Wednesday, July 30, 2008

• Updated LFT Plastics Post

I updated my post on Lake Fork Tackle plastics. I cross linked it with a few posts such as rigging the LFT Craw as a jig trailer and my Back To Basics T-rig post. I also added more to the section on the LFT Craw Tube after having used this lure more.

A Few LFT Pastics
LFT Craw, Craw Tube, Top Dog Lizard, & Pig Claw

Wednesday, July 16, 2008

• New Layout

Some time in the last few days when I was fumbling around with those star ratings, a new feature Blogger is working on, I messed something up. Upon viewing my page earlier today, I witnessed the background color change from its usual tan to gray. In addition, a few fonts looked different and my visited link color had changed. In a panic, I dove into my hard drive looking for my most recent backup template. I couldn't find them. I'm not sure what happened to my backups from last month. I made one the other day when I messed around with the star ratings, but that didn't fix the problem.

I saved all my widget data offline and went to work on a completely fresh Minima template. This time, however I planned on making three columns keeping the blog posts on the left and putting two smaller sidebar columns together on the right. I've seen it on other blogs and I really liked that appearance. I started a completely new blog to test those kinds of things out on from this point forward.

I don't have a lot of die hard fans, so I don't think too many people will be confused the next time they stop by. Everything is essentially still there in roughly the same location, just shifted to the right or left. I think this look is a lot cleaner. I'm scared to mess around with those star ratings again. I don't want to have to go through all of this one more time. Besides, the stars take a little while to load and I don't want anything extra that delays my load time.

Monday, July 14, 2008

• New Feature

Blogger In Draft has two new features that caught my eye. The first is Star Ratings. Below each post, a star rating should show up so visitors can rate my posts. I like the idea, however it can easily be abused. I tried inserting the code, but the ratings didn't show even after resetting the widgets as instructed on another site. I will wait for this add on to go public before trying it again.

The second feature is something I think many bloggers have been waiting for. It's an embedded comment form. The comments form can now be arranged below the post on the post page instead of on a second page making it much easier for visitors to post comments. So far it looks like it works. I made a test comment and somebody tried to spam twice, but I rejected their comments.

Since these features are still in draft, they may not work as expected. Let me know if the comments form confuses you or rubs you the wrong way.

Thursday, June 26, 2008

• Now Subscribe To Comments

Visitors can now subscribe to the comments feed. Scroll down and find the AddToAny subscription widget and pick your feed manager of choice to subscribe.

Why subscribe to comments?

If you make a comment and would like to keep track of any additional responses from other visitors or myself, subscribe. You'll be able to instantly get up to date information on responses and also to new comments. Let me know if you're using it.

Sunday, June 15, 2008

• Upcoming Posts Are Done & Scheduled

Four upcoming posts have been written already and are scheduled via Blogger in the following order.
Local Tackle, Spooling Tip, Split Shotting, Bass Weight Calculations

If you haven't noticed, I'm getting close to 200 posts. By the end of this week, I will have 202 posts. I'm not planning anything to celebrate having 200 posts. I don't think it's that big of a deal. It just means I need to start coming up with more things to write about. Easier said than done it seems.

Enjoy!

Friday, June 6, 2008

• Subscriber jump?

Somehow the number of subscribers on my blog jumped from 26 to 40 over a few hours. I'm not sure how that happened. I know I added the addtoany subscription button to my page. Now Feedburner is reporting 25 subscribers again. There was only one "uncommon use" listed and that came from Blogcatalog, which isn't the least bit uncommon. I did notice the Technorati search bot was visiting a little more frequent. All I can figure is that addtoany somehow triggered a feeding frenzy, pardon the pun.