The WTH Wednesday Blog

Bonus Points to anyone who can identify what is in image. 

Yesterday I wrote the tidbits blog as I usually do on every Tuesday. I wrote it Monday night just before I went to bed so I didn't forget about it in the morning. Typical day so to speak, par for the course as of late.

Well to my surprise the entire back side interface had changed and it was changed to something that I really didn't care for.

Normal Interface

I've been writing this blog going on 16 years now, most of that being done on a daily basis and that's a long streak of consecutive days where I've put content out and not missed. 16 years of seeing the exact same back end interface without fail and all of a sudden everything changed with no notice.

Zoom ahead a day to today's blog and I was prepared to once again see the interface that I had to use when I wrote my tidbits blog.

New Backend interface

Surprise, everything appears to be back to normal for now. It looks just the same as it has for years. Needless to say I was quite happy, until I tried to grab a screen shot of what the this interface looks like to show everyone and the new one popped up. As I'm writing this one, I opened the back end in a different tab and the interface I don't like was there staring me in the face.

Make up my mind Blogger, I prefer to traditional interface that I am used to, the one I have used for 16 years as opposed to this newer one. Now if I were new to blogging and was just setting one up and never seen any back ends before, I might like it because the new one is a little more user friendly.

The classic back end is a little trickier, but for people like me who understand HTML code, it gave me very helpful options that I could use to correctly format posts.

Oh well. Going to the first picture in this blog, it's a sterogram. A picture hidden within a picture. Can anyone see the Helicopter?

Have a great day.

Monday

All good things must come to an end, and that does in fact include those fun filled fall football weekends that we all kind of enjoy. Now it's time to put those games behind us, head into the office so we can talk about those games and start another week of doing what it is we do for a living.

Would you believe that today is kind of an accomplishment for me as a blogger. While I am coming up on a milestone of 5,000 blogs written which should be coming up later this month, today actually marks the 13th Anniversary of my very first blog post. It was 13 years ago today that I heard someone say "I'm a grogger not a blogger", that I had to find out what a blogger was. I knew what a grog was, but I had never heard the term blogger so I investigated and the rest is a daily documented history pretty much of my life over the last 13 years.

I have to say that for me, someone who loses interest in things after a while, that 13 years of writing about things in my life is a pretty remarkable accomplishment for me. It's a great way to document times and events of things that have happened in my life. It's documented my time with Michelle, job changes that I have made, births, deaths, travel, purchases, what I am watching on TV, and things in my life and the lives of many people who have been around me for those 13 years.

I try to keep it simple with a few simple rules I have adopted over the years. Never air out any dirty laundry on my blog. I have a few times, but I have found it is better to remain neutral. Keep it PG rated, I have been known to cuss worse than a factory worker at times and I have tried not to carry it over to this format. I've made very few political posts and that has been by design. I do strongly hold my opinion, but putting it out there for the whole world to see while I am employed as a Government Contractor is probably not the smartest move so I just don't do it. I try not to angry post or say anything derogatory about anyone. I learned a long time ago expressing your emotions is one thing, expressing your emotions and documenting them on the internet or Social Media (which this blog also posts to via Twitter and Facebook) is something that you could very be more trouble than it was ever intended.

There are other rules, but they have all been pretty simple and easy to comply to. I have been threatened with lawsuits by lawyers for my blog a few times. Specifically the cash for gold scam whose attorney's sent me multiple letters to cease and desist, but they are lawyers and not a judge and I stood by first Amendment Rights.

I can been a wonderful 13 years, it's been fun documenting them and I take a little time out every once in a while to go back and review them. It's been tedious at times, but I don't regret becoming a blogger and it really has been a whole lot of fun for me.

Have yourselves a great day today and here is to another 13 years of Blogging.

Hi ho hi ho

It all Started 10 years ago today

It all started ten years ago today, a co-worker made a statement of "I'm a Grogger, nor a Blogger" (Thank You Evan Fedorko) and I knew that a Grogger was someone who was a beer drinker, but at that time I had absolutely no idea what a Blogger was. I googled it, because that's what college graduates did back then when there was something they didn't understand, and quickly saw the blogger site. It came up first in my search engine results, probably because Google owned both of them, so I decided to start one.

I had seen that blog stood for weB LOG, an online Journal that people use to track their lives and events. My sister Kim had been doing something like that on her website and was honestly the first one to start blogging. She's had about 10,000 different or better different variations of blogs (she likes change) and I started with one concept and called it George's Journal as I made my very first Blog post ten years ago today at exactly the same time that this blog is going to post.

It has been an honor and a privilege for me to share my life publicly over the last decade. A lot has changed over that decade, I had just recently Graduated a few months earlier and was still working for peanuts at the NRAC and through this blog my career has blossomed. I went from a single guy looking for love to marrying a very special lady. I've blogged about births, deaths, events, TV shows, vacations, come up with a number of themes to allow me to do this daily and have learned a few lessons about how to be a blogger the hard way. Never air out or disrespect anyone through your blog, that doesn't go away and no matter how mad you are, nothing like that needs to last forever.

So here is to ten years and the start of my second decade writing George's Journal. I think I'm going to continue to celebrate our Steelers Trivia Championship at my favorite place in the world with my wife.

Thank you to each and every one of you for reading and allowing me to share. It is all of you that have given this blog life. And to my midget porn loving Mother, thank you for so much feedback through the years. This blog has your fingerprints all over it from things you did and did not like.

Here's to (at least) another ten years!!!

I Hate the New Blogger Backside

I know many of you will never see the back end of BLOGGER unless of course you are a BLOGGER. This is the place where those of us edit our posts and submit the content. I've been using BLOGGER since 2004 and have grown accustomed to how things worked over the past eight years.

Not too long ago they introduced a new back end. I tried it out for a little while but saw it as very user non-friendly and a hassle to use so I switched back to what I have grown accustomed to.

As many of you know I write my blogs the evening before with the exception of the weekend blogs and I schedule them to post at the same time the next morning during the week. Been doing this for years on my daily blogs. Over the last couple of days the feature has not been working and I have had to go in manually and post my posts.

This morning I logged in to force the post to an unpleasant surprise of a very user unfriendly and confusing back end to the BLOG. To say that I hate it would be an understatement.

Template Changes

After finally switching over yesterday to the new Blogger, I finally decided to play around a little bit with the template and give a little feedback. Previously if you wanted to change your template you had to go into the code and actually edit the code itself to make the BLOG appear how you wanted to look.

With the New Blogger there are a few features that I liked and was actually one of the reasons I stayed with the old Blogger and that was to maintain the integrity of all my posts. You will notice that there is a slight color change to the BLOG and some of the elements have changed to make it a little more user friendly on the space. The main thing I like and a big reason why I waited to switch my BLOG over is the was you can now navigate to previous posts. You can use the drop down menu to see the year, or then month of the previous post and it compacts it and lists the number of posts by each month.

I was a little surprised to see that I have in excess of 450 posts in my BLOG. I have tried to keep it as active as possible and interesting, and I think I have achieved my goal and been able to keep it both fresh and interesting to some extent.

The new Blogger allows the user to edit the template much easier. It's written in block code and has their own individual interface for each block. I know how to write HTML, but I welcome the change for those who are in the beginning stages of web design.

Switched Over

A month or so ago Blogger came up with a new blogger. Kim started using the new blogger right away, but I was hesitant in order to keep the entire BLOG in tact and migrate everything together.

Today I finally had the option of Migrating everything over to the new Blogger and have finished this process.