davidbarbarisi.com

I finally made it to post 300. I'm pretending this is a big milestone for my blog. Now I'll reflect back on the last 100 posts. It took a lot longer to get to post 300 than it did to post 200. I think that's a good thing. The quantity is down a lot, and hopefully the quality is up. If my stats are any indication, then I am getting better at this blogging stuff. I mean there's a bar graph of something, and over the past year the bars are generally getting taller than the previous months. So that's probably good. Unless it's a reverse bar graph that graphs bad stuff. What kind of graph does that though?

Post 200 still holds the top spot for my longest post. I hope I'll replace that spot with this post, but I won't try too hard. I'll just talk about some new things I'm planning on doing for this blog to remind me to do them, which is apparently what I also talked about in post 200.

In Post 200, I had just started using Technorati, and my rank was 1,119,625. As of today my rank is 432,850. So if I'm interpreting that correctly, that means I squashed 686,775 other blogs to get where I am today. I hope that also means I can date in a higher up league now.

Also in Post 200, I started using FeedMap. At that time there were 16 bloggers nearby. Now there's 24. Welcome to the party new guys.

I said in that post that I'd put a bio and photo on the sidebar, but I still haven't done that yet. Maybe soon. I actually took a recent photo, but all of my photos have been so boring lately. I like most of the classic photos of me. A bio always seems like the hardest thing to write.

Ok time to talk about some new things to add to this site. I started tweaking the design again. I have some ideas for moving things around and redoing some stuff. I moved some of the navigation to the top of the page. I'm thinking of moving all of the dumb Javascript things to the bottom of the page because they're making the page load more slowly. I'm thinking about finally getting rid of this table that makes the two columns, because that would make the page load faster since it wouldn't have to wait for the Javascript stuff. But I always remember all the hassles of floating the columns and how Internet Explorer does some crazy stuff with floats. So I'm really dreading doing that, but it can be done. Thinking about it gives me flashbacks of all the hard work on the Fieri DC site to get that to work right. Oh yeah, speaking of CSS fixes, I finally fixed that weird problem in IE where the links in the sidebar would get messed up when you scroll the page. For whatever reason I had margins and padding on the links, so IE interpreted that as "mess up the links when you scroll" instead of "add some spacing here." Is it a rule to not put margins and padding on an inline element? I'll have to look that up. Maybe I was just trying to do something dumb.

Back on topic, I have some ideas for new pages to do, and I think I'll finally write a decent about page. I'm thinking about pulling in some lists from Remember the Milk so I can just make lists of favorite stuff and then you'd see it here. But then I thought wow that's nerd overkill, and so I'll just make lists here the normal HTML way and try to remember to update them. Note to self: Stop making complex solutions to easy problems.

Just today I started using FeedBurner. It's a service that adds a bunch of features to my blog feed. So subscribe to this new feed and unsubscribe from my old feed. Sorry if that means you have to do extra work. I'll try to limit the changing of my feeds on a whim in the future.

I've been thinking for a while that most of my friends and family would probably read this stuff more if there was an easier way to get updates. The people I know in real life aren't into RSS and feeds and that sort of techy stuff. So for a while I've been looking at a decent feed to email solution. I tried Bloglet in the past, but it didn't work for me. But now that I'm using FeedBurner, they said to use the FeedBlitz service, so now there's an email subscription form on the sidebar. I think all you have to do is enter your email address in that text box, click subscribe, then fill the image verification thing (called a captcha) to prove that you're a human (because aliens and robots can't read that text), click submit, and then they send you an email to confirm your email address. You click on the link in the email to confirm, then you should be good to go. It only sends out emails daily, and only when I update my blog. The emails have the full contents of my posts, so I'm going to try that for while because I hate those teaser posts that some other blogs do. But you should still come visit my site and post comments.

So there you go. This post is probably more for me to be a reminder of things to do. So I'll try to make some more posts for you to make up for this one. Note to self: stop writing for me, start writing for you.

I'm going to start using tags to add categories to my posts. It's getting to be a pain to make all the right categories and try to organize my posts. So now with tags I can just make up words to classify each post and then you can use the tags to find posts that interest you. It's kinda like the categories but now I can be more specific and make up categories on the spot. Flickr, del.icio.us, and Technorati use tags, so I'll give them a try too. I hope this works out better than trying to come up with categories. That reminds me, I really need to try out Flickr, everyone uses it. It's a photo storage site that uses tags and some other cool features. I really don't know that much about it, but lots of people talk about it. Tagging makes a lot more sense for photos though, because photos are hard to search for without words to associate with them.