I’ve updated the RSS syndication feed from 0.91 to 2.0, which should suck less. It’s got the same address (e.g. blog/index.rss), so you shouldn’t have to update anything. Lemme know if it doesn’t work.

Oh, and for the vast majority of you out there who don’t have the slightest clue what I’m talking about, don’t worry about it. It’s one of those geeky things that apparently only I and my brother-in-law worry about, and you can safely go about your business. Unless, of course, your business is juggling chainsaws or something, in which case you shouldn’t.

You know, we’re all really worried about you, and we’ve decided that it’s time for an intervention. Juggling chainsaws isn’t really a solution for your problems, is it? We all love you very much, and we’re here to help you. Just put the Stihl down, okay? Okay?

…

(So tired. So very tired.)

Well, as you can clearly see, I’ve been entertaining myself in my free time by overhauling the look and feel of this blog and my page. All of the pages are generated automatically by a system of elaborate templates which I personally think is very interesting but I’m sure you won’t care about, so I won’t bother describing it.

What’s also interesting is that I spent all of the time I did making the the pages look pretty, not putting up any new content. You know, I hope that doesn’t say anything profound about me…

I’m trying out a new blogging engine, called Blosxom. This is why the page is currently so ugly. The hassles of the old one were just too great to cope with any more– hard-to-edit templates and unstoppable comment spam– so I’m giving this a shot instead. Don’t worry, I’ll make it all prettified real soon now.

Blosxom, alas, doesn’t handle comments (very well), so you’re not going to be able to comment (at least for a while). Seeing as how most of those who do comment predominately talk about poker and erectile dysfunction drugs, I don’t see that as much of a loss.

Update: I’ve got the new templates working now. Neat, no? I still need to put links to older entries on the left side of the page, but I’ll fix that eventually.

Yeah. “Hardening” the comments to stay “Viagra-free”. Insert your own joke here.

I’ve been having a lot of trouble with the comment spamming here so far. I enjoy having people make comments here, but having to delete 100 comments about penis enlargement or online poker for each entry certainly makes one think twice about checking the “Allow comments” box. So I’ve done some extra hardening of the comment system, using MT-Blacklist, and I’m hoping we’ll stay Viagra-free from now on.

Well, I’m doing a great job keeping this thing up so far, aren’t I? Admittedly spring is an unusually busy time. In the next two months, I plan to go to (at least) two crystallography meetings, a backpacking trip, my church’s 50th anniversary celebration, a wedding, a choir reunion, and play city league softball. So I hope you don’t mind if I whine, whine, whine. (I would like some of the fish with my whine, thank you. Perhaps the halibut?) Worry not, I have plenty of those semi-literate rants, and I will subject you to them soon enough.

Incidentally, if you happen to be near Huntingdon, PA on March 27th at 7:30 pm or near the National Cathedral on April 18th at 10:30 am, you should really check the Juniata concert choir out. If you come to the one in D.C., you’ll have to put up with us creaky alumni too, so I especially suggest the March homecoming concert: it is always very moving. I haven’t heard a Juniata choir concert myself for a while but Russ Shelley always does a suberb job putting the choir together. Plus you should buy a CD!

On an unrelated note, I’ve turned the comments feature off. I have heard ugly rumors about comment spamming of Moveable Type weblogs and I must admit to great fear of my comment fields filling with ads for Viagra, get-rich-quick schemes, and nekkid women. I get enough of that in my inbox. I’m almost positive that nobody reads this thing but if you really want comments, drop me an email (mzimmerman@virginia.edu) and let me know.

Just throwing up an addional entry up to see how it is handled.

So I’m joining the Wesley Foundation blogging movement. Dozens of current Wesley students and alumni have started weblogs in the past year, and I’m starting to feel left out. See David Vaughn’s, for example– his weblog is really well done and has links to most of the rest.

I’m trying something different, though– I installed Moveable Type on my own web account rather than using a hosting service like Blogspot (which appears to be the Wesley service of choice). Two motivations for this: first, I can replace my current webpage with the new blog and not confuse people with multiple URLs, and two, give it a try in case we would like to install it on the main Wesley site. I hope to eventually move the content of the old site over into this one, so don’t worry (like any of you care, anyway).