Timelines and Changes

Time to highlight a few minor changes to my blog.

The first is a new image at the top of the page.  It’s a timeline of what I consider to be notable events in my life throughout 2007.

Why?  Glad you asked.  Firstly, I want it to be a supplement for this blog’s content.  Ideally, I’d like to make the events clickable, so that they’ll take you to specific blog entries.  I mean, if these things that happen are important enough to highlight front and center, I should be writing about them, right?  You might notice that some of the past events don’t have entries; that’s because I’m lazy and need to get back to writing.  You might also notice some of them are in the future; that’s because they’re things that I know I’m going to want to write about this year.

There’s another reason I like the idea of creating yearly timelines.  How many times have not been able to figure out when something important happened in your life?  Hmmm, that first road trip across the U.S.  It was in… um, well, I was in college, so it’d have to be after ’90, but it was before I moved to Juneau in ’94… um…  It’d be cool to be able to quickly look up that information, but beyond that, I think it would be incredible, later on in life, to have one of these for every year.  Pass it on to the grandkids, you know?  Oh, wow, granddad met his wife in Venezuela and then proposed to her exactly a year later in Costa Rica!

Keeping on task with this project will be hard enough.  Working backwards 35 years will be much more difficult.  Wish me luck.

More esoteric subscription/blogging software information follows:

Some of you may have noticed that I’ve switched my RSS feeds to Feedburner.  I’ve seen plenty of other sites use their service, but never actually looked at what they offered.  To be honest, I can’t say that I prefer subscribing to Feedburner feeds, but I do like what they do for the content producer’s side.  With just their free service, I can track the number of subscribers to my blog and see how many people click through to my website.  I think the number of subscribers reported is rather suspect, but at least it’s a rough gage.  And for the record, I don’t mind one bit if RSS subscribers don’t click through to my site — it’s not like I have any advertising or anything.  I fully support those that want to read entirely within their RSS aggregators; It’s my preferred method, so why not?

Let me know if you notice anything wonky with the new feed(s).  If things go well, I might even fiddle around a bit more and enable the podcast feature for the rare video files I sandwich into my entries.

And, as always, if you don’t use RSS to keep up, there’s the fallback option.  You can get an e-mail every time I update my blog by clicking the “get e-mail updates” link at the top of this web page.