1. Many of my posts are boring, even to me. Before pressing publish I should make sure my eyes are not glazing over. If so, delete it.
2. The posts I like best are long form blogging about family, food, and vacations, with a few rants thrown in.
3. I like the many of my “link blog” posts, but they’re not my best posts.
4. I posted a lot of family vacation pictures this past year.

Take a quick glance. Do you have a favorite?

Miscellaneous and rants

• Inaguration Day. Posted back when we still felt hopeful. Awesome animated GIF! (I wish I could take credit for creating it.)
• Donating Blood is Easy, I Donated Blood Today, I Sell My Blood For Stickers And Pins, One Gallon of Blood. In which I brag about donating blood and attempt to convince you to do the same. I gave six pints this year and earned my gallon pin.
• Please, Don’t Use Captcha. An experiment using xtranormal. “The traffic you save may be your own.”
• Books on the History of Science and Technology. Three books I like, and why.
• Tabletop Trebuchet. A project Jamison and I built for his science fair.
• Ha! Ha!, Ho! Ho!, and Heh…. Not sure any explanation is necessary (or possible).
• The Stranded Traveler Scam. I learned something that day, something my mother solved old school and faster.
• Trolling, Trolling, Trolling. No one bit, but I still like it.
• A Calorie-Neutral Lunch. In which I attempt to justify my caffeine habit by walking to Starbucks.
• Hypoallergenic Cats, Part II. I’m a cat lover, what can I say? Add a cute kitten picture and I’m hopeless.
• I Need a New Bike. A nostalgic look at the bikes I’ve owned and what I’d like now.
• Good Guys: Les Schwab Tires and Bike N’ Hike. It’s so easy to complain. It’s fun to praise a couple of deserving business instead.
• Bullitt Cargobike. The picture accompanying this post is bike pr0n.
• All I Want For Christmas is a donation to your favorite charity. No, not that one.
• Christmas Blobs. My attempts to duplicate Aaron Hockley’s photo. Success?

Social media

• Birthday Wishes. This was an e-mail I received from a friend on Twitter, so I guess I didn’t even write this post. It still makes me happy, so on my favorites list it goes.
• MyWhiteSite — Real Life, Real Racist. An April Fools’ Day parody post that pushes the limit. The subject of the parody, GirlsGuideTo.com nee HerHotSpot.com, still uses Facebook Connect to discriminate against males, in violation of the Facebook’s terms of service.
• Dear Facebook and Friends, Facebook, We Have a Problem and a Solution Exists, and Facebook, Pretty Please. If you hate those stupid quizzes on Facebook half as much as I do, these will make sense to you.
• Facebook to Sell Targeted Ads in Your News Stream. Paranoid ranting at its best. Checking… checking… Yup, there’s a ;-) lurking in the footnote.
• My Social Media New Year’s Resolutions. Executive summary: less.

Recipes

• Vegetarian Chili. A recipe we’ve enjoyed many times. We enjoyed some last week.
• Gazpacho. Another favorite summertime recipe.
• Pasta Salad. A great picnic food recipe. I’ll try not to notice the snow outside my window while I type this.
• Creamy Red Potato Salad. I’m hungry just thinking about it (and missing summer picnics).
• Vegan Tomato Basil Bisque. It’s not every recipe that mentions Charles’ Gas Law.
• Update: Healthy veggie soup, or is it stew? Okay, I didn’t write this, and it’s not even on my blog, but this soup/stew is wonderful and I want to be able to find it in the future.

Family pictures

Warning: These posts are unlikely to be interesting to outside my family.

• Walla Walla Balloons. Yeah, everyone has hot air balloon pictures. I like mine.
• Congratulations, Willy! Willy graduates from WWU.
• Fathers’ Day. Grandma and Grandpa visit the Northwest.
• Hillsboro Fourth of July Parade. A Logan family tradition.
• Sailboat Dockt at BLYC. Big Lake, a dock, and a sailboat. Heaven.
• Happy Birthday, Heather! Does anyone else still make animated GIFs instead of movies?
• Sabbath Walk. I think I’d forget all these good times if I didn’t blog them.
• Oregon Coast Vacation. Another fun family trip.
• Mt. Rainier Camping Trip. More fun, more family. And I finally realize how to spell Mt. Rainier’s spelling.
• Afternoon Trip to Sunset Beach. Actually, more than just afternoon. We arrive as the tide was coming in.
• Family Fun at the Corn Maze. Success!
• Off to Walla Walla. Delivery Ashley and her stuff to Walla Walla.
• All Moved In. Ashley and Heather survey the scene from their balcony.
• Happy Birthday, Jamison! Another animated GIF.
• Christmas 2009. Visiting Santa at Pioneer Place.
• Our Anniversary Celebration. Our kids treat Suzi and me to a Chez Logan dinner.

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I didn’t use a scientific method to create this list. These are simply the posts I like best. Through some quirk of Google, “Where in the World is North Korea?” is my post with the most page views. Although it’s a few years old, it remains the most hit post each and every day. Does that make it my best post ever? I hope not. My post, “Craigslist Buyer Scam E-mail” has the most comments. I don’t think it’s one of my best posts, either. That’s why I went with the unscientific “what I like best” method. :-)

Year in Review: Favorite Posts from blogan.

The video references freetelepromptersoftware.com.

Make a Teleprompter from blogan.

Update. Oops! Looks like I also had to redo the embedding of FriendFeed in the sidebar like Building 43 does.

Test, Please Ignore from blogan.

Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools, because they have to say something. —Plato

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Hat tip: Pickles.
Graphic credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/spacedust_design/ / CC BY-ND 2.0.

On Blogging Fools from blogan.

If you can’t write good no one will read your blog. —Ron Coleman.

I couldn’t have said it better myself. Well, maybe… ;-)

Fortunately, Ron is writing tongue in cheek, recommending that we follow David Krell’s blog “Write This Way 2.0.”

I’m giving David’s blog a trial read.

Quote of the Day — Ron Coleman from blogan.

You can edit comments within the WordPress moderation panel the same way you used to before having IntenseDebate installed. Your changes will be synced back into IntenseDebate. To do this you will need to disable IntenseDebate Enhanced Moderation in the plugin settings page. (Source.)

This is great news!

Update. I have added IntenseDebate comments to blogan. If you see any funkiness, please let me know.

IntenseDebate Allows Comments to be Edited from blogan.

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Hat tip: Kinchie.

WordPress Inspiration from blogan.

Newest feature: the sidebar menu collapses yet retains full functionality.

Click the pictures for more description.

WordPress 2.7 User Interface from blogan.

• Audio player. Audio player creates an inline player for mp3 files. Using it is simple:

  [audio:hillarylaugh.mp3]

  [See post to listen to audio]

  The filename after “audio:” is either in a defined directory on your web host or can be an absolute web address to anywhere on the Internet. Remember, hot linking to someone else’s mp3 file is bad form.

• Easy tube. Easy tube embeds a YouTube video in a post. Using it is similar to audioplayer:

  [youtube:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXAH3WVhhwg]

  The web address after “youtube:” is the YouTube address of the video, that is, the address that shows in your browser’s address bar.

Both plugins can be used in WordPress’ visual editor or HTML editor — neither converts the square brackets to anything else.

What plugins do you use to help display multimedia content on your blog?

Next up: stopping spam.

Update. I’m now using Viper’s Video Quicktags to display YouTube and other videos.

Update 2. Embedding of videos is being added to the WordPress core for version 2.9 — no plugin needed.

Starting a Blog — Multimedia Content Plugins from blogan.

I chose the K2 theme for Impolite Company and blogan.net for the following reasons:

• K2 Sidebar Manager. WordPress supports widgets that display recent comments, calendars, blogrolls, etc., on your blog’s sidebar without programming or editing your theme’s files. Unfortunately, WordPress’ widget support displays the same widgets on every page of your blog.

  K2 Sidebar Manager lets you control where on your blog each widget appears: the main page, individual pages, single post pages, the archives page, or even individual posts. I use K2 Sidebar Manager’s display feature to restrict my lengthy blogrolls and Google Reader shared items to the long main page.

  Note: WordPress is planning to add most of K2 Sidebar Manager’s functionality. Once that happens, all themes will be able to take advantage limiting where widgets appear.

• Configurable columns. K2 can have zero to two sidebars in addition to the main content column. The width of the header and page automatically adjusts and K2 Sidebar Manager automatically supports placing widgets in these sidebars. If you want, the blog can be screen width aware and move the sidebars to the bottom of the page if a visitor’s screen width is too narrow to display the sidebars beside the main content.
• Archives page. K2 creates an archives page that allows visitors to browse your posts by tag, category, or date. Nice!
• Page menu. When you create a WordPress page, K2 places its title in a horizontal menu in the bottom of the header. This is handy for “About” and the archives pages.
• Custom CSS file. K2 supports a custom CSS file that changes the appearance of your theme and can be selected from your K2 Options screen. It operates like the child themes mentioned above. Keeping your custom CSS separate from the core K2 files simplifies the upgrade process when a new K2 version becomes available. The custom CSS file also defines the size of your header, enabling WordPress’ header upload function to crop to the correct proportions for your blog.

  My custom CSS file changes my colors, background images, fonts, link styles, and supports some plugins. I also use it to unclutter my blog by hiding some extraneous icons and messages I don’t want to display.

  K2 comes with two sample custom CSS files to get you started.

K2 has some other features that I’m not currently using, but you might find useful.

• Asides. K2 allows you to designate a category as an “aside.” K2 will display all posts in this category with different styling. If you choose inline asides, the post title uses a smaller font. For sidebar asides (which uses K2 Sidebar Manager), the an aside’s title doesn’t display, just its text.

  Asides are useful for short posts. For now, I use Twitter as a “microblog” and import the “tweets” into my sidebar using Twitter Tools. Josh Bancroft uses Twitter Tools to save his tweets as asides in his WordPress database and have them displayed in a sidebar.

• Advanced navigation. K2′s advanced navigation is an AJAX capability that can load older posts without having to reload the entire page. I go back and forth as to whether I like it. I’m not using it right now.
• AJAX commenting. When someone leaves a new comment, AJAX commenting displays it at the bottom of the list of comments without reloading the entire page.
• Live search. Live search displays search results as someone start entering letters in the search box.

What theme did you choose and why?

Next up, content plugins.

Update 10/1/08. The latest K2 nightly build now supports threaded comments, but no longer supports AJAX commenting.

Starting a Blog — Choosing a WordPress Theme from blogan.