Well, first, I should note that yesterday was the second time I had an opportunity to blog on my blog on a leap day! How exciting. I intended to say something particular about that, but did not! Oops.

Also, I realized my blog’s birthday went by without observation. Yes, it was in the last week of February 2002 that the site eventually known as asisaid came alive. I need to bump up my “years blogging” meter on the side column to six!

Finally, it seems fitting, then, to wish a VERY HAPPY 30th BIRTHDAY to Christopher, one of my oldest blogging buddies. Hope you had a good one, Mr. WIT!?!?!

One goal I continually float before myself as a blogger is that of posting at least a post a day for a month. I’ve done it a number of times — and gone on even longer stretches — but not in recent times, thanks to the schedule of seminary. Well, I almost made it this month while I was off, but forgot completely about posting yesterday. Oh well. It is kind of a silly goal, I suppose, but I’m still disappointed to have missed it. The helpful part about such a goal is that it forces me to examine life, the universe and everything and come up with something to say by the end of each day. Without that pressure, I’m more inclined to put off writing and have less of an array of topics covered here. As such, I think I will try again in February.

In case you tried to follow the links in the last post to go read "Nameless," you may have been driven crazy by the fact that the links simply came back to the front page. Not that I have a terribly good reason you should want to go read it and if you are a long time reader, you've already seen the posts anyway. But, I've fixed the links, in case anyone did want to read the posts.

From July 1 through November 8, I believe I posted at least one blog post everyday. It was the longest run I’ve ever done of daily blog posting. It was a good exercise, I think, because it forced me to say what was on my mind rather than writing posts that were more like articles. Blogging in that mode serves as a form of catharsis and deconstruction of the day. I played with some creative ideas on days that I didn’t have anything in particular I wanted to post about. It was good.

Unfortunately, on November 9, I forgot to post, somehow. I’m not sure how — I thought I had, but if I did, the post was lost in cyberspace. And, since the record was already ended, I figured I might as well take another day off yesterday. But, I’m back now. Perhaps if I get time tomorrow, I’ll verify I really did post all of the rest of the days.

Incidentally: I’m really upset with the late theologian Francis Schaeffer. I’ve never read any of his works, and tonight I ran into one of them cheap on Amazon, so I used “Look inside” to read some of it. In the small part I saw, he labeled Karl Barth, T.S. Eliot and Soren Kierkegaard as part of those who have taken society below “the line of despair.” From the reviews, it sounds like he views Thomas Aquinas as part of the problem of creating this “line of despair” as well. What in the world would give him such an idiotic idea?

1. How long have you been blogging?
Four years back in February, so I’ll hit the five year mark in just five more months or so.

2. How many times have you taken a break from blogging?
It depends how you look at it. When I started, I wasn’t exactly a frequent blogger, and went over a month without a post a few times. Since I really started blogging seriously about four years ago, I don’t think I’ve ever really taken a break.

3. How long is the longest you’ve gone, so far, without posting on your blog?
Maybe 10-14 days since the Fall of 2002 when I really started getting into the whole blogosphere concept.

4. How many fellow bloggers do you keep in touch with, through your blogs, on a regular basis?
More than just a cursory read, probably five or six.

5. Have you ever met, in person, a blogger on your blogroll?
No. One of these days, I must meet my friends in Cranium Leakage, since they aren’t that far way.

6. How often do you update/change the ‘extra’ stuff on your blog?
I really don’t have much extra stuff these days, I moved that all to another site. But, if you count both sites, maybe every few months.

7. Do you think you’ll be blogging for years to come?
Yes, I’d imagine I’ll be blogging for quite awhile. Maybe until the web becomes an “antiquated technology.”

I’ve never taken SAFARI 2 out of “beta,” but what I’m working on now is sophisticated enough and different enough that I’ve decided if I ever release the SAFARI codebase, it will be released as SAFARI 3 (well, probably under a different name since Apple took my name and it makes it confusing saying I’m using Safari to look at SAFARI).

SAFARI 2 was essentially a port of SAFARI 1 to MySQL, with additions to make it a blogging tool. SAFARI 3 moves from there into new territory that I believe is not currently being covered by content management systems. My big initiative is metadata — each post will not belong to just one category, it will belong to tons of categories and an unlimited number of other, user definable classifiers. You can find any post by any of the metadata objects owned by that post.

By necessity, I’ve now introduced a new feature that I think is also innovative. For lack of something better, I’ll call it Word2SAFARI. W2S allows you to upload a Word document and have it output into your new SAFARI post for further editing or posting. I’ve tested using both wvware and the heir of its technology, AbiWord, as the backend to process the documents. Right now, the W2S codebase runs a server side copy of AbiWord to do the processing, which seems to work beautifully. Bold, italics, highlighting and various other Word formatting bits seem to be preserved. Also, and most importantly for my present purposes, it fully supports Unicode.

If I get time and it proves worthwhile, maybe I’ll add more uploading features, such as photo uploading or PDF2SAFARI.

A couple of days ago, asisaid was hit by blog spam (something unusual for my blog, for whatever reason). Most of it was at least semi-explicit, but it also had a peculiar quality to it: none of it seemed to actually point to anything. Several of them seemed to include phone numbers, but with the wrong number of digits. When I looked in my database, the poster left neither an e-mail nor a web site in the contact information. This left me wondering: why spam a blog if you don’t even link to a product or service?

Is this just the twenty first century equivalent of graffiti?

It’s funny. I have lots of ideas to blog when I don’t have time to do so during the day, but then at night, my mind has been going blank lately. I should scribble my ideas down when I have them, I suppose.

Hopefully, I’ll get more up tomorrow.

I hope you all had a nice Maundy Thursday.

Well, I promised the last two blogs today, and here they are. There are a few others I’m considering removing from my list because of inactivity or simply lack of time for me to read them. Thus, at some point, these two blogs will round out the entire blogroll of asisaid, most likely.

The Ninth Blog of Christmas is Mark’s 5 Speed Cassette. Mark found me rather than the other way around; I can't recall exactly how long ago. After awhile, I went over to his blog, and found a delightful mix of technology, faith, news and other bits of life commented on in a thoughtful way. He may not get it, but we can forgive him for that. Mark's a great guy and I always enjoy discussions with him.

And last, but not least, the Tenth Blog of Christmas is the Grey Shadow, the blog of my long time friend Eduardo. Eduardo, like Ed Hurst, has worked with me on a variety of projects, including some of the same ones as Ed: namely, ChristianSource and Open for Business. Eduardo isn't the most frequent poster, but I enjoy whatever he posts on when he does. He also likes the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and Jose Luis Borges, so how can you not like his blog? The Grey Shadow is the only international blog on my list just now, with Ciaran H. posting under password protection and Flip on extended leave.

Check both of these blogs out, as well as the other ones I've mentioned over the last two weeks. I think they are surely some of the finest in the blogosphere.

Ok, I’m running behind. Tomorrow, I will finish up the Blogs of Christmas with my last two featured blogs. I’m sorry about the delay.