Kicking around layout changes

Over the next few days, the regular readers of this blog may notice that I am experimenting changing the layout and description of the blog to bring it more in line with what I am currently doing. Perhaps using a picture or photo in the header.

For instance, the old description of this blog was:

The musings and gripes of Morgan Drake Eckstein as he goes about the business of being a freelance writer, full time college student, and Golden Dawn lodge officer.

And the new description is:

I am a scholar, writer, artist and photographer. That makes me a triple threat, right?---Morgan Drake Eckstein

This is not the first time, I changed something like this---the original name of this blog was Musings from the Pen, which I later changed to the current title, Musings from the Inkwell.

All blog comments recovered

At this point in time, I have re-approved all the comments that were submitted during the time period that Blogger had to do the roll-back though. And that includes all my blogs. If your comments have not been approved, either I consider them spam (or Blogger does---I always forget to check the spam folder for comments) or they have been lost forever (and need to be resubmitted).

Hmm Is Blogger Reading List Acting Up

The last couple of days, Blogger Reading List has been saying that I am not currently following any blogs. Some of the blogs I follow show up in Google Reader, but not all of them.

Going over to The Real Blogger Status (not an official site of Blogger news), I have learned that this is not the first time that this type of problem has occurred.

So if you recently posted something and are surprised that I have not commented, odds are that I have not read it yet because of this particular bug.

Three random observations

Here are three random observations for today (random because they came out of my head):

1: There are sure a lot of ads for ballon helium on the writing site Helium. I guess that the spiders that control ad generation believe that people looking for gas to fill party ballons will end up on that site merely because of its name. Then again, I have noticed that often the little ad spiders have no idea what type of ads to put on my pages either. And it is not just Google Adsense either---all spider driven ad systems seem to have this issue. So it goes.

2: There are times when it takes me forever to figure out how to do something, especially things that I have been putting off. Today, I decided to put the "share buttons" on all my blogs here on Blogger. I had installed it on my most popular blog, Gleamings From the Dawn---a blog about Golden Dawn and the mystery traditions, the first day that it was an option. I decided that I would do it another day for the other three blogs I have here. I failed to note where the option was hidden...hence I spent a half hour today looking for the widget that does this. (It is under Design/Blog Posts if you are looking for it yourself.) If I would have done it the day that the option became available, it would have taken me five minutes to do it. *sigh* Good news, all my blogs now have share buttons under the individual posts.

3: The economy probably still sucks eggs on rocks, especially the job market. When I was in the restaurant business, I used to judge how the economy was going by the sales numbers and the behavior of my customers. This habit has carried over into my current profession, being a writer. I watch the articles I have on the pageview sites as a "witch's ball" (the big glass fishing floats that Wiccans use to scry with); as the concerns of my readers go up and down, so too do my articles go up and down with the trend. The fact that my articles about unemployment have shown no signs of cooling off makes me firmly believe that any rosy numbers I hear from the government are being cooked to a fine mash (these articles did not go hot until the job market tanked, so it is not that they are always good pageview generators).

So there you go. Three random observations. Now I really should go work on my latest project---one that I have been putting off for a month.

Interesting malfunction

That was an interesting malfunction. I just had the same post appear thirty times. Moral: Neo (a type of portable word processor) are not compatiable with Blogger. I will have to do it the old fashioned way, because uploading it directly from my Neo sure messed things up.