New Year's Resolution

I'm going to make a blogging New Year's resolution. When I add a post to one of my blogs, I'm going to post a link on Facebook and Twitter.

I've been too shy to do it before, but if I ever want to get anyone to visit my blogs, I have to let them know about them, right?

I have 109 friends on Facebook and 41 followers on Twitter. Most of the Twitter followers are random people I don't know, people who have followed me, I think, in an attempt to get more followers of their own. I don't automatically follow those who follow me, and I hardly ever tweet, so these people may get a big surprise when they start getting regular links to posts about the Bible and Creation Science and stuff like that. :-)

I've got a sort of secondary resolution. Maybe not a resolution, exactly, but a goal. My goal is to start several more blogs this year. I have this blog and my creation science blog, Dinosaurs on Noah's Ark, and a blog where I very occasionally tell stories about ancestors I've "met" along the way on my genealogy research, called I Love to Tell the Story, and a couple of other blogs that are now abandoned. I want to start other blogs about some of my interests and hobbies:

• Digital scrapbooking
• Knitting
• Bread baking
• Genealogy
• Writing
• Graphic arts

Which one would you like to read?

Happy New Year!

Firefox: "The Most Disruptive Technology of the Decade"

Sitepoint has listed the Top 5 Web Technologies of the Decade, and Number One is Mozilla Firefox.

Their reasoning is that all of the Web 2.0 innovations were enabled by the tools Firefox provided.

"Without Firefox, Web2.0 may never have occurred. It changed the industry’s perception of what a browser was and what it could achieve. It deserves it’s place at number 1!"

Wow, I'm impressed. I've been using Firefox for years, but I never realized how important it was. Still more amazing that it can be the technology of the decade and be celebrating it's 5th birthday. So it's been around for only half of the decade.

I wonder if Chrome will have the number 1 spot for the next decade?

My Pet Peeve about Gas Pumps

I have a pet peeve about the kind of gas pumps where you pay by swiping your credit card.

Actually, I have several pet peeves about these devices, but I'll concentrate on the main one.

Why does it have to display the previous transaction amount until after you've swiped your own card. Every time I use one of these things, I feel sure they're going to charge me for the gas the person before me put in their car.

It seems to me that it would not be a difficult thing to have these machines programmed to zero out the amount once the previous person's card has been successfully charged.

As it stands, I'm always afraid that maybe the person before me drove off without paying and I'm going to get stuck with their gas being charged onto my card. Now, I know that most of these machines make you put in the card before you can pump gas, so I guess it would not be possible for the person to drive off and leave a balance that would be charged to the next person's card. But it also just seems possible that they could zero the amount out and not leave it up there till the next person starts to pump their gas.

This problem happens with several different gas companies, so it's not limited to just one brand. And it doesn't seem to matter if you press "pay outside" before you put in your card, the amount of the previous transaction is still displayed and you can't make it go away.

Am I the only person bothered by this?

I got my wish -- Chrome history

I just blogged about wanting a drop-down mini-history attached to the back button on Chrome, such as Firefox has. I like being able to see the recent pages and go back several in one jump, rather than hitting back-back-back-back all the time.

So, today, I clicked on the Chrome back button in a leisurely way and held it there a bit longer than normal and there it was -- a list of my recent pages! I don't know if this is another new feature of the beta of version 4, or if I just didn't ever happen upon this before, but I'm really excited about this feature!

Chrome Wish List

I love Chrome.

It's fast. It works much better than Firefox did when Firefox was new. Though I know Firefox paved the way for alternate browsers, so that's nothing to hold against Firefox.

But Firefox is still my default browser. Most often, I have my laptop on the desktop, plugged into the VGA flatscreen monitor and USB mouse and keyboard. That way, I can use both the laptop's built-in monitor and the flatscreen. So I have Firefox open on the flatscreen and Chrome open on the laptop. The laptop has a wider screen, and I usually have more tabs open in Chrome.

But if I click on a link in an email, it still opens in Firefox, because that's my default browser. I generally right-click, open in new tab for links in a browser, so they open in whatever browser the page with the link is open in.

I have a couple of things I still need Firefox for. One is a neat little extension I just found that helps me save stuff I've entered into forms if something goes awry. Since I do a lot of writing in web forms, this is handy to have. But the other two things I use a lot are my Evernote and Taboo extensions. These are ways to save bookmarks and other notes in a different way than regular bookmarks. I use Taboo for links I've found for writing an article, ones I think I'll only need for maybe a couple of days and then don't want to have kicking around any longer. And Evernote -- Evernote can be used for a lot of things, but the way I use it in my browser is to save articles I don't have time to read now but may want to read later. I can't leave them all in an open tab because eventually that takes up too much memory, or one of my kids will come along and close all my tabs when I'm not looking. Accidentally, of course.

So what I've been doing is, if I have a tab open in Chrome and I want to save it to Evernote, I copy the url and open it in Firefox, so I can highlight part of the text, right-click on it and save it to Evernote. There may be a better way to do it, but that's what I came up with. Until today.

Today I downloaded the beta of Chrome 4.0 and it has extensions! At least for those of us with Windows and, I think, Linux. So now I have an Evernote extension for Chrome and I'm happy as a clam.

Except for one thing. I wish Chrome had a little drop down arrow next to the "back" button, like Firefox has. I love being able to see a list of websites I might want to go "back" to, rather than having to hit "back," "back," "back," "back" repeatedly. I wonder if there's an extension for that?

For a new browser, I guess that's a pretty short wish list. Bring on Chrome OS!

What I Write About

Often, lately, people ask me what I write about.

Mostly, I write about what I can get paid for. I write articles for a website called Demand Studios who contracts with writers and editors to supply articles for several different websites. The one I tend to have the most articles published for right now is eHow. How it works: there is a list of titles to choose from. Some are things I'd never write about (Kawasaki Engine Troubleshooting, for example, or Homemade Recumbent Bicycles). Others are titles I either know about (printing brochures or writing resumes) or can do research about (sciatic nerve pain, or paper vs. plastic recycling). They pay me per article as long as the articles meet their editorial requirements.

I also write for sites that pay you by how many people read your articles. The two I'm working on right now are Associated Content and Suite 101.

And, I want to start making blogs on various topics and see if I can make money on advertising. So far, I just have one and I just started it. I don't even have a domain name yet. It's about creation science and you can see it here.

It's not really a lollipop

Lollipop, lollipop, oh, lolli- lolli- lolli- lollipop
budum-bum bum
Lollipop!

I keep singing this song, because it's being played all the time on a TV commercial.

When I was a kid, Life Savers came out with a Life Saver lollipop and they used this song in the commercial. Lollipop, lollipop, Life Saver Lollipop . . . I still remember it.

But the current commercial that's using this song isn't about lollipops. Despite the fact that they show conveyor belts making bright colored -- somethings -- there is no food item being sold here. Instead, it's one of those new small, low-powered laptop computers that people call netbooks.

Dell's netbooks come in 6 bright colors. A voice-over announcer who speaks in that kind of voice you hear over a loudspeaker and ignore, tells you the features of these computers, but I didn't catch the details. I was too involved in watching the elephant feet stamp the bright colored globs flat, and then this little robot on wheels cuts off the edges so it's a rectangle. Then it get's stamped with the Dell logo and it's all set. Is that really how they make these things?

Honestly, I want one. Small portable laptops in bright colors? And at a low cost, compared to full-featured laptops? You don't have to say more, I'm there! Sign me up, these look nicer than my little pink Asus Eee PC. I bet the screen's a bit bigger, too (though the commercial didn't tell me -- at least I don't think it did).

So, I'm the audience. I'm their target market. Yet, this commercial made me think these things are made of plastic. Or gum, or high fructose corn syrup. More suited to helping me deal with that grumbly feeling in my tummy around 3 in the afternoon. Not something I'll use to check my email. I mean, in my experience, sugar and a computer keyboard don't really mix all that well. Tends to make the keyboard sticky, if it doesn't render it completely useless.

So I'll go on singing this song and wishing they still made Life Saver lollipops, but I don't think I will really buy a Dell mini.