Thought Patterns

I will be leaving tomorrow (Wednesday) to drive up nawth to see my nephew Ryan test for his first degree blackbelt. I plan on being gone just a week.

I will try to post something while I am gone, but I won't be making any changes or major stuff. I will have access to email of course. Anyway, just thought I would mention it before I forget. I'll be driving to TN to get on I81 north which I follow all the way up to the PA Turnpike. Then I take it until it smacks into NJ where I'll take a right and drive south to Riverside. It is a 12hr drive so I won't be doing it all in one day. It's too hard on me bod.

Okay, well, gotta get back to packing and stuff.

My online friend Sophia just sent me a link to a site within LiveJournal.

"I have been given stewardship of The White List, a list of writers, editors, and other publishing professionals that have LiveJournals or LJ RSS feeds."

It's not just individuals, but groups within LJ. It is a very long list, which is a good thing. I haven't visited any of them yet, but I will I reckon.

Found some more writers on the web.

I *think* I got there through the Blogwise website. I was checking the details on my page and saw a link for 'find a similar blog'.

My first result was Georganna Hancock, a writer in California. She impressed me by revealing what her desk looks like.

[side note: I have a webpage of an older photo of my desk but I moved it to this blog.]

From her site I found Sallie Bingham's site. I am not sure it is a blog, but it does have some good examples of her work as well as a listing of her published works.

Another link from Writers' Edge led me to a grammar article on the Mediabistro site.

Okay, one more link from Writers' Edge site and I am done. The 'Inkygirl - A weblog for writers' is chock full o' resources. Check it out.

Kinda tired of coming over here and not knowing what you will find?

No problem!

On one of the sidebars you will see a long list. So far, I have all of them ready to roar from the first down to, and including, Gila, the theme you've been seeing the most.

What happens is that the Theme Switcher will want to put a cookie on your puter. If you don't want it, that only means that the next time you come here, you will see whatever theme *I* have active. You'll have to click on your favorite look again. You can allow or block the cookie through your browser.

The others past Gila work, they just don't include all my stuff. Which may or maynot be a bad thing.

Came across another one today. Lessee, how did I get there??

Went over to Frank Paynter's blog and read about the Ten New Voices where he mentions…

Susan Mernit and her Ten New Voices in which she mentions….

Hypergene and his/her Fifteen New Voices where he/she mentions….

Amy Gahran's News and musings on how we communicate in the online age by Amy Gahran: Content Strategist, Info Provocateur.

Amy Gahran mentions a way to get over 'blogging block' which I decided to turn into how to get over apathy block.

So, going over to the nearest bookshelf, I close my eyes, spin around (don't know why I did that) and reached out for a book. I pulled out Feathering Your Nest: An Interactive Workbook and Guide to a Loving Lesbian Relationship by Gwen Leonhard and Jennie Mast. Oy. What a book to grab. Could be worse though; the one next to it is Lillian Too's Feng Shui: 168 Ways to Declutter Your Home

(more…)

…you find yourself excited that your site is #12 in the Personal Blogs Top Hits list.

…you sit up all night trying to figure out the theme-switcher plugin.

…you are still up when the sun rises by the ghastly hour of 7 f*ing a.m. because you are now trying out a style switcher.

RSS feeds are neat, if you can use them. I have had desktop RSS aggregators before and loved them. It was especially useful during hurricane season since I would get regular updates as soon as NOAA published them.

The problem though that I had was finding a way to keep the feeds on the net and put them on a webpage. I am sure they were right under my nose and I didn't see them. Geeks and nerds speak in code because they write so much code and forget there are others that don't speak their language. We writers do the same thing, flying words around like genre, submission (and not giggle), and various ways to dispose of bodies, how to design a planet with three suns, and how to get our characters to behave.

Anyway, I was surfing again, still, whatever, and came across a headline on my Dashboard about a listing of Del.icio.us tools. Clicking on a link there led me to Quick Online Tips site. That led me to Jeffrey Veen's page on how to integrate a feed onto your site. Yay! This was what I wanted!!

His suggestion was to go to RSS Digest, enter in the URL of the feed, and the program would generate the code you needed to display the feed wherever you put that code. Wow.

Okay. So I tried it on my Del.icio.us collection which aren't RSS feeds themselves, but my listing is. So its like each of my entries is a different news story or weather alert. Went through the thing (two steps with mini-steps in between) and there it was. Not only did I get the code, but it came in HTML and as a javascript and with instructions on how to modify the way it looks.

Veen's instructions were more for putting it on a webpage instead of on a blog. I took the code and put it in the left hand column, the lowest thing on that ladder. Hit 'update' then refreshed the main page. There it was! That's how freakin' easy it was! The only modification I made from the default was to make the time at 360 rather than 90. Way cool. I realized though that it was going to be all jumbled up in such a narrow space so I now have it all in its own page.