A Life Without Compunction » @Blogging

Just Once Men’s Tablet

Dan — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 18:22:44 +0000

My wife and I decided to get some multivitamins for us as we are looking to prolong our lives and thus gain #tigerblood and be #winning. We ordered a Men’s & a Women’s Just Once from Rainbow Light (via Vitamin Shoppe). Excellent product. The contents of the multivitamin scream 101+!

However I’d like to issue a warning to all Male’s who may be considering Rainbow Light, Just Once, Men’s One Multivitamin. It tastes awful! Now I know all vitamins taste awful but you know how when you smell something you can associate it with a taste (and vs.), well this vitamin tastes like DOG FOOD! I kid you not.

I expressed this perplexing issue to my wife to which she replied “well I guess men are like dogs”! — I took artistic liberty with that!

Tweets crawled on your website

Dan — Thu, 21 May 2009 16:26:22 +0000

Definite benefits to having your tweets show up on your website. I tweeted the following yesterday:

finished migrating from #trixbox to #pbxinaflash. Still not happy with my AgentCallbackLogin replacement, but it will have to do 4 now

Did a Google search today for “agentcallbacklogin pbxinaflash” (no quotations on search string) and saw my site sitting at #4. It’s not a huge term so easy to sit at that spot. But does show the value of having your tweets hit at least the frontpage of your website providing fresh content for the crawler.

I now remove my hand from the bucket …

Dan — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 05:56:24 +0000

Cuz my hand is cold. No I’m not quitting blogging just wanted to send Jer to the edge of his seat. (If he sees this).

Twitter and Ubuntu

Dan — Fri, 27 Jun 2008 06:37:08 +0000

So I’m getting rolling with Twitter and discover that Gnome Do has a great twitter plugin or so it seems. So I go through the hoops and upgrade to 0.5 of Gnome Do, but for some reason I can’t get the twitter plugin to authenticate me. My twitter account name has a “_” in it, has anyone experienced this problem? Or have a suggestion of what I can use to twitter from Ubuntu. TIA.

Falling Like Flies

Dan — Fri, 02 Nov 2007 08:58:48 +0000

I’m saddened to see the latest announcement on Live the Creed, that it will no longer be updated and is closing it’s door to new posts. This was a great site and a really good idea come up with by Mike and Justin! Thanks to those who blogged there — your posts (though infrequent) will be missed. Thankfully the archive will remain online.

We need something to fill the void that this will leave! A wiki maybe? I’m starting to itch … maybe it’s an idea … we shall see …

Collapsing like Dinasours

Dan — Wed, 24 Oct 2007 11:04:43 +0000

Another great blog has gone belly up, bit cyber dust, etc. Farewell Phil “I Hate This Place”, until you feel the urge to blog once again.

Another one bites the dust

Dan — Sun, 23 Sep 2007 05:45:20 +0000

Maybe there was some merit to my observations. For a very different reason Hobbyns (Justin) — aka Blogapedia, Yellow Pages of Family Blogs, King of Bloggers — has bit the virtual dust. This one due to domain expiration. Will we see a come back Justin?

Family Blogging Milestone

Dan — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 08:22:47 +0000

Mike, one of the original SoCal bloggers, has bowed out of the blogging world. On the frontpage of his site he has posted a brief farewell citing the all elusive “they”:

They say a dead blog is worse than no blog at all and frankly, I agree with the ever-elusive “they”, just this once.

Around the time that Mike started his blog, there were only a handful of serious Family bloggers. Since then the number has grown exponentially.

Will this now mark an exodus of Family bloggers? I believe it will – prove me wrong.

Blog Series (BS) IV – Photos

Dan — Tue, 22 May 2007 05:18:03 +0000

I thought I’d get away from the legal vein and talk a bit about photos. Photos (and video – which I will cover in a different BS article) make a blog lively. They add color, character, spice and visual gossip. Photos can be a great way to convey expressions, feelings and emotions. They can also be a great way to get your friend angry because you posted that photo of them where they look like Jimmy Durante.

Outside of any legal ramifications (which I already covered in the BS III), there are a few topics to consider when posting photos to your website. Once again I will add that this is only my opinion and I’m interested in hearing other opinions and views on this topic.

Permission

When it comes to posting a photo probably the best rule of thumb is making sure that those featured in the photo are okay with having images of them plastered on the world wide web. With friends this is often just a simple understanding. However when you catch someone in your lens who you may not have a “simple understanding” type relationship with you may want to check with them first. Or at the very least remove the photo immediately when requested to do so.

Outside of common courtesy there’s a few considerations:

You would want them to do the same for you right? (Matthew 7:12)
Did the person pose for the picture? Or did you catch them in the worst kama sutra position possible?
Is the picture going to complement your blog or draw ire from your readers.

Children and the WWW

I covered this in a previous post, but it’s worth a mention here. Children are precious and there’s a lot of low life that lurks around the web. Make sure that the parents of the children you post pictures of are okay with you doing so.

Photo Size

Now this is slightly more technical but is a personal pet peeve of mine.

Have you ever visited a website and it took ages for the site to load the pictures? When the site was loaded each picture looked pretty small and grainy and you thought the site owner was nuts for posting such a crummy photo? Often what folks do when putting photos in an article is just upload their nice big 8 megapixel file (2 MB) and then resize the picture using the image tag settings. What you get is a 3264 x 2448 photo displaying at @ 500 x 300. Same download time as the massive version just looking ugly and small.

There’s a few workarounds for this:

Shrink your photos before uploading. Anything over 1280px (on the long side) is overkill as those visiting your website are probably not planning on making prints. (Hint: Use Shrink Pic)
If you do have to upload a large image. Make a thumbnail of the image and link to the large version.

Use a Gallery

If you are going to be posting a lot of photos on your website you may consider using a gallery of some sort so that your readers can easily browse through the photos. Having all the photos in a single article makes the frontpage (home page) of your website sluggish and bulky. A couple good examples of websites that utilize gallery software correctly are Steve and Linda / Mike and Nina. (I know there’s others of you but they gave me .10 cents for the back link — so there).

***

Photos is something that can be a blessing or a curse to website. Anything that’s visual is bound to catch attention and if you have a blog you probably are looking for some attention. Just make sure that you are attracting the right folks and secondly that you keep your readers happy by not stepping on too many toes.

Blog Law

Dan — Fri, 04 May 2007 23:57:02 +0000

I came across the following article that was linked from slashdot. It covers some topics already covered in the blog series, and others I still want to cover. Nevertheless it’s an interesting and informative read:

12 Important U.S. Laws Every Blogger Needs to Know