Well I finally figured out how to make the number of comments display on this main page. Looks like everything works now. Thanks to Mark for the heads up! Wanna know how to do comments on your weblog? Go to this page for the scoop. However you must have access to a PHP enabled web server (most freebie hosts are not PHP enabled).
Homepage watch: Looks like Scott Burka has added a new section to his homepage – Scott Facts. One thing that Scott forgot to include is that Scott speaks of himself in the 3rd person.

I decided that St. Patrick’s Day was a good excuse to redo some color schemes on this page. No more orange. It has been a full year since I’ve had this domain….and there’s been no color change to it until now.
Thoughout this time, I’ve been able to share photos, thoughts, and general miscellaneous stories. I hope you have enjoyed them. I am slightly surprised that nobody is using the comments thingy at the bottom of each post. It took me an entire 2 hours on a Saturday to install it.
Ok, question for you. Do you think this page is worthy of including on a resume? Not that I’m looking for a job…. My new boss has requested my resume, and I was thinking about putting this car crash of a webpage on a resume. Bad idea?
Now if I could only keep those kids from getting my Frosted Lucky Charms.

This just in: Beginning April 2, 2002, Geocities will no longer provide FTP access as part of their free home page service. This means Geocities members will have to use their Easy File Upload utility on their homepage to upload their files via their browser.
That sucks. I do have a couple of homepages on Geocities, but I rarely update them. Ever since Yahoo! took over Geocities it’s been rough. I anticipate alot of users to jump ship and go to another free homepage provider instead of having to deal with Geocities. If you are smart enough to know how to use a FTP client, then you are probably smart enough to find another free homepage provider which supports FTP. The old adage applies: You get what you pay for.
I’ll be traveling to Knoxville today to see some friends at UT. So it should be fun.

Has your church’s webpage been Faithsited yet? If you don’t know what I’m talking about, look at these sites:

• www.ottercreek.org
• www.brentwoodhills.org
• www.dianasinging.com
• www.faithmatters.com
• www.antiochcofc.org
• www.aultroad.com
• centralchurch.faithsite.com
• wingate.faithsite.com
• westend.faithsite.com

You’ll notice that the general layout of these sites are almost all the same…..navigation on the left; calendar on the right; banner on top; all having really small print. All of these sites are hosted by Faithsite.com. Faithsite offers low cost hosting to churches and businesses. Except for a few changes in colors and content, the general layout is all uniform. How depressing! A few years ago when I was looking for a host for my church’s website, I considered Faithsite. I’m glad I didn’t go through with it. I like experimenting around with the layout of my church’s webpage. I can’t do much experimenting with Faithsite. By using Faithsite, you will be assimilated into the Borg; with your creativity stifled. In principle, Faithsite is a good thing. However providing a bunch of uniform webpages just doesn’t cut it.
Somehow I wish more people would get creative with their webpages. Getting a template from Faithsite is just a cop-out.

At the urging of Comcast, I downloaded their nifty program to setup my Comcast email and homepage. That was a mistake. Basically Comcast’s idiot-proof program assumes that the user is an moron and changes around my Outlook Express settings for me. I’m sure it made some changes to the TCP/IP settings and probably installed some spyware on my machine. Note to Comcast: Do not assume I’m an idiot…..I have plenty of people to tell me that. Just give me the basics on how to configure my own computer’s settings and LET ME DO IT MYSELF.

Well my cable modem went out at around 3PM today when there was a cable (internet and tv) outage. The cable tv came back almost immediately, but the internet stayed out for about 7 hours. While I was a bit frustrated at Comcast for such a long down time, I wasn’t as frustrated as what some people could have been. I think we’re using the internet as a crutch these days. Friends and family aren’t talking as much as they used to. People are overusing the artificial communication of chatting and email. I used the outage to my advantage. I made a few phone calls to friends who I don’t get to speak to frequently.
I remember seeing advertisements for Prodigy Internet Service in 1990. They were touting that with Prodigy you could find out the weather in any city in the world. Back then no one knew what the internet was. I remember thinking why would I want to know what the weather was like in New York? This was totally useless information. How times have changed…. Now we can’t live without the internet.

Saturday I went out and got a 40x speed CD Burner for my computer. The church’s computer needed a CD Burner, so I decided to give them my old one (a 4x speed), which gave me a good excuse to upgrade. As usual I went to Best Buy. While I was there the guy in computers tried to get me to purchase a 3 year warrantee on it. He said that due to the heat generated by the burner, made it go bad at a much faster rate. He also mentioned that he had gone through 12 CD Burners. I thought this was a bit extreme. Let’s do the math. The Best Buy guy mentioned that he gets about 2000 burns out of his CD Burners have been out for consumer use for about 4 years, but we’ll say he got his first one 6 years ago. He goes through 2 per year. That’s an average of 10 burns per day EVERYDAY….for 6 years. That is alot of burning. So we can assume one of two things. Either he is operating a pirating software/audio CD factory in his basement…..or he is exaggerating his story to get me to buy the 3 year warrantee.

Homepage watch: Matt Folker’s webpage has been taken offline. Most likely Matt took it offline himself. Matt has pretty much taken himself out of the loop. He doesn’t answer IMs on the limited occassions that he’s online. Also Zack Bennett’s homepage is gone. Most likely it was taken offline by Geocities due to lack of updates.
I’ve noticed that Geocities has been deleting old webpages lately. On the other hand Tripod doesn’t even bother deleting pages. Example: This Tripod page hasn’t been updated since 1997, yet Tripod still gleefully hosts it.
I picked up Cracker’s new CD today. I haven’t listened to all of it. What I’ve heard sounds ok. It came with a bonus live CD which is really good. I tend to like songs more if I hear them being played on the radio. Radio tends to give a song a kind of “legitamacy.” I doubt that I’ll be hearing any of these songs on mainstream radio. I might catch it on Lightning 100.

I’ve tried using Netscape 6.2, but it’s really buggy. For example, when I type in a web address, sometimes it goes to a totally different webpage. Hit reload and the correct page usually appears, but sometimes it goes back to the same wrong page. Looks like I’m stuck with Netscape 4.7 for most of my surfing until Netscape comes out with a better product. I refuse to use Internet Explorer as my primary web browser, simply because of M$’s monopoly on everything.
I’m thinking about downloading Opera. The thing holding me back is knowing a full version of Opera will cost $39. Somehow Opera is going to have to convince me that it is worth paying $39 for it, when I can get a similar product with Netscape for free.

Geocities is the home of orphaned webpages. “Orphaned” meaning their owners have abandoned them and haven’t updated in quite a while. I noticed a friend of mine from Lipscomb, Hunter Hagewood’s webpage had been deleted (probably due to lack up updates). It’s been up since 1997 and hadn’t been updated for at least 4 year. No worries. For archiving purposes, I have a saved copy of it on my hard drive. I have a program which downloads webpages and saves them to your hard drive. It’s mostly for nostalgia purposes. Remembering the web…way back when….
By coincidence, a friend from church, Tracy Speight’s webpage has been deleted also. However it was most likely deleted by Tracy himself and not by Geocities.