It took me a few days and several complete redos of the entire design, but I think I’m finally content with this new theme. I call it Retro-fitted because the colors are a kind of throwback to some past that I certainly didn’t live in.

Giving credit where credit is due

My original design for this was largely based off WordPress with its new design and the Movable Type Blog (Yes, I realize we’re at constant war with the other blogging system). I got my blue colors from the Movable type design and the reddish color from the WordPress design.

I had originally planned to go very open with the theme because I’m a big fan of Theme Shaper’s current theme. I like Ian’s my-design-won’t-get-in-your-way layout. I ultimately decided against the open layout and enclosed the content area. However, I still kept the front page’s fairly big post title font size, which puts a lot more focus on content.

Last — not anywhere near least — Smashing Magazine. Their recent article on the celebration of vintage and retro design made me completely rethink what I wanted to do with the theme. And to think I almost missed this article because I was working on the redesign. Luckily, I took a break and read through some posts from my feed reader and happened to catch the article.

More thoughts about the design

Gravatars
I don’t know how I ever lived without them. After a day or so of using them, then looking at my own blog, I just didn’t want to comment. It wasn’t any fun.

Author highlighting
You’ll also notice that I’ve added author highlighting to the comment section, so you’ll always be able to pick out my comments quickly because they’ll look a little different.

Sidebar
I’m not sure whether I’m happy with the sidebar just yet. I could probably work on it a few more days and get something more suitable. But, I might work on it a few more days and get nowhere.

Internet Explorer still sucks
Especially IE6. Really, the only problem I had with IE6 was PNG transparency issues. If only everybody would get off that browser, I wouldn’t have to support it with my designs.

Let me know what you think

Do you like it? Hate it?

Overall, I’m happy with it because I needed something fresh. Blogging can sometimes get boring, so we need to spruce up our sites once in a while. I wanted to go with something lighter and a bit more fun. I think I at least accomplished that.

I haven’t ported the theme over to the forums yet. Look for that in the next few days. Once that’s done, you all can look for some more of your regularly scheduled WordPress stuff.

My blog was down for about three days while I was trying to fix things. Another week of trying to get things pieced together would’ve probably made me crawl to some corner and curl up into the fetal position.

To top it all off, I’ve been “deathly ill” for the last week. My throat is so swollen at the moment that I can hardly talk without wincing, which doesn’t help when your day job is a job where you’re talking the entire time (I’m a teacher for those of you that don’t know).

A special thank you

I do want to point out a few users that’ve helped me out tremendously throughout this ordeal. Groovy and Web Lady, you’ve been more than helpful in the last few days, giving me updates on what’s happening on your end. It helped speed up the process quite a bit.

There are other users that have contributed too, especially on the blog. Unfortunately, I lost quite a few comments, especially on some recent test posts (also lost). I can’t remember who you are but thank you nonetheless.

There are still quite a few pieces stranded

Although I’ve got my blog and forums back up and running, some things are still out of place. I won’t bother with the whys and hows of this though. It just is, and it’ll take some time getting things back to normal.

This experience has taught me a very important lesson — don’t get complacent when it comes to upgrading WordPress.

I upgrade my local version at least once a week with the latest version from trunk and try to routinely keep my theme demo sites updated. In short, I was off my upgrade game when it came time to update this site. I wasn’t fully prepared for problems that might’ve arisen.

When upgrading JustinTadlock.com, I should be more than careful and will be from now on, even if I think I would’ve had the same upgrade results.

Losing a part of yourself

When a blog goes down, especially one that has had so much put into it over a long period of time, it feels like you’ve lost a part of yourself, an extension of your very being. For nearly five years, this blog has been a sort of second home for me. I felt like that second home had been taken away from me.

I’ve always felt passionate about blogging, which is why I develop themes and the occasional plugin to help other bloggers achieve their goals. It’s more than just a hobby to me; it’s who I am.

Just losing some comments hurts more than some may ever know. I consider many of you to be friends and have gotten to know a good number of you on a more personal level. I hate to think that some of your comments have been lost forever. On some days when I’m bored and have a lot of extra free time, I like to browse through old posts and read the comments. It helps put things into perspective, letting me see how far I have come in the last few years, how things have changed, the people I’ve interacted with.

A fresh start

I’ve been preparing for a redesign lately. It’s overdue. I suppose this is as good a time as any to put up a new theme for the site, which I hope to have done within a week.

I also got a chance to finally move the contents of my WordPress install to a subdirectory of my main site, which basically just clears up a bunch of room in my site root.

I’ve got a few plugins in the works too. Some of you noticed the Random Quotes plugin in an image I posted about a theme update.

The second of the plugins is a plugin that uses WordPress 2.5’s new gallery feature. Basically, it’s an extension of what the WP team put together. It’s also the reason I’ve upgraded the site — I wanted to show off the plugin and needed to upgrade. So, trust me, this plugin will be released soon and you will love it. I repeat, you will love it. It’s the sole reason my site has been down for three days.

The last thing on my priority list and certainly not least, is putting more emphasis on actually blogging. I’ve been too wrapped up in designing custom themes and developing free themes and plugins these last few months. Even though my subscriber count is continually rising, I’m posting much less than what I want to. I probably have at least 10 post ideas every day but don’t have the time to sit down and write.

With that said, I’m officially closing down my custom design services. Some of you may ask how I’ll be able to support free themes without making money through custom work. Don’t worry. I won’t discontinue free themes in any way.

I want to close down my custom work because I just don’t have the time for three or four designs at once and running things around here. Of course, I have to have a little bit of a life offline — just a little.

To close off this long post

I want to thank you all for being patient because I know that y’all are very patient people, right?

There’s a lot of stuff that needs to be fixed around here. It’s an unfortunate side effect of my site going down. If something’s not working, just drop a note in the comments or join the discussion on this forum post. I’ll put it on my list of things to update.

Now, I’m off to check my feedburner stats to see how many subscribers I’ve lost in the last few days.

After a lot of nagging from users of the Structure theme and finally getting some time to work on it, I decided to put this thing together.

One of the reasons it took me so long to get a forum up was because I was torn between which forum to use. I checked out what other theme designers were using. Darren Hoyt is using Vanilla for his Mimbo forums. Small Potato is using vBulletin for the WPDesigner Forums. The WP Snap Forum is powered by bbPress. Plus, I had to seriously consider using the Simple Forum plugin.

There doesn’t seem to be any widespread agreement on which forum software or plugin to use. In the end, I decided to use bbPress. I really wanted to use Simple Forum because of its easy integration but didn’t like all the bells and whistles. I wanted the more lightweight bbPress, even if it was a pain to integrate.

Some problems

One of the major problems I had was getting permalinks to work. I’m not sure why it’s such a problem because my WordPress install works great. Most of the threads I found on the bbPress support forums regarding permalinks were about GoDaddy. Unfortunately, I’m still using their hosting service. I can’t remember what thread I found this code on, but it fixed my permalink problem.

You need to edit your “.htaccess” file for this. Put this code in in the file (the top two lines should help GoDaddy users):

AddHandler x-httpd-php5 .php
AddHandler x-httpd-php .php4

Options +MultiViews

Another problem I ran into was not being able to create new forums as an administrator. This was caused by one of the most popular plugins (one that’s definitely needed), Display Name.

To correct this, just deactivate the plugin when you need to create a new forum. Then, reactivate it. Problem solved.

Why did I choose bbPress?

I chose bbPress for several reasons.

• The future for bbPress is looking up. I trust Matt and co. will continue building upon the software with an extra $29.5 million laying around.
• I like the open-source community of WordPress. If bbPress gets revamped, I believe the WordPress community will embrace it. This means more people helping out at the support forums and better documentation.
• Even though it was a pain to integrate because of my permalink situation, it’s nice to be able use other WordPress functions easily.
• Easy to modify with the template system.
• Very lightweight compared to other forum scripts.

What do you think?

I’m sure there are some bugs, but you should go play around on the forums a bit. I even have a practice forum set up for now.

Another thing that’s been bothering me is the naming situation. Since I’m still in the early experimental stages, I can still change the name. Currently, it’s “forums.” I think “forum” sounds better, but I don’t like the forum slugs, which would look like “/forum/forum/forum-name” using that naming convention. Most of all, I like “message board” but figured it was a bit too long.

Go give the forums a test drive and let me know what you think. I do need a few lab rats to help test it.

I’m still not sure what I think about it or how comfortable I am with it. Change is hard sometimes. I’ve struggled with what elements I wanted to include for hours tonight, trying to get something to work right, hoping for that feeling I get when everything is right with the world and the design gods are smiling down on me.

Well, I didn’t quite get that feeling I was hoping for, but I decided to throw the new theme up anyway. Maybe my readers can help me put the finishing touches on this thing.

One of my goals with this theme was to bring some of my work with WordPress to the forefront. There wasn’t enough attention given to my themes before, so I put together something extra at the bottom of the home page. I also wanted to shine a little light on my new feature: my custom design service.

I orginally had only one post excerpt on the home page but felt like it took away from the blog part of the site. Now, I have three post excerpts on the front page, but it pushes the emphasis on the WordPress themes and custom design service below the fold.

Things I like about the theme

• Less clutter.
• The design feels more open.
• Emphasis on content.
• Smaller sidebar.
• Fresh design.

Things I don’t like about the new theme

• Main content area may be too big for readability.
• Not sure if I’m satisfied with the colors, especially the background.
• Not particularly ecstatic about the sidebar links.
• Not sure if I like only having excerpts on the home page.
• Doesn’t feel complete.

A work in progress

Since I don’t feel the design is complete, I’ll have to mark this as a work in progress. I’m sure I’ll update little bits here and there throughout the week. I’d rather go ahead and put it up even though it’s not finished, so I can get a feel for how it works with my blog.

Feel free to give me your input. Do you like the new theme? Hate it? What do you think would make it better?

I won’t go into too many details about how sick I was, except for I slept well over 20 hours this past Saturday and Sunday.

This post is about change though. A new direction.

When I say “new,” I don’t mean a complete 180 or anything near that, but I will implement a few changes around here. I mentioned some of these changes in my last post, but didn’t go into much detail. Plus, those of you that got caught up in reading all those links to old posts (because I know you read all of them) might not have made it to the section at the end where I wrote about my plans for 2008.

Project M

For those of you that did notice the quick mention of Project M, I’m sure you’re wondering what it’s all about. Well, I can’t tell you. I just want to reiterate that I have a new project I’m working on for WordPress. I’m excited about its potential and what it could do for the WordPress community.

Project Amy

Even though she doesn’t know it yet, my sister and I are going to work on a Web project together. Her current blog, Amy N. Russell, which is momumentously underposted, is something that I badly need to update the design on. However, we’ll take this new project beyond a simple blog.

I’ve long thought that Amy has a lot of potential with her music, but she doesn’t do enough about it. So, I want to set up a site where she can showcase her talent. Much of what I’ve learned about embedding videos in my last two themes will come in handy there.

I’m at a point now where I enough online contacts and Net knowledge that I can help her at least get a small audience, which is much more than I could do a year ago. I won’t start this project for some time, and it will take a long time to put together because we’re half a world apart. I have a lot of great ideas I want to implement.

Amy, if you’re reading this, surprise! You might have to be a star whether you want to be or not. I guess I’m not giving you much choice.

WordPress Themes

I’ve got three WordPress themes nearly ready to go. You’ll get to see the first within the next week.

One of the themes is a custom theme for a client that has backed out of his deal. I’m sure I might rant a little about this in a later post. Since I shouldn’t waste all that hard work, I figured I’d give it back to the WordPress community for free.

I wanted to wait for the release of WordPress 2.4 for another theme that’s near completion, but the date on that seems to have been pushed back. I can’t wait until March to get rid of this theme, so I’ll release it sometime soon.

The last of themes is just a reworking of my current theme on this blog. Yes, I’m redesigning this blog, which means some of you will get some of the more advanced functionality included in my magazine-type themes in a regular blog theme.

I also have an idea for my next magazine or news theme. It’s still in the early concept stages, but I hope it will become as big as the previous themes have.

One other thing I’ve started doing is translating the Structure theme into other languages. Currently, there’s a German version, but there are plans for quite a few other translations soon. At the moment, it’s entirely experimental, but future theme releases may be translated too.

Redesign

The current theme was basically a Christmas theme for my blog and something fresh, different from my previous look. My new theme will center on the changes around the site.

The most important new idea is my “custom design service.” I’ve already been working on several paid jobs, but this is something I want to pursue more seriously this year. The blog will be geared a little more toward making money, but not so much that it will take away from the usual free content I offer.

The new design will put more emphasis on WordPress also. I don’t feel I’m pointing enough new readers to the tutorials I’ve started and other themes. I want to center the design a little more on that.

“The ABCs of Writing” and upcoming e-book

Some of you have been following my writing tutorial series, and I hope you keep reading it. This series will continue in the next few months, and I want to only keep making it more helpful and entertaining.

After I finish writing this series, I will release a polished version with lots of extras. The finished version will be in an e-book format. I’ve always wanted to write a book, and this will give me something to start from, a way to see how the process works.

What to expect in the next week

I’ve already started drawing out a road map for the next year with details for the coming months and weeks. Here are a few of the things you can expect within the next seven days:

• Site redesign
  As I mentioned earlier, I will completely redesign this site. I’m looking forward to moving through this year’s journey with a fresh look.
• New WordPress theme
  I haven’t decided which of the themes I will release, but look for this early next week.
• Part D in the ABCs for Writing series
  This article is long overdue, and I’m ready to release the next article in the most enjoyable series I’ve done.

Now that I’ve set a course and made my plans publicly known, I must work as hard as I can to achieve these goals. I’ve said enough about what I’m going to do in these last two posts. Now, it’s time to start doing.

In honor of this site’s venture into the Technorati top 10,000 blogs, I’m kicking off my new advertising campaign. I’m giving away 2 – 3 advertising spots for free. Currently, I’m using AdSense in the far right sidebar. This is where the new ads will go.

Note: These ad spots have now been filled. Thanks to everyone that participated.

I’m a little late on doing this because I’m currently within the top 9,000. I dropped rather quickly, much quicker than I had expected, below the 10K mark and was a bit unprepared. I’m ready now though.

How do you get this free advertising?

Simple. Leave a comment on this post or use the contact page requesting the free ad spot.

I’m not sure how many people might be interested in this, so I can’t guarantee that you will get a spot. Priority will go to sites or blogs in the WordPress, blogging, or Web design niches because that’s the type of advertisers I’d like to have on this site in the future.

I, of course, will pick the sites that get their ads put up. If there’s enough interest, I might run a rotating ad script or something like that.

So, what’s the catch?

There’s no real “catch,” but I would like a little help. I’d like to get weekly reports on what kind of traffic you’re getting from my blog. This is just a little stat-tracking to help me out.

That’s it. Free advertising in exchange for statistics.

I’m not sure how long I’ll run these ads, but am looking at about a month or until I start seeing some more serious advertising proposals. A lot depends on how much traffic my blog’s getting, bringing you, and other various factors.

The only other thing I ask is that you have a 125 x 125 px ad. This is becoming more standard, and I would like to try this out.

Am I crazy for offering free advertising?

To some extent, maybe. I do have some goals in mind. Part of the reason I’m doing this is to see if my site is ready for advertising beyond Google AdSense. I’m also experimenting with ad placement because I might change this site’s layout or theme some over the course of the next month.

It’s all one, big experiment, and I feel like this blog’s still at a point where I can do a lot of experimenting.

No, I won’t make any money from this in the short-run. However, I think this could help draw in a little more traffic and subscribers. I’m looking toward the future to see what my advertising options might be then. There are still a few kinks I’ll probably have to work out with my advertising system, and this experiment should help straighten those out.

Help celebrate my blog entering the Technorati Top 10K 9K by signing up for a free ad spot now!

A few weeks ago, in New Directions: Which Path Should My Blog Wander Down?, I actively started seeking out a permanent place for this blog in the blogosphere. Although I was a little unsure of what direction to go at that moment, I had at least started actually answering questions that I’ve had for a while (e.g. What’s my topic? Do I want to make money?).

Now, I know where my blog is going. I know what my topics are (at least to some degree). The official blog name and description is now Justin Tadlock: Life, Blogging, and WordPress.

Mostly, I’m writing about WordPress, but just in case I want to write about some other stuff, my readers will know that I might venture out into life and more general blogging topics on occasion.

I think that narrows it down from a previous description that ended with “other random stuff.”

Now that I know what my topics are, what do I do with them? Simple. Enjoy blogging. Enjoy knowing that there are countless things I can blog about without having to ask myself, “So, okay, what do I blog about today?” I know I have content that someone will need in some way.

Why WordPress?

Sure, there are countless others blogging about this wonderful content management system, but I think I have a few things to offer. I’ve been using WordPress since May 13, 2005 and I want to push my coding / designing skills to the limit with it. There’s still lots to be done. In part, this is my way of giving back to the WordPress community.

WordPress custom fields:

The first thing I wanted to tackle was custom fields. I’d been using some basic custom field scripts I coded for a while, but wanted to take them a step farther. Now, I’m writing a WordPress custom fields tutorial series. So far, I think it’s going well. I hope my readers are enjoying it because I’m enjoying learning new things.

This should be an interesting series to watch. I would always appreciate feedback on what anyone would like to see done with custom fields. They’re such a powerful, but rarely used, feature of WordPress. My goal is to release at least one (possibly two, if I have the time to do all the testing) post in the series each week until the topic is pretty much exhausted. Afterward, I plan to release a free e-book compiling all of the information in one spot.

WordPress themes:

Another goal I wanted to accomplish was creating more WordPress themes. It’s tough to continually put out quality themes on a regular basis. Right now, I have my goal set to design at least two WordPress themes a month. This is a reasonable amount, and it gives me time to focus more on the quality of the theme instead of just putting them out there as quickly as possible.

I think my two latest themes, Magtastic and Newspaperize, have offered loads more quality and functionality than any of my previous themes, and I want to continue this process.

WordPress plugins:

I’m not a hardcore PHP coder, and this makes it fairly difficult for me to code plugins. However, I occasionally come up with ideas that I want to use on this blog that I can’t find anywhere else. The problem is that I haven’t been sharing these with the community. My goal has always been simplicity when it comes to blogging, especially with plugins. I plan on releasing at least one WordPress plugin per month.

Mostly, I want to continue learning PHP and pushing my limits by using it to code plugins. My most recent plugin is Themes List. It give WordPress theme designers a simple way of listing their themes on one convenient page. There’s still a lot that can be done with it, and I look forward to continuing its development.

Weekly Roundup:

Another feature I’ve been hosting here is the Weekly Roundup. Weeks 1, 2, and 3 have went well so far. I haven’t gotten much feedback from regular readers on whether they like this feature though. At the very least, I may have brightened another blogger’s day by thanking him on my blog.

Basically, I wanted to just give a list of things I’ve found interesting throughout the week and pile it all in one post.

Google PageRank:

If you take a quick look at my Google PageRank, you’ll notice that this blog’s index page is ranked 4. While many other bloggers took a hit and are complaining about the system, I’m thanking Google for their recognition of my site’s content and boosting me up the ladder another three spots.

This may not be a big deal to some of you, and it’s not really as big a deal to me as my subscriber count, but it still makes me feel pretty good about my efforts. It’s like someone out there is recognizing them.

October’s goals:

Did I reach my October goals? Yes, but my goals were very general. When laying out a gameplan, I still didn’t have all the details, but now my path is becoming clearer. October has been an eye-opener. I’ve seen what a little effort, narrowing down my blog topics, and planning can do for my blog.

I’ve been amazed at my subscriber count’s increase. My daily subscribers have multiplied by 21. That’s enough to keep me happy for a while. Site visitor and page count have been a little erratic (mostly because of some days with loads of traffic), but has seen an gradual increase over the month.

Setting goals for November:

Now that October is finally at an end, I have to come up with some new goals. I listed most of these in the previous sections of this post.

• Continue the WordPress custom fields tutorial series.
  There’s still a lot of ground to cover in this series, and I have a few ideas ready to share in the coming weeks.
• Write a series called “How to create a photoblog.”
  This is something I started on a few weeks ago, but haven’t pieced it all together yet. The idea behind it was that I wanted to easily share daily pictures with my family over the next year (I’m currently living in South Korea). I’ve put together some neat concepts for this tutorial and can’t wait to finish the work on it.
• Double my current subscriber count.
  This will be tougher than it was in October because I now have fair amount of regular subscribers. But, I’m up for the challenge.
• Triple my average daily visitors and pages visited counts.
  This is a fairly lofty goal for me. I think it’s still within reason though.
• Make more money.
  I don’t want to set a price tag or percentage increase on this yet because I’m at a point where I don’t want to set definite earnings goals. I want to release quality content first, then see what kind of money I can make.
• Implement an Advertising program.
  Right now, I’m in the early stages of building a business model for this blog and am thinking about putting together some advertising packages. If you’re interested in advertising on this site, feel free to contact me.

November goals set. I’m ready to see how well I do with concrete monthly goals.

Why set goals? The simple answer is that it challenges me. It not only challenges me as a blogger, designer, and coder, but as a person. I strongly believe that we can only become successful if we push ourselves to success, and well thought-out planning always helps.

What would you like to see more of on this site? What kinds of things are you doing to push your business model, become a better blogger, or challenge yourself? Do you have a plan in place?

Don’t let the title fool you. I have a few specific things in mind that I want to accomplish with this blog. I have, however, been constantly asking myself this question lately.

I want to do something new with this site. It’s felt a little stale to me for some time now, and I’ve been thinking about what direction I want to take with it. I still want it to be my personal blog, a place where I can unleash on the world once in a while or rant or ponder over random musings, but I want to have a more defined direction for the blog overall.

Some things I want to do:

• Offer more WordPress themes.
• Offer more WordPress plugins.
• Write more WordPress and web design tutorials.
• Catch up on my book reviews.
• Offer monthly and/or weekly breakdowns of what I’ve blogged about and some things that I’ve found interesting online.
• Narrow down my topics (categories) a little more, which would help with putting this site in a more specific direction.
• Use tags to create a better taxonomy system in which users can find related articles. This would help users better find things they are looking for if the topics are too broad.
• Piece together a design that fits with this site, that I like, and offers content to users in a more useful way and stick with it for a while.

Goals:

• Get more subscribers to my feed.
• Blog daily, or at least write a few quality articles each week.
• Double my daily unique visitor and returning visitor counts.
• Generate more discussion of my posts. What’s a blog without a few comments once in a while.
• Make a few more dollars.

Mostly, I want to focus on getting better content out into the web by offering users, as well as the occasional family member that drops in, something of substance. I want to focus more on the things I love, namely web design and programming.

Now, that I have a few goals written down, I’ll have to follow through with them, won’t I? If you have any suggestions or want to tell me what you do or don’t like about JustinTadlock.com, feel free to do so.

I have accomplished a few things though. Let’s get those out of the way before I get into a long, boring post. First, I moved my sister’s site, Amy N. Russell.com over to my hosting account, and updated her theme. Which, by the way, is my first official Wordpress theme. I know I’ve done “themes” or “styles” before, but you have to remember that I’ve always used my own style/skin/theme system.

That brings me to my next point. I’m now moving over to Wordpress themes. That’s the final step in completely moving my entire site over Wordpress. Well, a few things will stay like they are.

If you haven’t noticed, the site has a new look. You should see the Faded Green Leaf Theme. It’s my first Wordpress theme for this site. Completely built from the ground up.

I’ve had a lot of fun in these last few days building a couple of Wordpress themes. They’re just so flexible. I have a few complaints with the sidebar/menu/navigation system, but nothing worth noting right now. I think I may start making themes to release to the public because I’ve seen some pretty crappy ones around. Not saying I’m the best theme designer around or anything. I learned a lot from WP Designer about building themes. A lot of it I knew, but some stuff I didn’t know (widgetizing the sidebar was very helpful).

I might release my current theme to the public, but there’s a few things I have to do to make it user-friendly. Let me know what you think about the it.

I haven’t done anything on Books In Bed this week. Like I said, I’ve been lazy. It is Spring Break though.

I went home last Saturday and stayed until Tuesday. Did I get in touch with my roots as I thought I might when I posted The Captain Of My Soul? I’m not sure. There were times when I felt right at home. Other times, I felt like it was the last place I wanted to be. I enjoyed seeing my family (for the most part) and friends. I got my first round of golf in since about early November of last year. I won’t bother mentioning my score. It’s too embarrassing.

This week has done me some good though. I don’t think I’ve been stressed out once. I’ve slept more than I have in months. I watched the first two seasons and part of the third of Dawson’s Creek, half the first season of Rome, and about half a season (series) of Firefly. I really need to branch out into some new shows. Which is why earlier tonight I bought the first two seasons of The Office.

Okay, so I’ve mostly watched TV during my week off. Some might argue that it’s not good for me, but I’ll have to disagree with that notion. I’m totally relaxed right now.

I’ll try to get around to everyone’s blogs that I’ve avoided for the past week. I’m interested in seeing what’s been going on in the blogosphere.