Well, this is it. I’ve given up on blogging. I’m out of words. Farewell!

It seems my blogroll has gone missing. I pull it off Blogrolling.com, so maybe they changed the way they distribute blogrolls. Never fear, my links to finer blogs across the world will return — hopefully sooner than later.

Well, it was not intentional, but asisaid celebrated its fifth birthday with a new look. Last night I was feeling rather worn out, and so decided I needed to do something different — doing a little web design hit the spot. As I was finishing up, I realized it was a perfect thing to be doing to recall that my personal web site became blogified on February 21, 2002.

Yes, the internet somehow has put up with me opining for five whole years here. Open for Business celebrated its fifth year last October. I’m starting to feel like a regular internet fixture!

Let me know if you see any bugs in the new design. I'm still tweaking it, and it may adjust a bit more, but after two years with the last look it was time for something new. About every year or two I alternate between a green and a blue design, and staying true to that trend (which I do not follow on purpose) we are in the blue era again.

A couple of days ago, I noted an increase in blog spamming on asisaid. Now, generally speaking, asisaid was ignored by blog spammers in the past, so I'm not sure how long it has been broken, but I've discovered the blacklists I checked against were no longer in service. No wonder the filter wasn't blocking spammers!

I've switched my filters around and merged in more of Brad Choate's SpamLookup (the official spam filter for MT, which, since it is written in Perl, can be easily integrated with SAFARI) so that I check not only the links but also the IP address of the poster. Hopefully this will work. If not, I plan on requiring authentication for commenting (e.g. you'll link your e-mail address with a password and verify that e-mail address), unless any of my regular readers object to that.

I’ve been spending too much time lately posting about posts I’m going to do “tomorrow.” The good news is, whenever you read those posts, tomorrow is still, well, a day away, which means I’m never late. But, on the other hand, I do actually want to finish my Barth series, continue my literary criticism series and post my hot air balloon pictures from last night's Balloon Glow. Oh, and answer the meme Eduardo tagged me for.

I went through my balloon glow photos tonight, but I need to make another pass through my favorites of the 650 so that I can avoid posting too many of them. A lot are duplicates with subtle advantages for one or the other depending on which balloon you are focusing on. At any rate, hopefully by tomorrow (there's that word again!) I will have something to show for my visit to Forest Park. I'm also going to at least complete Eduardo's tag by tomorrow. The rest will come "real soon now." ™

Well, the thousand post milestone was passed several weeks ago here on asisaid, and while I planned to say something about it, when it occurred, for a long time prior to the event, I failed to say anything when it finally did happen!

Oh, well.

As a bit of festivity for the event, here’s a question for y’all: what’s the most interesting thing you’ve forgotten that you should have remembered?

For the first time in asisaid’s four and a half year run I have been forced to disable comments on a post. It seems that blogspammers, which previously have either been unsuccessful with my spam filter or ignored me altogether, really liked this one post — I had to delete three spams in three days. Hence, I closed the comments on that post.

I hope it is an isolated incident.

Well, I think that should take care of my pending business: the permanent Cranium Leakage linkage went up on over to your right a few minutes ago. That means asisaid has given up its life as just another independent blog in the sea of journals and become a major network blog! Click the pretty graphic that the mad scientists over at Cranium Leakage designed to see what the official CL web site has to say. Of course you can also check out my blogroll, which has long linked to three of the four other active CL blogs (which are well worth reading, in my estimation).

I received word last night that my kind blogging neighbors Christopher, Craig, Michael voted me into their Cranium Leakage blog-thingie (a.k.a. "network"). I'll be adding my new Cranium Leakage seal to the side of my blog in the next day or two.

Thanks, guys! I'm quite honored!

Y'all can listen to the podcast featuring the business meeting that voted me in over at CL. It's a funny listen. It sounds like I'm going to end up being a call-in guest on the "show" someday -- I wonder what they'll do to me? Yikes!

In case you're fretting: don't worry. Asisaid will still keep the same quality (or lack thereof) that you've come to expect. Although, in honor of this event, I think I am going to drop the medieval spellings I announced the other day.

I’ve never been entirely happy with the new asisaid design I switched to early last year. The background color was a bit too minty and light, and the header was too plain. I've been wanting to try a photo-based theme for awhile, so I decided to go through my newly cleaned up iPhoto and pick out some photos. Virtually everything you see (including every photo up in the main header and in the sidebar headers) has been taken within the last few months. The first, third, fourth and fifth photos in the header were actually taken just in the last week, for example.

Note for the archive: I plan on changing the header more frequently in the future, so if you are reading this weeks or months after I posted this entry, go here to see the header I am actually referring to (in case I've changed it).

I've also replaced the drawing of a hill side that was at the bottom of each page with a real hill side of a similar shape. The drawing was a cropped portion of the old asisaid's header, which changed with the seasons. It never really fit in with the new site design, but the bottom of the page needed some color. I think this looks better.

Well, this is a work in progress, but I'd like to hear any thoughts y'all have on whether I'm headed in a good direction. Post your critiques below.