Blog Month Is Over

Yea! Blog month is over! There is much rejoicing. I think I proved my point: You can do anything for a month. And a month is about as long as I can do this. I almost didn't make it, but I pulled through. The time really adds up. I spent 40-60 minutes each day writing a blog. And it takes probably 20 minutes of thought time to find a subject and some days I couldn't find anything interesting.

 

I actually did become a much better writer. You might now believe that, but I started with the bar very low and now it's a little higher. I don't think my proof reading skills got any better because my blogs are full of typos and wrong words, but it's certainly easier for me to write now. At the beginning of the month it was really slow and I suffered through forming each sentence. I learned how to just keep writing and not spend so much time on picking each word. Just keep writing. Just keep writing...

 

 

I beat my goal of 20 words per minute. I actually hit 30 words per minute one day. I'm pretty sure that I can't get much higher than that without speeding up my typing. That's about as fast as I can go and still fix some typos and proof read the blog once.

 

I missed two days this month. That's why the chart only goes to 25. The other missing day is today because I made the chart already and I'm not done with the blog.

 

Do you like that chart up there? Excel sucks at making pretty charts by default. I ending up making the chart in Excel as a new sheet. I changed all the fonts to about 18 points. I got rid of the ugly background gray. Boy is that a bad default. I changed the diamond points to circles and made them a little smaller. And here's the important part, I took a screen shot of the chart and pasted it into Photoshop. I resized the image down to 400 pixels wide. That gives it a soft, antialiased look that I like in charts.

 

Outlook is the best way I found to post to Blogger. If you set the default email font to Times New Roman 12 point it will post the blog without any <font> tags. Font tags are annoying because it screws up the formatting in Blogger and also in the RSS feeds. You also need to uncheck the "send pictures with messages" box in the HTML composing options. This makes it so that the images don't get attached to the email and posted once in the middle of the blog and once at the end. I just save the images to my webserver downstairs. This was the easy way I found to host images.

 

Well, my dedicated readers, this is my last daily blog. This is actually a good thing for you because now I can blog when I actually have something interesting to say. I'll try to blog about 4 times a month. The best way I've found to read blogs is with www.bloglines.com. That's a website where you can put all the RSS feeds for all your blogs. Then you only have to check with Bloglines to see who has posted new blogs. That's way easier than polling each of your favorite blogger's sites.

 

If you want to start your own blog the best place I found to do it was www.blogger.com. That was the only free blog website that I found where the default template wasn't completely ugly.

 

Later dudes.