I'm Leaking Now!

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.

QOTW: CMS

I thought maybe I'd try to revive my old Question of the Week meme. Feel free to participate here or on your own blog. I'll update this post with my own answer later on. I've included my answer.

What is your favorite content management system (CMS, e.g. Moveable Type, PHP-Nuke, WordPress, Drupal, etc.)? Why? How long have you used it?

Update: That's tough. At the cost of sounding biased, I'd probably say SAFARI, which runs this blog. I've used it in various ways for about six years, and familiarity is certainly one of the big reasons I like it. But even more importantly, since I've written the code, it acts mostly how I want it to. It isn't perfect by any means, but I've had the ability to carefully avoid certain things that annoy me in other CMSes I've used.

Pardon the Remodeling Dust

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.

On the Fourteenth Day of Christmas

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.

On the Thirteenth Day of Christmas

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.

On the Eleventh Day of Christmas...

Well, I've gotten behind, but that's OK, there are several blogs I don't read all that reliably (or they don't post that reliably) left that I was going to cover. I'll skip those, leaving me with only three blogs I really want to mention. First up, as the Eighth Blog of Christmas is Ed Hurst's Mission, Method and Means (formerly “Plain Package”).

Though I've never met Ed in person, I feel like I might as well have. We work together on a bunch of things, including OfB.biz, Sakamuyo and ChristianSource. He's always full of thoughtful observations, helpful how-to's, and a whole medley of other things. It should not be overlooked that Ed is also a continued willing (sole) beta tester for SAFARI 2.

After a forced hiatus from reading his blog due to a WordPress bug, I'm happy to be back to seeing what he's writing on his blog. He's been working on two series in the last week, one of shameful ISP's and one on Christian romance. Take a look.

On the Eighth Day of Christmas...

Well, I just had a big New Year's dinner and I barely feel like doing anything at all, but I figured I should write the next Blog of Christmas before it gets too late again. This is an interesting exercise, at the very least; I hope some of you are enjoying the brief looks at some blogs perhaps you do not already follow. I really encourage everyone to checkout the blogs I mention, if you haven't already.

The Sixth Blog of Christmas is Craig's Avoiding Evil. Over the years, Pressed, as he goes by on the Internet, has provided some really excellent theological posts, along with an especially notable history of controversy in the Southern Baptist Convention — often that have been known to start good debates on his blog. Avoiding Evil has gained an additional writer recently in the form of Craig's fiancee, Kendall, who has added her own interesting flavor to the blog. While it isn't as regularly updated as many of the blogs I read, it is still worth checking out.

On the Sixth Day of Christmas...

Well, Blogrolling is down (perhaps six geese a laying got in the way of the servers), so I can't use that as my guide for who will be the Fifth Blog of Christmas. In lieu of that, I decided to go on a slightly different theme from the past few and make Josiah's Buzzing Bye the next blog du jour.

I first met Josiah on CS-FSLUG, but I ran into his blog — interestingly enough — via BlogShares, back when that site was new and some didn't have so much blog money that there wasn't much fun to playing any longer. Josiah posts on a variety of topics, but especially Linuxy things, along with VoIP, faith and so on. He's sort of my dose of tech bloggy goodness (unless you count Slashdot as a blog). As I've spent less time following the tech sector over the last year or so, it has been especially nice to have Josiah point me towards things I might otherwise miss. Thanks, Josiah.

On the Fifth Day of Christmas...

Well, I'd like to receive five golden rings, if anyone wants to offer them to me. I'm not a ring wearer myself, but I'm sure my mom and my cousin would both like one, and I could pawn off the other three for a tidy profit. That has a nice ring to it. But, barring that, we return to the Fourth Blog of Christmas, which it seems is Jason Franklin's the Book of Confusion.

Jason is a newcomer to my blogroll (I just added him about two weeks ago), although I've been following his blog somewhat for a good while now. I know him better for his participation over at SCF and on Kevin's blog. I appreciate his wide ranging blog entries, be they short little ones posted from his T-Mobile Sidekick (such as the one today on the foundation of our faith) or slightly longer ones posted in a more traditional manner. He is observant and I certainly thank him for his contribution to my daily reading of the blogosphere and (like Kevin before and Ed sometime in the next six days) also to the fellowship at SCF.

On the Fourth Day of Christmas...

Well, let's forget the calling birds. Today, we have the third blog of Christmas: Kevin's emergentpdx. It has gone through more names than I can probably recall now, but I've been following his blog in some iteration since the summer of 2002. Kevin's blog was the second blog I started reading and the first to really get me connected to the blogosphere (I followed his links to the Cranium Leakage gang, starting with WIT, especially). I've known Kevin a bit longer; I first “met” him on the customer forums of our mutual old web host back in the summer of 2001 — he actually had to put up with me as a customer for awhile, when he took a position at that company and was often the tech that answered my questions and complaints.

At any rate, Kevin has a tendency to make me think. He's usually one step ahead of me on whatever path I might be heading down (such as the conversion to seeing the light amidst the darkness and chaos). Usually, I've found I disagree with him, try to formulate an argument and sooner or later defeat myself and end up agreeing with him. But, contrary to what some people tell me, I'm don't think I'm going to be making my own RomeComing just now. Thanks, Kevin for the always thought provoking posts.

Hmm… so who will be the Fifth Blog of Christmas?

PS: To my first two Blogs of Christmas, I'm sorry your posts were a bit shorter, on the third time I actually remembered to start early enough that I could still write coherently half-intelligible ramblings.