Gnome match at all

It's official. My garden gnome's blog is garnering more traffic than my own. I'm actually a bit jealous ...

Cut Off

For the two of you that read the blog regularly, the communication gods have conspired to cut me off from both satellite and dial-up access. This, coupled with a spate of gorgeous weather and gardening necessity has made it nearly impossible, or highly undesirable to make posts.

Watch this space for pics of the emerging dry stone wall; furniture being moved into the studio; and an upcoming plague of frogs.

Help. I need a blog post.

So, for the first time I am making a double post between the Design Innovation blog and Verticalbones. My assumption is that few of you actually use the sidebar links ->, so if I truly find some interesting things around design, I should probably post them here as well. It takes time to maintain three blogs so I believe I've earned the right to pilfer some thinking and finds.

Tell me if I am completely off-base or not. Also, I can probably say some things here that I can't or wouldn't on the work blog.


I was completely taken by the whole "packaging" of the Help Remedies brand. Smart. Irreverent. Sustainable. They even offer help for those of you who are just bored or horny. Love the t-shirts.

The mobile test

I still imagine that Twitter will be the preferred method of blogging from the Electric Picnic, but I might give this a whirl. One big bummer, no cameras allowed...

Cheating?

I guess there really are no rules for managing a blog. Somehow it seems like you're cheating when you backdate entries. But there are no rules, right?

I'm still not sure if this is a (public) diary/journal, letter to friends and family, some ego exercise, or all of the above. You certainly feel that you have an obligation to write more regularly when you realise you have an audience and strangely I've become more self-conscious now that I have walked into the offices of a potential client and they say, "I was reading your blog ..." That changes things a bit, doesn't it? (The map above shows the geographical distribution of the last 100 visits, stretching from Moscow to Seattle.)

Readers are even beginning to make content suggestions. "I'd like to hear more about the differences between Ireland and the US." "I really like the movie reviews." "You haven't uploaded an image gallery for some time."

Enough self-indulgence on a rainy Sunday morning ... I've got some more work to do in the garden.

The domain has landed

Blogger re-established the ability to publish to your own domain name, so please update your bookmarks. (You should have been automatically re-directed.) I'm still working on getting just verticalbones.com working, but it's been awhile since I mucked around with CNAME records and DNS, so cut me a break. Or, laugh at me if the domain isn't working tomorrow.

Update: I can only add one CNAME record, so it will have to remain www.verticalbones.com ...

CSS wimp

Honestly I think the only people that care about how a blog looks are the authors. It's really about the content, right? Even though my template looks like a bazillion other blogs, it is clean, easy to navigate and does the job...

I was holding my breath when I upgraded my template and only had a few things to fix once it was complete. There are a few CMS tools that will make life easier than going into the template code and mucking about just to add to a list of links. There is a cool archiving feature that will remember everything I've posted to the sidebars, but only show the latest 10 in the list.

I'm also back on Firefox, as Safari isn't doing the job on some sites and isn't compatible with all the Blogger tools.

99

Well, this is my 99th post to my blog, coincidentally announcing the posting of 99 pictures from Florence.

In the Permalinks sidebar, I have also posted a link for archived photos. One day I will get the photos transfered over to Flickr. It's a shame Google didn't buy them as well as Blogger so we'd have seamless integration.

Blogger ate my template

Need to work through fixing my template after Blogger ate it unexpectedly. Unfortunately I did customize the links along the right hand side. Would be nice if they automatically backed up your template!

Update: Well, things are basically back in working order, though I need to get my traffic counter installed again, and I lost a bunch of movie reviews. A few more tweaks and we should be there.

Blogger problems

Just a note that blogger is having some serious problems with their publishing system. I wasn't able to update the blog for a few days. It's still hit and miss. Hopefully I'll be able to switch over to their databased beta-site soon.

Dreaming of Florence ...