's Tuffy:


She's not so much lounging as posing for me, while "maintaining a state of catlike readiness" in case gobs of meatloaf suddenly appear between my fingers. That's currently all she wants to eat - no dog food, no cheese, no dog biscuits. As I've mentioned before, she's always been a fussy eater, so we're trying not to worry. Nevertheless, we worry.


This shot is from February, the same session as the photo on my sidebar.


Here's a surprise: I actually have a few shots for this shoot that have human beings in them, and no Tuffy! Here are my friends Kevin and Eva, this past Sunday afternoon:



And here's 102-year-old Eva with her daughter's dog, Shady:


And here's why I may just post this Monday Photo Shoot without any photos in it:


Good grief! First Carly gives me a heads up that all of Scalzi's Monday entries have disappeared from By the Way, including the Monday Photo shoot entry. For one awful moment I thought AOL was punishing Scalzi for breaking the Unwritten Rule or something. But no: everyone's Monday AOL-J entries are gone from their blogs. Any smugness I may have felt about this as a Blogger user (very little, actually) evaporated when I tried to upload the photos. I need to go to bed anyway, so I'm gonna try one more time, and then post without pictures if it doesn't work - and try again in the morning.

Hey, it worked this time! Good enough. Good night!

Second Tries and Lost Opportunities

I'm really, really tired, so I'm going to rush this entry and go to bed. But notice, please, that with Shelly's help I've got the blog set up pretty much the way I want it. Thanks, Shelly!


Today was one of those rare days when I get miles and miles away from Wilmot Road, the corridor that pretty much defines where I eat, sleep, work and worship. A friend asked me to take her shopping on Oracle Rd., in the northwest part of Tucson. On the way, we happened to pass this big fellow. Roadside America calls his ilk "muffler men," because many of these giant figures hold mufflers in their huge hands. This fellow is more properly a Paul Bunyan, made by the same company, International Fiberglass, in the 1960s and 1970s. The company started making these giant lumberjacks before adapting them as muffler men, cowboys, Indians, and even spacemen.

This particular Paul Bunyan figure is at the corner of Glenn and Stone Avenues in Tucson, in front of a hot rod supply shop. His nickname is "Glenn Stone, the axe murderer." Rumor has it that rookie cops are told to respond to a call about a big man wielding an axe at Glenn and Stone. Years ago, I bought a Mercury Capri right across the street from old Glenn. I like him. At Christmas they sometimes give him a candy cane to hold instead of his axe. For at least 20 years I've been wanting to write a story about one of these guys coming to life. but I've never managed to get an actual plot worked out. Maybe I should just take it from the top and make it up as I go along, as I pretty much always do.


When I came out of church this morning, there was actual snow on the mountains again, but this time with no clouds. It was starting to melt, though, as I left the house again an hour later. But the time I reached Oracle Road with my friend, it was all gone. Drat! But I did manage this shot of the Catalinas reddened by sunset, and much closer as seen from, um, I think it was Roger Road. (The garish yellow building is a local mattress factory; I like that, too.) Even the red on the mountains was gone by the time I dropped off my friend a few minutes later, and was free to pursue the photography. Moral: when a photo op appears, drop everything and take the shot!

Karen

(Just Like) Starting Over

Now I'm likely to have the Lennon song stuck in my head for the next day or two.

You've probably noticed that the Outpost looks a bit different. Actually it's gone through a flurry of changes over the past eight hours or so. I upgraded to the new version of Blogger, the one that came out of Beta recently; and somewhat rashly upgraded the template so I could use the new customizing features. Ever since then I've been trying to get back some features I wanted to keep from the old template, with only limited success. Yes, I can go back to the original template,(and have already done so once), but I want this new version to work, darn it!



Problems I've had so far:

1. It took Blogger about twenty minutes to convert my blogs. No big deal.
2. As the originator of the Round Robin blog, I couldn't upgrade my other blogs without changing over the team blog as well. This means that Steven and Carly and I can only post to the Round Robin Photo Challenges now using the new version.
3. This is the big one: there is no provision in the new drop-and-drag, modular settings controls for setting background colors and images. I went through three or four templates and hours of experimenting to get the sky background on the edges, the wood pattern on the header and the "sky_blue" one on the sidebars and so on. I still don't know how to make the footer work right, or the bottom of the sidebar, which used to end after the buttons, and let the background image show below it. I have no clue how to get it to do that again. And oh, joy. Apparently I've given ordered lists like this one a sky background as well.
   
4. Similarly, I can't get a line of text to display in the footer. I can only get it into the wrapper below the footer.
5. If I add a photo element, Blogger doesn't recognize the web address of a jpg as a valid image source, and gives me an error message. I had to upload the Robin all over again.
6. When it converts the old template to the modular one, it just leaves out anything it doesn't understand, which is to say anything that doesn't fit its canned definitions of different page elements. So the list of Robins was gone because it began with an image. It took me probably an hour to get the list back in, because I had to past in all those links and descriptions individually. The Frappr, Technorati, hit counter, and other third party widgets were also gone, but I was able to restore them with an add element that's specifically for that sort of thing.
   
7. Similarly, at one point I had two of each of such headings as "Some Favorites" and "Please blog more." I deleted the dupes, only to discover that I saved headings and accidentally deleted actual lists of links.
   
8. In restoring my link lists I discovered that if I don't let it alphabetize, it puts the newest links on top. To get things in the same order requires entering everything from bottom to top.
9. I couldn't make my flag fit in the header properly. I had to shrink it, which is probably for the best anyway.
10. The poem at the top absolutely won't recognize any line breaks unless I use a "pre" tag.

Overall, I'm not impressed. Yes, there's a handy place for tags (except that Blogger calls them "labels") but that seems to be the main advantage so far. For all the really critical customizations, there's no way to do what I want except to experiment with css styles, which are extremely confusing to me.

And it occurs to me that this is just another example of the way the year is going so far, with lots of hopes and promises but little actual movement in the right direction. It's like a giant reset button has been pushed on my life, and not in a good way. The only New Year's resolution I've carried out so far was writing to Tor, and despite that and other developments nothing has really changed on that front. I'm just settling down to wait again, just like before. I haven't been to the gym, I haven't cleaned the house, and I haven't gotten more sleep. If and when I work on carrying out any of these reforms, it truly will be starting over . Like designing this blog.

Karen