Magic Jewball

It’s late Sunday night and you know what that means! Blog changes! Why? Because Sunday night is the night I do my blog back-up, in case Houston, TX where my server is gets hit by an atomic bomb or, you know, I hit a wrong button or something. They’re equally likely, people! Anyway, once I’m doing that I start to think about all the little plugin ideas I’ve been hoarding in my Google notebook from the 85 geek feeds I subscribe to. Inevitably, I will put a few into action. No one’s really reading on Sunday late night, they all have less bloggy things on their minds, so if I fuck up, only three people on the West Coast notice. Most of the tweaks you don’t see but this week’s are all visible and so, I’d like to show them to you. Let’s go clockwise, shall we? On the right, in the sidebar, you can see two fun new things to play with. The lesser fun thing is the print button, and it has a check-off list so that you can just print the posts you want on a plain white background without all the round boxes that so prettify my blog. It goes to pdf first and then prints. This is dedicated to Monkey Girl who once printed out pages upon pages so she could catch up. No more “what you see is what you get,” sister! I gave it its own box but I may move it to the footer. Although that’s getting crowded. More on that in a moment.

The next one is for all the people who hit refresh hour after hour and curse me for not providing new content. Now you can have a random blast from the past! In the Blogroll/Links area, there’s a new Meta section (I moved “Who’s Linking to Magic Jewball,” which takes you to Technorati’s list of just that, in there too since it’s also meta) and in it is a new link called “Random Post.” Go ahead! Try it! See where it takes you, it should be different each time. Commenting is turned off on old posts, however, so you’ll just have to keep those burning thoughts to yourself, alas.

In the footer is a new link to subscribe to my blog via e-mail. See, I tried to turn you all onto RSS and lots of people did go for it (thanks!) but many of my readers are not technologically proficient (love you guys!) and so you just check forlornly. Which is OK, but I worry about you and all the things you could be accomplishing, like curing cancer or looking at porn. So for you I’ve added this special button which you just click, a form comes up, you hand over your e-mail address, and each day that I have a new post you get an e-mail to let you know. I think I have it set up for 7-9am Eastern US time, but who the hell knows. Point is, you’ll know.

But I didn’t forget my RSS readers. You’ll notice a footer with some new options in each feed item. Some of you will remember my old blog on Blogger (perhaps the only time I’ve ever switched away from Google, but face it, Google, Blogger sucked back then). Anyway, back when I had an empty footer it had my old slogan in it. I’ve added that into my RSS feed for fun, plus an option to e-mail my post, should that float your boat. I already had a way to see how many comments there are on a post but now you can subscribe and be alerted when one gets added. They also had options available to add my posts to Digg or Reddit or del.icio.us but I don’t think I’m really that sort of blog, so if you want to do that, you’re on your own.

Lastly, some of my favorite folks, my commenters, have a new option to check-off a box that will e-mail them if anyone comments after them. I tried to sell you on Commentful but I’m going to go ahead and guess that no one is using it but me. So since you’re already giving an e-mail address to comment, why not be notified when someone else says, “ew, I hate what you said?” It could even be me! Although I’d say it more tastefully. Want to be notified? You have to leave a comment. Psych!

One of these days I will set up a page to thank all the designers of the brilliant items on my bloated plugin list as well as the guy who does the famfam icons which are all over my site. Famtastic!

So in summary, I continue to make my blog prettier and more fun, all the while establishing new ways to ensure you never actually come here.

Tears for Fears – Change