Almost a year ago, Tommy over at Sticks of Fire and Brett Glisson worked out a deal where Tommy…  well, he bought / took over Brett’s brainchild TampaBLAB.  For the uninformed, uninititated or the plain flat out uncurious (helloooo Bush family!)  the TampaBLAB is an aggregator / blog reader.  It shares new posts from blogs in the greater Tampa Bay metropolitan area.

It sounds really complex but really, it’s not.   It’s simply like this:  You have a blog, most (if not all) blogs provide feeds — ways to syndicate or share their content with other web sites.  If you’re a  blogger living in the Tampa Bay area and you wanna’ share your blog with the rest of the Tampa Bay blogosphere, you submit it to TampaBLAB and lo and behold — every new post you write gets published at the BLAB (not in it’s entirety, mind you, just a lead in).

Of course, someone has to be in charge of the BLAB (acronym for Bay Local Area Bloggers).  Tommy didn’t have the time to update the theme and add newly submitted blogs, nor maintain the main blog page on the BLAB.  That’s where I’ve come in…  Running the day to day and keeping an eye on things…  Dropping defunct blogs that haven’t updated in a long while…  Adding newly submitted sites.  Occasionally posting on the BLAB Blog and fixing technical SNAFU’s that show up from time to time.

…Well, more often than not with thanks to the number of upgrades WordPress has gone through in the last few months and compatibility issues that arise because of it.  But that’s techno-jargon you could do without.

So it’s been good so far, a little slow. Know someone who blogs in Tampa Bay and wants more readers? Suggest they submit their site to the BLAB. Brand spanking new blogs with no posts need not apply, though… Sorry. Blogs come and go so quickly that we can’t accept the newest of new kids on the blogging block.

Also, I’m trying to figure out if I should make the Skyway theme that’s employed at the BLAB available to the general WordPress-blogging public for download. It’s cute but not cutting edge, you know?

Copy Editor: “RUMORS OF OUR DEMISE HAVE BEEN GREATLY EXAGGERATED“; bold faced and centered across the front page. Print it.

Janet Coats: What are you doing?

CE: Refuting the rumors that are going around that the newspaper will be ceasing publication in the coming weeks. It’s really heinous stuff and we have to re-assure readership with…

JC: You can’t print that headline.

CE: Well, no, I guess we can’t now that I look at it. It’s kind of long… We could, well, you know, find another phrase to use…

JC: No, you can’t print a headline like that — in bold — at all. Ink isn’t on sale this quarter and stockholders are upset as is that Mother Corporate‘s share price is down. You need to pare down that statement to the bare bones.

CE: Well, all right, we’ll –

JC: Look, “exaggerated” is too big a word to stick in there. No one who still reads a print edition of a newspaper will understand it… That’s got to go.

CE: Oka–

JC: And then pare down the most common words you are using: of, our, have… They have no relevance in this age of buzz words. Change the typed out version of the word “are” to “R”… See, it’s looking fine. Now nix the -ly on greatly and we can save all of another penny on ink! This will so please everyone back in Richmond!

CE: But –

JC: Just LOOK! It’s a bold statement in itself without actually being bold! It’s hip and now! Print it! Ship it!

CE: “Rumors r great”?

JC: Don’t QUESTION it, just DO it. We’re in the Internet age! By now the Times has already posted three stories on their blogs and out on the rest of the Internet, there are thousands of new, fresh stories! How can we be with-it with you lolly gagging in your old ways?! HOP TO!
—

Life. Printed Inanely.

Here’s a quick way to either get on my bad side or get yourself flat out removed from my friends list on Facebook: Use status updates for advertising and only advertising.

I hate to break it to bloggers across the Internet but Facebook has a tool built in called Notes and that gives you the ability to import your RSS feed from your blog onto your profile.

Your status? That’s about you. That’s not for blog headlines, requests for people to become-a-fan-of through Facebook Pages or some other promotional crap like that. If you need help marketing your blog or site, there are plenty of tools out there on the web and plenty of better (less annoying) strategies regarding social media.

I add friends and networking contacts because I’m friends with them or they are colleagues. Sometimes it’s because I am a fan. But it’s a real big pet peeve of mine for someone to find the only use for their Facebook profile as a large EAT AT JOE’S advertisement.

One fo the tough things I have to do when handling graphic design is trying to eyeball graphics out to see how aligned the graphics are — or how pleasing to my eye things look in their final arrangement. It can drive me crazy.

That being said, I got a kick out of this Eyeballing game. It’s basic geometry and a lot of alignment spotting. Though my average is quite high, it was better than I figured it to be.

Just a little update regarding those crazy college kids who are playing Metroid to raise money for Child’s Play: After 24 hours of play, they have earned $366 dollars. Their goal is $500.

It’s kids being kids for the kids. Stop by the site and help’em out by donating.

I’ve got a few minutes here while waitng for technical support to get back to me on a plugin issue with some software, so I’m doing my normal Wednesday web-surfing rounds while I wait and I come across the always enjoyable Penny Arcade (10 years of Tycho and Gabe! All rejoice!) and their latest comic and it gets me to thinking…

One thing I hated about the Star Wars prequels was the defining of the Force, or the defining of Storm Troopers (they were all clones!) and other rationalizations that killed the mysticism of the original trilogy. Conversely, it’s the pop culture references to Star Wars and inane in-depth discussion that I love. I mean, Clerks? Randall and Dante musing about the construction and destruction of the 2nd Death Star? INSANELY Funny in it’s inanity.

There are other places that don’t immediately come to mind regarding Star Wars and inanities about the how and other side stories that never get to the forefront of the story. One of the classics that I can think of is this image:

…and of course Penny Arcade’s latest comic seems like another great example… Though it goes a bit beyond just Star Wars: It’s the story about henchmen’s families. You see guys getting offed here and there… But we don’t care about them. That doesn’t mean other’s don’t.

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Anyone tried Dicewars yet? Strategy! Flash! Dice!

Anyone else getting hit with massive amounts of spam labeled “CNN.com Top 10″ or some such? How about being blasted the last 12 hours with another Phishing attempt from someone posing as MSNBC?

Let me first make this clear — you don’t have to be signed up for either site for these malicious emails to be sent to you. They aren’t news pieces, they are attempts to get your interest and lead you to fake web sites. So, no, you weren’t signed up for things without asking.

That being said, I just guffawed looking at this headline:

msnbc.com: BREAKING NEWS: NASDAQ index gains 720 points overnight upon war announcement

Uh, newsflash: NASDAQ doesn’t do shit overnight. Unless you are in Asia. In that case, why send out an email in English with that title? Because the English speaking world (most of it) who follow MSNBC are awake during NASDAQ trading.

But I digress. I find humor in this… But I’ve also given it more attention than it deserves.

That being said, I’m tired of waiting for Trillian Astra to go to Beta or the official release. Tired of reading the development blog that updates too slowly and only talks about the technobable in developing Astra which goes beyond the average user (which I am)… And of course, I’m tired of Trillian 3 Pro. I’m ready for an upgrade.

This was originally due last year and at this rate will not be out until next year… Please, get it done. Get it done, gentlemen.

— posted September 7th, 2007 by me.

Here we are now on August 11th, 2008 — just a few weeks shy of a year to the day of the original post I made about development of Trillian Astra.

I realize it’s a labor of love, more than profit, for the Trillian team and my impatience may not exactly warm the hearts and minds of said developers. But I worry, I worry greatly, about the future of Trillian if they are still fine tuning the software and can’t update their web site front page to remove a warning that was posted in March for a previous prototype build of Astra.

Two years in the making now… All while the major clients of various varieties (my blog software, WordPress; Firefox, multiple others) have been upgraded several times over that span. Of course, those are also open source and have a huge viral development team. Trillian is less viral and more product, sans the major development team.

I still ask to get it done, please. I have Digsby installed on my computer but it doesn’t do much for me. Trillian 3 Pro remains the standard. The outdated, unstable standard at that.