It isn’t so much writer’s block as it is that I just don’t have anything to say. I guess I could have written about my trip to Dahlonega last weekend but I went there, looked though some shops with Gerri, had a decent, but not great meal at an Italian restaurnt there and then came home. I forgot my camera so I don’t even have any pictures of the trip. I enjoyed myself but all in all I don’t think I have anything interesting enough about the trip that you would care to read about.

I guess I could be writing about the Bush administration’s PR blitz on the good things that are being accomplished in Iraq but really what is there to say? I haven’t had time to check it all out with this new job and I have no idea how much is hype and how much is accurate. How can I write about what I don’t know?

The thing is, I’m doing fine and I’m very busy with a paying job. My lack of writing doesn’t mean that there are problems, the opposite is the case. I’m just too busy to write and too busy to involve myself in things that are interesting to write about. Maybe this coming week will give me something to write about. If not then maybe I need to just let this weblog rest for a few weeks.

For a little over the last twenty-four hours this site has been down due to a little security problem my webhost was recovering from. I knew he was having some problems so I waited until this morning to call to get a few things ironed out. I got permissions straightened out and my cron jobs reinstalled now so things should be back to normal. At least that’s what I’m hoping.

On and off over the past couple of weeks I’ve been doing a little tweaking to my Blosxom templates and plugins to make this site valid XHTML 1.0 Strict and clean up the CSS to be valid CSS. It was close when I first put it up but there were some problems in some of the plugins I was using and in my templates.

My next goal is to get this site to pass the WAI Content Accessibility Guidelines for support level AAA. I pass the section 508 guidelines now and the priority 1 guidelines for WAI Content Accessibility but there are some design issues I need to address to pass the priority 2 and 3 guidelines.

Why am I doing this? Well, markup and stylesheets need to be valid. Valid markup and stylesheets just makes cross-platform design problems easier to find and fix. As far as the accessability guidelines go, though, I don’t expect there to be many readers of this site to require that degree of accessability but I want it to be there for the few that may require it and want to read my content.

If things work right you ought to be able to point your newsreader to www.flutterby.com and subscribe to flutterby.larryslog and see this post. Of course things never go right the first time.

Of course things will have to be tested.

And tested…

No, it isn’t working yet, but I’ll get there.

Update: It still doesn’t work and I’m not sure when it will exactly… if ever.

There has been a lot of discussion going on about bloggers editing their posts after they have published it and of the author of the blogs editing out flames in their comments. Some folks are pointing out the ethics of doing these things with sides being taken and whatnot. One blogger, Rebecca Blood, came up with a proposed code of ethics for bloggers. I like what she came up with but I’ve never thought of myself as a journalist, only someone who likes to write his thoughts down and put them somewhere that they can be commented on. I don’t believe Rebecca’s ethics quite apply to this blog.

Still, since folks are getting all hot and bothered about edits and such I thought it might be a good idea to publish a house policy how I operate this blog. If you want to hold me to a standard this is the standard to hold me to.

1. I will edit my posts. If I see a typo or a grammatical error I’m not going to leave it out there for the world to see and point to saying, “look what a dummy.” If I ever post something that I look at and say, “boy was I a jerk to say that”, I’m going to remove it. If you quote what I say and point to it before I remove it let me know and I’ll edit my post again to say what I’ve done and why I edited my post. I have no problem admitting I’m a jerk when I’m a jerk.
2. I don’t get many comments on this site and I’ve never edited a comment here or on Justin’s Journal but that’s just because there has never been a problem. If you have attached your name and e-mail address to the comment I’ll leave it be unless it’s clearly libelous or unjustly opening up an embarrassing personal situation for someone else. If you are an anonymous commenter I’ll delete your comment for a lot less of a reason. I’m out here in the open with what I say, if you want to be controversial in your comments then I think it’s only fair to ask you to open yourself up the same way with a proper ID.
3. I will strive to be accurate with the information I convey here unless I’m in a playful mood and want to yank someone’s chain. With that in mind I will leave you this caveat, believe nothing you read on this site unless it is consistent with what I have said in the past or with what you know. You ought to be able to tell by the tone of my post and the category I place the post in if I’m being serious or not. If you can’t tell then check my facts with Google. I will occasionally pull your leg.

That’s all I can think of for now. Most likely this post will be edited. I’ll link to it in the header in a day or so in order to have an easy way to find my policy page. If you have any questions just leave them in the comments here… or ask them on your blog and send me a track back ping.

I did something stupid when I first set up this site. I wanted an about file that I could tell a little about me. I just whipped up an HTML file formatted similar to the rest of the site and threw it in the root directory of Larry’s Log. I should have let Blosxom manage that just like it does everything else on this site. The entry below was to accomplish that.

I’m playing again. Google is doing targeted advertising and I’m curious as to what ads appear for various topics. For now and the forseeable future you will see ads on this site. These ads are suppose to be relevent to the topic of the page and I want to see what they are keying on. I’m also placing them in two places to see which is the less obtrusive and most visually appealing. One of them will disappear in a few days.

If this is too annoying to you let me know and I’ll get rid of it. For now though, watch what pops up for ads. This could be amusing. I know I don’t expect to make any money with it.

I haven’t really left or anything, just been real busy. I’ll be back soon, I promise.

One thing I missed when moving from my old site to this site was the logo I was using over there. It’s just a little graphic that I found on a free clip-art website but something about that little line drawing made me feel comfortable. I thought it sort of caught the spirit of someone just chronicling what they saw and that was what I wanted to do.

I originally thought I’d find a new little graphic to incorporate in this site but nothing has struck my fancy. I realized that I still want my focus to be about the same on this site as I was doing in the past, I just want to do it as me, not as a psuedonym. With that I brought “Man With a Quill” over here to act as my logo just as it did in the past. I may change my mind on this but for now he’s here for a while.

Okay, I know you aren’t suppose to do this but I don’t have a huge amount of traffic and I’m not making any money with this weblog so I thought, “What the heck.” I’m now using Blosxom 2.0 beta 3 to generate this site. The betas had been working real smoothly and some of the features the plugins offered I wanted right here. Someone please give the comments a whirl and lets see if I have any unresolved issues. A trackback ping would also be very helpful.

It appears that I now have comments working on this site.