• Now on Facebook; New posts

I have expanded my horizons yet again. I signed up on Facebook. I think it's funny that I went to Twitter before Facebook, but now I'm on both, so there you have it. Not everyone uses Myspace. Not everyone understands Twitter. I'm sure quite a few readers or visitors are on Facebook. I'm not sure how I will use Facebook. I uploaded lots of images and a few videos on Myspace already. I'm not really in the mood to go through all that again for Facebook, but I might have to go ahead and put myself through that hell. I've set it up so my blog feed gets published on my Notes page. My status updates should get converted to Twitter updates if the Twitter Facebook app works the way it said, but we'll see.

So if you would like to add me, go right ahead. Here's the link.

http://www.new.facebook.com/people/Bass-FishingDem/1766908472

See you there!

I'm also working on the Strike King Red Eye Shad post. I've put it off long enough, I think. My life has been a little distracting lately and the weather has not cooperated with fishing. We've had a lot of rain. Now the Summer heat and humidity is sliding right in. I have a rough version of the Red Eye Shad post, but because I have yet to catch any fish on one, I'm a little stumped. I do have some thoughts on the lure. That's about all I can offer. I will hopefully have it ready to go before the week end begins.

A new post will be published using the scheduler featuring pics of some of the fishing paraphernalia I have at my workspace. I have drink coasters scattered around with a fishing theme on them as well as a fishing themed coffee mug that I use to hold pens and pencils in on my desk.

Two other posts I'm toying with involve techniques. The first is a casting technique I've fine tuned after being forced to fish in close quarters between cypress trees. The second is a twitch technique I tend to use with a variety of lures. It's similar to the twitch I use to walk the dog with a Zara Spook, but other lures benefit from the technique, so I figured I would write about that too.

• Edited Shimano Callisto; New Header Image; Skirt Post Coming

If you have visited my blog in the last 24 hours, you might have noticed something new. I went to work on a header image in Photoshop yesterday. It's still a little quirky because I can see some minor pixelation around the letters. Otherwise, I think it looks pretty good.

I also edited the post on taking the Shimano Callisto apart. I covered taking off things from the handle side. I went all the way down to the level of the drive gear. Not sure how many people that will help. I plan on doing that for some of my other reels in the near future, or at least on ones that are no longer under the basic warranty.

I also wrote a post last night about replacing jig/spinnerbait/buzzbait skirts using parts from a pen with the aid of a paperclip. I'll proofread it and post some time later.

• Fixed Some Code, New Posts

My intro at the top of my blog which describes how to get around was not being properly displayed in IE7. Nobody let me know. I found out when I saw a screen shot of my page in my BlogCatalog profile.

What went wrong?
I had the text set to justify. Justified text is a well known problem area among web developers. Some browsers just don't know what to do with it. I use Safari and Firefox on a Mac. The text had been rendered properly. Apparently IE decided to be the black sheep. Big surprise, I know. Anyway, I set the code in the table to align to the left and then used the p align="justify" instead. Justified text always looks cleaner assuming the browser handles it as intended.

New Posts...
Rain is hitting Shreveport all week in the form of thunderstorms, so I won't be posting many fishing reports. I've written rough drafts of my Gander Mountain Competitor rod post and Vicious Fishing Line Conditioner post. Each should be ready this week. I'll probably schedule them and let Blogger do the work for me. I also have rough drafts of the posts on Vicious Fluorocarbon and the Strike King Red Eye Shad.

I'm trying to think up another frog related post seeing as how topwater season is almost here for me and likely already coming to life for anglers in much warmer waters. Expect the Strike King buzzbait post to come along soon.

• Table of Contents Removed

It was a neat script and very useful from a navigation perspective, but not very practical, nor very popular. As the number of posts at my blog grows, so will the size of the TOC. The amount of information the script has to load will continue to increase.

I ran a poll a couple of months ago about whether or not people use the TOC. Not only does it appear that people avoid the TOC, but they also avoid participating in polls. I can observe visitor statistics in my Statcounter pageload log and for the most part, people just use the label list to find what they need. How do I know? Their visiting patterns follow results on label organized pages.

No point in having it if very few actually use it.

• Upcoming: Season Starts, Skirts Sticking, & Guide Series Rod

I just scheduled two posts for later this week.

The first is on the official start of the fishing season here in Louisiana. Although we really never stopped, March is when everything takes off. I have a love/hate relationship with this phenomenon, so have a read when the post gets published.

The second is on my solution for dealing with spinnerbait skirt strands that stick together. Line & Lure conditioner solved this problem.

Now I'm working on my Guide Series rod post. I thought I had a text file of notes, but for some reason, I can't find it now. Got to start from scratch.

I'll also try and get out a post which takes a look at the new Big Bite Baits Dean Rojans Fighting Frog plastic lure. Neat little bait.

• Now on Twitter; Cosmetic Changes; New Poll...

I'm not sure how successful this latest idea will be. I signed up on Twitter, a social networking site with real-time updates. There were just too many things going on with the blog that I wanted to post about here, but were too miniscule to really justify making an entire post. Twitter fills that void. The feed is listed in the sidebar at bassfishingdem.blogspot.com, but I will be adding it to the sidebar on this blog shortly. A Twitter link is also listed in the subscription section.

Along the same lines, I added a new poll about social networking. Do you use it? I listed a few of the popular social networking sites and added two fishing-specific social networks to the list as well. Be sure to take the poll and tick the boxes for the networks you belong to. It will help me decide how to distribute my time and effort towards publicizing the blog and posting other information.

I have also been making a lot of cosmetic changes to the blog. Maybe you noticed or maybe you did not. The first change I made was to spread out the opening section entitled "Getting Around" where I discuss the various ways of navigating around the blog. I moved the Table of Contents widget to the top again. I changed the line spacing in the Recent Comments, Blogs of Interest, and Fishing Links widgets to shorten the sidebar a little. I also modified my post-footer by replacing the default theme's separator line with a horizontal rule code. I shifted around the Labels, comments link, and the other interactive items at the bottom of each post to give everything a cleaner look.

I am toying with the idea of going to a white background on the blog. The tan just isn't doing it for me anymore and a white background might make everything easier to read. A white background is rather conventional in the blogging world for that reason. I also need to start working on a header image. Plain text at the top just isn't very exciting.