Posts in the "website stuff" category - Chris Hardie

"I thought that I heard you laughing, I thought that I heard you sing, I think I thought I saw you try, but that was just a dream." # Important lesson from the movie Atonement: always encrypt sensitive communications, especially love letters delivered by young children. # Oh no, the U.S. military has realized that the Internet is a communications tool for vegetarians: http://tinyurl.com/5jmxcj # @DougMasson Great! They had a verifiable paper trail in place this year, right? in reply to DougMasson...

If I survived that high ropes course today, surely I can wean these kittens off of their bottles. # What a lovely day, full of those moments C.S. Lewis described: "What! You, too? Thought I was the only one." # Whether they ever find life there or not, I think Jupiter should be considered an enemy planet. # New blog post, "On practicing what you preach" # Why do the caterpillar and the ant have to be enemies? One eats leaves, and the other eats caterpillars. Oh, I see now. # NO CARRIER...

One of the weird things about blogs is that, as much time as people put into creating interesting and useful content for them, it's rare that anyone goes to the trouble to read back through older entries unless they're really looking for something specific, or are otherwise very committed to the content. I don't expect that most of my readers here will bother with browsing through archives just for the fun of it, so I already make available a couple of topic-related mechanisms to find what you're...

Those of you who follow my blog may not always bother to check in on the other parts of my personal website, which is understandable since they're much more static than the weblog. I do try to use the actual home page of the site as a fairly current jumping off point for various other projects, events, and adventures I'm involved in, and today I launched a redesigned version that organizes all of that a little bit better. It also has a photo that reflects the facial hair experiment I'm currently...

I've upgraded the Wordpress software powering this blog to a more recent version, and added a few more ways to interact with my posts at the same time: I'm now using Gravatars - "globally recognized avatars" - to display user-uploaded images next to the comments that people post. This creates a little bit better sense that you're interacting with real humans, and even adds a dash of color. If you want to try it out, just visit gravatar.com to upload your avatar today. You can now choose to be e-mailed...

The feeds reminder and redux edition: I've been updating my list of local blogs and bloggers in Richmond and Wayne County, Indiana. Check out the new additions, and if you have any blogs to suggest or corrections to make, please let me know. My page of custom RSS feeds doesn't have a whole lot going on these days, but one feed I've started actively maintaining again is a Kicks96 / 930WHON News feed. As one of the few other newsgathering entities in the area, it makes a nice complement to the custom...

Are you brave enough to say no to a high-stress holiday? "The problem with Christmas is not the batteries. The problem isn't even really the stuff. The problem with Christmas is that no one much likes it anymore." Richmond News Review podcast episode #23: Debate bid followup, buying local, media coverage gaps from last weekend. And don't forget to submit your suggestions for the upcoming podcast segment, What news stories did Richmond media miss in 2007?. Energy Efficiency Jobs at Google: Get paid...

Another stop along the journey of trying to organize all the information in my life, without adding complexity: I've been ignoring del.icio.us for a while now. I've seen little icons for it popping up on weblogs I read, seen references to it in articles on software and productivity (including one on my own company's weblog), and heard people using it in everyday conversation. But I really didn't understand it, or what it really did, or why anyone would use it. (Plus, it seems like a waste of a perfectly...

I love Flickr, which shows off the world we live in through the eyes and camera lenses of everyday folks. In the last week I've had a few of my photos posted there (most of which are released under the Creative Commons license) appear in some interesting spots: Schmap Nashville Travel Guide: a couple of photos I took at the Tennessee State Museuem are apparently now a part of the fourth edition of this online tourist guide. There may be a print version too, but I'm not sure where to find it. All...

Rest in peace, Rachel Burrell: friend, encourager, piano teacher, visionary, comfort to grieving children everywhere, and an amazing woman. Seven principles of community building: don't try to control the message, transparency is a must, participation is marketing, concept of audiences is outdated, build value, inspire with real information, manage distribution media to grow. A new episode of my podcast (online audio broadcast), the Richmond News Review: a great interview with Jason Truitt...