About this blog

This is an experimental WordPress blog, set up to compare the features of WordPress and Blogger.  This blog is not meant to be seen by the outside world, except for a few friends.

Test of a new post

This new post should definitely go out to subscribers. Updated posts might not.
——————Result, this post did go out, updated post did not. So we can’t disseminate revised information via an updated post.

Testing subscription service

I just added a subscription widget and signed up for emails to my Yahoo account. This is a test to see if that works.
—————That did work. Now I’m updating this post to see if updated posts get emailed to subscribers. In a minute I will create a new post that should definitely get emailed to subscribers.

Our hour with David Pogue

Last Saturday, we were dazzled again by fellow Westporter David Pogue, who talked at the library about his new book, The World According to Twitter. Someday I’ll find just the right adjectives to describe him (brilliant, talented, funny, what else?) but for now his short-form bio will do.  He began by placing Twitter in the context of Web 2.0 (people interacting on the Internet) and ended at the piano, singing his new song about I-Phone Apps (not yet in his Song Spoofs collection.) You can listen to a podcast of the talk (about an hour) and/or download it to your MP3 player.
But listening doesn’t capture what was on the screen on Saturday. About the book, here’s a video of what he said and showed on the Martha Stewart show. (My conclusion was that Twitter is for people like them, not for us.) Twitter also fits in the larger context of what’s going on with cell-phones today, especially the I-Phone. What I-Phone apps can do takes our breath away. Here’s a video of David’s 12/08 conference presentation on Life with Cell Phones – the marriage of the cell phone and the Internet (27 worthwhile minutes.)
Pogue at the New York Times

New photo insertion improvement

Wundermap 1511

Today there was  a new announcement from WordPress titled Display your photos in style. It pertains to photos uploaded from the PC, not to Flickr links. A minute ago there were edit and delete buttons on top of the photo, but now I don’t see them. Found them by hovering and clicking, changed size to 70%.

Table using html code

Nature Center, official opening	Nature Center with plantings
This is a 10 cell table created with an online code creator.	I see now that the cell widths are not fixed. I should put cell width in the code.
Total width 560 px could be wider	Links go to Flickr 240 px size
This theme is wider than FWSC.

Table-Flickr-code change

Code for this table was created in Frontpage to have no border. Table width is 600 px, photo is 500 px. Cell vertical alignment should be changed to top.

Table plus Flickr

Yes! In the earlier post of this Flickr photo I couldn’t put the text next to the photo. Now I can do that. This is a 2-cell table created in Outlook email and pasted into the post. The photo is 500 px wide, and the table adjusted to that.    The trouble now is that the table borders show and I can’t manipulate spacing within this cell. Now I wonder whether I can create the complete table in Outlook, including the link to Flickr, and paste it into a post.

Photo post

 

I experimented with a photo gallery page, with photos uploaded from my PC. Now I’ll get them from the media library. This won’t be a gallery. First added captions and descriptions, thumbnails, no alignment. I can drag and drop, but the 9:45 picture has image and caption together, the 10:40 picture has caption separated from the picture.  Try again. The 9:45 picture was centered. I clicked on it and it shot to the left. Couldn’t get 10:40 picture in right. In a gallery, clicking on the image brings up a big picture attachment. Here, clicking does nothing.

9:45 am

 

Real life and the web

In an article title Living on the Radio in the 4/20/09 issue of The New Yorker, Sasha Frere-Jones begins with this:

“One way to understand social-networking sites like Facebook and MySpace is to consider that younger digital natives are not necessarily being exhibitionists when they post photographs of themselves and share personal details there. Instead, these users are living a life in which consciousness is spread out evenly over two platforms: real life and the Web. Rather than feeling schizophrenic or somehow pathological, digital natives understand that these two realms divide the self much as speech and the written word divide language, a division that humans have lived with for a long time without going bonkers.”

As an older digital native, I must admit that it drives me bonkers.

Untangling credit default swaps

An explanation from American Public Media: Marketplace Senior Editor Paddy Hirsch