. . . for a little while, in a bit. I'm moving it to another web host that hopefully won't apply a vacuum as bad as this current one does.

I will take it down in an hour or so (give or take).

See you on the other side, blogosphere.

We're talking Apple vs. PC here! ;-)

This is an interesting blog post from the Houston Chronicle's Tech Editor on the price difference between the two systems.

But eWeek's Joe Wilcox says that, while he wasn't looking, that has changed. Windows-based computers -- and particularly notebooks -- are now much more powerful than Macs, and a lot cheaper. He thinks Apple not only must lower prices, but is actually planning on it.

If Apple lowers prices, that's good for everyone. Apple has always been too rich for my blood. The aforementioned post sums it up nicely ...

Of course, Mac fans will tell you -- ad nauseum -- that Apple computers have other benefits, ranging from better reliability and stability, to great service and support, to fewer hassles with security malware. There's also the fact that Macs can also run Windows, but the reverse isn't true (unless you're willing do some hacking and violate some EULAs). But then, when your budget is the bottom line, those secondary benefits become, well, secondary . . .

One of these days I'd like to own an Apple (besides my iPod), until then I'm happy with my PC. I find that people who have the most problems with PCs are generally the type of people who are relatively clueless about how to maintain them in the first place. (With that said, I'm fully expecting mine to crash now.)

We interrupt our normal blogging for a crass commercial.

There's a new version of Bloo available, Bloo version 1.10. If you're one of the three people on earth who hasn't already got themselves a blog (or gotten and abandoned a blog, or two, or six), and you want to have one that is hands-on, meaning you upload the code, create a database, configure it, etc. Bloo might be for you. Thinklings is powered by Bloo, for instance.

Plus, I work on the development "team" for Bloo, along with my fellow geeks me, myself, and I, and I'll be your best friend if you start using it. ¹

You can download it by following the instructs here. It's free, of course.

And there are some new themes available for Bloo too, with more coming . . . You can see all themes on the Bloo Themes site.

¹ That was meant to be funny, not desperate-sounding. <sup>2

2</sup> OK, I lied. That was meant to sound desperate, not that I am <sup>3

3</sup> OK, I lied. I am.

Last weekend I updated our Mac from Mac OS X 10.3 "Panther" to Mac OS X 10.5 "Leopard".

The interface on this thing is absolutely gorgeous. So far I've been real happy with the upgrade.

Just wanted to share.

What did they do about Fingernails and Toenails back in Bible times?

I mean without those fancy little fingernail clippers we all have?

"Here Joseph, hold your foot still while I chop off your 6 inch toenails with my hand crafted metal tool."

I'm weird I know. I actually wonder about such things. This is one of those times you should thank God that you don't live in my head.

The latest release of Bloo is now available. This is the first full production release of Bloo and I'm so excited I'm snorting. This is huge news!

[Bill yells over his shoulder] "This is really huge news, right honey!?"

[Bill's wife replies from the next room] "What's really huge news?"

[Bill hollers back] "You know, silly, the first full production release of Bloo!"

[Bill's wife, quizzical] "The first full what of what?"

Oh well, I think it's pretty cool. :-)

Actually, Thinklings has been one of my test sites, so as features were developed they were deployed here; in other words, nothing huge is changing around here since we're already on 1.00. But if you're a Bloo user on a previous version, there's lots in this release that's an improvement over what you have, so you might want to download the latest version and do an upgrade. Once uploaded to your site, the upgrade takes just seconds.

And if you're not currently a user of Bloo, what's wrong with you? It's free, and getting better all the time. Be counter-cultural, people, and use Bloo. All the cool people are! (Plus, I'll be your best friend).

For a full list of new features and fixes, you can check out the Bloo Development Blog.

Below is a summary of some of what's new:

- Commenters can edit their latest comment for a period of around five minutes, even if they aren't logged on.

- Static pages are here! The bios and history in the left navbar are static pages.

- Bloggers can create Private posts, viewable only by other posters and administrators logged into the blog.

- If you're have a userid and password on the blog and you lose your password, the blog gives you a way to get a new one, quick and easy.

- We have a Contact extension SnapOn now, which allows you to contact the Thinklings via email (even though you won't be able to see our emails). It's in the left navbar.

- You may not have noticed, but the main page now has navigation links at the bottom to page backward and forward in the posts.

- Created the Favorite Posts extension SnapOn, which you can see in the left navbar.

- Fixed our RSS feed problems.

- Added a Comments RSS feed (both feeds are in the left navbar).

- Bloo now has a new logo (up at the top of this post)!

- Now we can send trackbacks as well as receive them (does anyone do trackbacks anymore?)

- Plus lots of other bug fixes and enhancements.

There's already lots of thought going into version 1.10, coming soon (hopefully).

Sorry for the commercial. You may now return to your regularly scheduled blog.

OK, I confess. I'm an 80's Christian metalhead. I still like Tourniquet, Deliverance, Bloodgood, Barren Cross and One Bad Pig. (Further confession: my favorite secular band is Metallica. I pretty much judge all music by how close it comes to Metallica, which is perfection.)

So what's out there now? I'm totally out of it. Man, I have no idea. I haven't kept up at all.

What's good now? I'm looking for good, quality, Christian Metal. It needs to be driving, melodic, drums have to go faster than my heartbeat, but I need to understand the lyrics. And some seriously awesome guitar riffs and solos wouldn't hurt.

Suggestions?

As voted on by a select panel of my one year old.
Read the rest of this entry . . .

I mentioned in this post that changes were going to start appearing on this blog. The first change was the addition of guest comment editing.

Tonight I'm rolling out another change - a moving time window on the Popular Posts extension SnapOn. If you've been hanging around here any time at all, you've probably noticed that the ten posts appearing in the Popular Posts section of the navbar, um, never changed. Whether it's just that the Thinklings have lost our commenting mojo, or the fact that, with 4,000 plus posts, the competition for getting in the top-ten is pretty intense, or a combination of the two, I dunno.

I originally discussed with the other Thinklings the idea of creating more of a "rate this post" feature, so that the word "Popular" in the Popular Posts section might mean more than "garnered the most comments even though the post is lame". And this is something I still might do. But Thundergeek suggested that perhaps just putting a moving time window on the Popular posts might be a cool thing to try (and it's certainly easier). This will keep the popular posts a lot less anachronistic and a lot more fluid and might help keep some excellent conversations going beyond their normal 3 day half-life.

The Popular Posts extension now allows the blog administrator(s) to set a time window (if desired) for which comments are counted. I've set it to 90 days, so the ten posts you see in the sidebar are posts that have received the most comments in the last 90 days.

And, um, I see Blog Free Association is still at the top . . .

(For any Bloo-bloggers out there, this enhancement (and a bunch of others) will be rolled out with the full 1.00 production version, coming soon)

Oh, also - the Gatorade post is not lost! It now holds an honored space in the Artifacts section of our navbar.

Now, ask yourself . . . What Color is That Liquid?

A while ago I solicited a bunch of ideas for a Bloo logo, and I came up with this one:



It's really a poorly done logo. I like the concept, but not the execution.

Does anyone out there want to try to do this one better? It doesn't have to be exactly like this, but I like the puzzle concept, the color family (blue, for obvious reasons), etc. But I'm sure someone could maybe take this one or two steps closer to something that looks halfway decent. Or you might have a completely different idea that is totally cool. I'm open! I'm getting near the first full production release of this software (this blog is running under the release candidate 2 version) and want to upgrade the logo.

If any of you are interested in taking a shot at this, send me your ideas to Bill AT NotMyEmail.com, but replace NotMyEmail.com with outofthebloo.com (kapiche?). If I use your concept/logo, you'll get full credit for it.

Thanks!

This is a follow up to my Changes Coming post:

As I'm working on the full version 1.00 production release of Bloo (the public-domain object oriented blog software that powers this site) I've decided to start streaming new features out to Thinklings and Out of the Bloo, rather than making these two blogs that I webmaster wait for official releases.

Some of the features coming out will be stuff you've seen elsewhere, others will be more unique. The feature I just rolled out may or may not be unique to Bloo, but I've not seen it elsewhere.

We've all left comments on blogs that we regretted, either because of grammatical mistakes, poor wording, or the fact that we shouldn't have written what we wrote. Mea culpas and corrections work, of course, but wouldn't it be nice to just be able to edit your comment?

Of course, if you're a Thinkling or Honorary Thinkling and have a login and at least Poster privs here, you can do so. But guests are out of luck - or were until now.

I've turned on Guest Comment Editing. Now, when you leave a comment, you have five minutes to edit or delete your comment if desired. You will only be able to edit your latest comment on the blog. (Note to Bloo Bloggers: it's an optional feature and you also can control how many minutes the Guest editing is enabled after a comment hits the blog).

Hopefully this will help our guest commenters feel the wind in their hair a bit more in their blog experience here at Thinklings.

I'm a techno-moron, so I thought I'd throw this out to see if any of our geeklurkers can help a brutha out.

I would love to add a reading list to Gospel-Driven Church in the sidebar menu pretty much like the one I have at BCC is Broken. But I can't figure out how to transfer the code format to do it. The new blog uses the new version of Blogger with the allegedly helpful sidebar element formatting, but a reading list with images of the book covers isn't a choice. (There is the option of doing a reading list, but not one that includes images.)

And when I copy and paste the html from the BCC is Broken template into (what I think is) the correct spot in the GDC template, nothing shows up.

Any help?

Bloo version 1.00 release candidate 2 is now officially available. As you may (or probably may not) have noticed, Thinklings was upgraded to this release recently.

You can read the full release notes here. But the stuff Thinklings readers and posters would care about is below:

• Multiple Category Tags. Finally . . .


• Redesigned the layout of the post admin and post display. In particular, made changes to accommodate multiple categories.


• IP Blacklist - just more spamicide to deal with nasty spammers and trolls. We hates them, we hates them forevah!


• Multiple comment protection. Some of you had problems with your comments hitting twice. This has been fixed.


• Reworked the ThemeSelector so that the admin can select which themes he/she wants to be in the rotation. This gizmo allows you to pick the Thinklings theme of choice that best fits your mood and preference. Check it out in the navbar.


• Fixed problems with the RSS feed. For like the gazillionth time.


• For those of you who are Thinklings chess players: you can now login to the Thinklings blog itself. Feel the power! Actually, you can't do much when logged in, but you can change the name you're known by in Thinklings Chess, you can now change your password, and also your email. Click on the login link in the navbar to check it out. Once you're logged in, this link will change to the pretentiously named "Administer blog" link. But all you can really administer is yourself :-)


• Plus a whole lot of other little fixes and enhancements

Now, for the crass commercial: For those of you who blog and who maintain your own blog site: anyone interested in giving Bloo a try? You can get the software on SourceForge, and the best way to find it is via the main Bloo site - just click on Download. It's free, of course.

There is a small yet growing community of Bloo blogs out there. Join in!

And watch me for the changes . . .

Did they ever set the phasers to something other than stun?

As many of you know, a number of the Thinklings, our commenters, and honoraries are into the game of Chess. So, in honor of all the Thinklings Chess activity, I created a chess theme tonight.

I've made it the default for now, and it's also in the Theme Selector drop-down in the navbar. For those of you who have already selected another theme for your Thinklings experience, you can pick the "Chess" theme in the Theme Selector if you want to take a look at this new one.

What do you think?

Thinklings Themes are back!

Only four of them, at this point, but with the upgrade to Bloo 1.00rc2, the revamped Theme Selector gives you the ability to customize your Thinklings experience. Check it out in the left navbar.

Here are the available themes (long-time readers may recognize these):

Cigar Band - a favorite of Rod's, if memory serves. This was his brainchild, and Rob T supplied the graphic.

Rodin - an introspective theme based off of Rodin's The Thinker.

Seven Samurai - this is the one you're used to seeing. This is another creation of Rod and Rob T.

Thinklings Classic - this venerable theme was our very first "look", from back in 2003. The "nexus" idea was Rod's, and he came up with it at one of our pre-blog Moots. The graphic was produced by Stroke.

As time allows, I'll roll out some more. In the meantime, check them out.

[* anyone get this reference?]

Update: I just enabled one of the themes that comes packaged with Bloo; it's called Quentin and is actually a port of a Wordpress theme. Just in case you want something classy looking and very different than the normal Thinklings themes . . .

This morning Thinklings has been upgraded to Bloo production version 1.0 (release candidate 2).

A few cool new things in this one that I'll get to in a later post. In the meantime, the main thing you'll notice is that Thinklings once again supports multiple categories for a post.

Fellow posters - let me know if the interface to select and remove categories when you post makes sense to you.

Those of you who are Bloo users: I haven't released this version out into the wilds of SourceForge just yet. Will do in the next few days or so.

Watch me for the changes . . .

I'm going to be upgrading the Thinklings site to the newest version of Bloo starting at 5:30pm central time.

It's not an earth-shattering upgrade (although this is the first release candidate for production version 1.00 - no more beta! - so cool) but there are a few nice additions. Much more will be coming in the release candidate 2, due . . ., um . . ., later.

I'm out of town while I do this, so if I screw up, Thinklings will be down for more than a day. So I hope I don't screw up.

See you on the other side, blogosphere . . .

Update: 6:30pm: Successfully done.

Some notes about this upgrade - and you can see the full release notes here:

The main difference in this version, outside of some nice new options relating to blog configuration (such as being able to set time formats, number of posts to display, etc), is that this version of the software is now timezone-aware. Many blog packages force you to enter the difference between your local time and the server time (which is often in a different timezone) or your local time and GMT. Personally, I've long been intrigued by the platonic-ideal of Greenwich mean time and have wanted to have Bloo facilitate time zone processing, so the blog admin doesn't have to know or care where the webserver is in relation to their own timezone. But programming a blog to be timezone aware means programming the handling of all the local complexities of daylight savings time, so it's a bit of a chore and requires some careful design. Bloo now handles all timezone processing automatically - no more knowing how many hours distance you are from GMT or your server, and no more pesky adjusting twice a year for DST. It's set and forget. And, for those of you interested, all times stored in the Bloo database are now stored in GMT. They are, as you can see, displayed in the local timezone.

Also - a caveat: I haven't programmed all the DST handling world-wide - Bloo currently handles all the U.S. timezones, plus an Eastern European timezone (as there is an active Bloo blog in Eastern Europe). The rest will be filled in as I find the time (no pun intended).

I realize to most people timezone-talk is pretty boring. But I get into it. I'm such a geek . . .

Ray Comfort (with trusty sidekick, Kirk Cameron) thinks that it is.



I'm more inclined to think that this is just one of those examples of convincing the already convinced. To the theist, it may be obvious. But to the atheist, not so much.

Witness all the responses to this video at youtube. Wowsers.

Here's just one.



Does anyone know the truth about the modern-day yellow domesticated banana we buy in the store? Designed by man or by God?

I've upgraded the Thinklings tonight to Bloo Beta 2. This is a pretty big release, and it involved a ton of refactoring and rewriting, as this was the "fix any architecture problems now while there's still time!" release. For those of you with an inner geek, the full list of what was done can be seen here.

For the rest of you, here are the highlights:

- Rewrote the way the components of Bloo ("SnapOns") load, so that it only loads what it needs. Generally re-architected the SnapOns, and in Bloo, everything's a SnapOn, darnit!

- Implemented the CTCode extension SnapOn. This is a spam checker that is quite effective against both trackback and comment spam, and that doesn't require the commenter to answer SimpleHumanCheck questions. This is a Bloo port of the spam controller that my good friend Salguod hipped me to.

- Improved the Comments interface

- Added Theme Screenshots to the administrative interface for Themes

- Improved the Theme administration panel

- Implemented Session messages, to provide a common facility for displaying information and warnings.

- Cleaned up and upgraded the Quicktags buttons, and added Quicktags to the comments form (optional)

- Added extension SnapOns that protect the user from losing unsaved changes to posts or comments if an errant back or close button is pressed.

- Added new themes: Lush, Jill, Quentin, Monochrome.

- Now administrators can associate a blog logo image to their blog.

- Theme Credits now can appear at the bottom of the main page

- Fixed general problems with the RSS interface

- Fixed the problem with Smilies not displaying properly in edited posts and comments.

- Fixed the problem with the PopularPosts extension SnapOn that had it counting removed spam comments in the total comments count.

- And performed a lot more behind the scenes enhancements and fixes.

I've also ported the venerable "Seven Samurai" theme over to Bloo, and it's now the default theme. Soon I'll put back the old "skin chooser" so you can choose your favorite theme to enhance your Bloo experience. Coming later.

Glad this one's done. It was a big, honkin' amount of work because there was so much re-architecting done.

The next version of Bloo will be the big one - the full-fledged Production version 1.0 [insert nerdy "that's so cool!" snort-noises here].