The other day I wrote about hyacinth flowers but I meant, and was picturing in my mind’s eye, hibiscus.
I caught my mistake just now when I added that post to my cross-country trip page, which has now been updated with more photos.
Category Archives: Blog
Our Big Cross-Country Trip, Scrapbooked
Mostly for the enjoyment of my own family, I have collected all my Bonny Glen and Lilting House posts about October’s road trip from Virginia to San Diego right here on one page. Even better (as far as I’m concerned), I have interspersed Alice‘s posts about the trip—she very kindly kept a sort of running travelogue for us, capturing the highlights of our many Bluetooth-enabled phone conversations during my days on the open road.
At some point I will probably add more pictures, but this is a good start for now.
Pardon My Dust
Sorry about the stray test posts popping up in Bloglines. I’ve been working on a template overhaul, and I seem to have hit a snag. Argh. I followed Jimmy the Geek‘s instructions for creating a top menu bar, and it worked—or so I thought—and then the error messages started coming fast and thick. Argh.
To make the top menu, you have to convert to Advanced Templates. For some reason, when I apply my spiffed-up advanced template, I can’t get new posts to, well, post. I have to switch back to an earlier design (not an advanced template) in order to put a post through. This involves republishing the whole darn blog. Did I mention argh?
I could just let it go, I suppose…
But now there’s a puzzle to solve. I’m hooked.
Another glitch is that the menu bar doesn’t appear on the main page. It’s only present on individual posts, and on the "About My Books" and "Best of Bonny Glen" pages. Weird.
(If you don’t see it at all, anywhere, that means I’ve reverted to the old template.)
Maybe I need to go pester Jimmy the Geek.
(Is that the best internet handle, or what?)
AHA! Problem solved! Typepad answered my help ticket with a simple explanation.
Build error in template ‘sidebar1’ : Error in <MTListInclude> tag: No list in context This means that the MTListInclude tag is referencing a< TypeList that does not exist. The name of the list referenced in the MTListInclude tag should match the name of the list exactly as it appears on the TypeLists tab, including capitalization and spacing. If you’ve recently deleted or renamed a TypeList, this would be the first thing to check.
That totally makes sense to you, right? Right?
But it really was an easy fix. See, I did "recently rename a Typelist." I changed "Our Rule og Six" to "Our Rule of Six." Because that’s just the wild and crazy kind of girl I am. But my template doesn’t care about spelling. It grabs fast to the first name you save, typo-infested or not.
Isn’t this just the most interesting post I’ve ever written? Heh.
The Moms Who Blog Blog
In conjunction with the discussion group (come on, join us!), here’s a collaborative blog on blogging for sharing the tips and tricks we’ve learned (usually the hard way). Got hacks to share? We’d love to hear them!
Argh
Sorry for the painfully slow page load today. The Blogads code seems to be gumming up the works. I hope to solve the problem soon. I know it’s highly annoying. The ad is only running for a few more days anyway, so if I can’t figure out the problem it’ll disappear before too long.
Also annoying: not being able to change the color of my post titles back to green without losing the fleur de lis icon and therefore having a funky indentation next to the title. That red color is the default for this template, and I changed it in the CSS, but then a couple of months ago Typepad made a change that turned subject titles to live links. That’s a great idea, except that it messed up my CSS and no matter what I do, I can’t get it fixed. I can either have the red titles with the icon, or green (or any color) titles with a blank space where the icon should be. Neither option pleases me. Anybody got a hack for this?
Attention, Moms Who Blog
If you…
• find yourself composing posts in your head whenever something funny happens
• find yourself composing posts in your head whenever something annoying happens
• find yourself composing posts in your head pretty much all the time
• are on a constant quest for the perfect banner image
• and keep thinking of ideas for more
• think "heavy traffic" is a good thing
• have ever said LOL out loud in real-life conversation
• have ever said "But I blogged about it!" incredulously when a friend or relative didn’t know your toddler had, say, knocked out a tooth
• get a little stressed over how out of date your blogroll is
• can’t resist trying out every new blog platform to come along
• are proud to be a flappy bird, a marauding marsupial, or an adorable rodent
• but aspire to someday become a large mammal
• have attended more carnivals in the past year than in the entire rest of your life put together
• compulsively click your site meter
• keep running lists of funny phrases people have Googled to find your blog
• would rather give up your dishwasher than your feed reader
• wonder how to strike a balance between living life and writing about it
…you are not alone. Join me at CafeMom to talk shop with other blogging mamas!
What I Just Stumbled Upon for Firefox
I love Firefox. Have I mentioned that I love Firefox? I was browsing the add-ons this morning and found some good, good stuff. 1-Click Weather, for example: a handly little extension that puts current-weather icons in the status bar at the bottom of your screen. Here, I’ll show you:
How handy is that?
I’m also quite pleased with the del.icio.us add-on, which I should have installed a long time ago. It puts two small icons in the top bar of your browser, right next to the window where you type in a URL. The first icon takes you to your del.icio.us bookmarks, and the second one ("tag") allows you to quickly add a new page to your bookmarks. What I especially like is that the tag page pops up in a new window, saving you the trouble of clicking back to the page you were reading. I am using del.icio.us more and more for tagging articles I want to come back to, post about, etc.
But the coolest find of the morning? StumbleUpon, which many of you probably already know about, but I only vaguely recall having heard of before. (Here’s the link to its Firefox add-on page.) StumbleUpon adds another little bar to the top of your browser, under your bookmarks toolbar. At first I didn’t like that at all (since it makes the text area of my browser window just that much smaller), but after playing around with it for a while, I’m totally sold, and here’s why.
When you click on the Stumble icon in that toolbar, you are instantly taken to a random website. When you set up your free StumbleUpon account, you can select categories for these random sites to come from. The sites are recommended by other StumbleUpon users. You can click a thumbs-up icon ("I like this site") or a thumbs-down one ("don’t like it"), or do neither and just go to another page. Okay, thus far, StumbleUpon is just a websurfing tool, right? But what I LOVE about it is the little "Send to" icon in the toolbar. When you click on that, a little pop-up window lets you quickly and easily email the link for the page you’re viewing. No cut-and-pasting. I want to share a site with Scott? Click! It’s on its way.
I LOVE this feature.
It works for any page you’re on, not just sites you have "stumbled upon." Likewise, you can thumbs-up (or down) any website you are visiting. Since the StumbleUpon toolbar is in your browser window all the time (remember, that’s what I didn’t like about it at first?), you can recommend or email any page, any time, very conveniently.
And there’s some pretty interesting stuff to be stumbled upon, I must say. I gave my first (and so far, only) thumbs-up to this awesome site. I have to say awesome like a kid because I am that excited about it. It’s called Earth Album, and it’s the marriage of Google Maps and Flickr. You’re shown a world map, and when you click on any area, a little slide-show bar appears at the top of the screen, with Flickr photos of the region in question. I can’t wait to show this to my children. It’s going to be the perfect compliment to our Journey North project.
What are your favorite Firefox add-ons? What other awesome hacks am I missing?
2006 Homeschool Blog Award Nominations
It’s time once again to nominate your favorite home education blogs for the Homeschool Blog Awards. This year there are more categories and a nifty new website.
Nominations will be accepted from March 26th- April 7th.
Voting for these nominations will begin on Friday April 13th.
Last year, Here in the Bonny Glen was honored to tie for "Best Homeschooling Mother Blog." But the best part about the awards was discovering a whole bunch of great new blogs. Can’t wait to see what treasures this year has in store!
Banner Day for Google Searches
Another honor for Bonny Glen: the #1 ranking for "how long do walruses stay with their moms?"
(Not that I was any help in answering the question.)
Sometimes I Don’t Know Where to Post Things
Such are the hazards of having more than one blog. This post over at Bonny Glen Up Close (a dopey title, I know, and I keep meaning to change it) is much more on topic for this blog than that one, but it was written in response to a question in the comments over there, so that’s where I put it. Confused yet?
(Up Close is my informal daily-notes journal, of little interest to anyone except homeschooling moms who like to see what other homeschoolers’ real days look like. I use it in lieu of a record book—the blog platform suits me much better than any kind of book I’ve tried. It is a rough, scattershot record, but it works for me. At one point I was playing around with Vox as a platform for the daily learning notes journal instead, but I never did more than play. "Be Like the Bird" is a much better blog title, though.)