Regular vistors here may have noticed I added my Twitter updates to the sidebar.  Some are very aware what Twitter is all about, however I assume many of you have never heard of it.  With that assumption comes how in the world do I explain it easily?  It’s not complex at all but explaining how and why so many people use it is another story.  The Twitter FAQ begins with:

“Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: What are you doing? “

While the FAQ does help, I think the folks at CommonCraft created the most concise explanation of Twitter with the short video “Twitter in Plain English“.  Watch it below:

I almost forgot… Twitter is free! Follow my Twitter updates here.

WordPress is the software guts of what you see here. It’s easy to use but can be difficult at times to upgrade.  I just completed the main piece of upgrading, but there are still some fixes to clean up.  For instance, the tags and categories of posts are missing.  I know how to fix it, but it will have to wait a day or two.  In case you wonder why things are a bit goofy looking here at the moment thats why.  It should be all fixed soon!

Update: It’s all fixed!

Yes, I’m a blog posting slacker.  Summer has yet again been a bit on the busy side. I had all these great ideas for posts that I never wrote… Oh well, at least I remembered to put this post up! :)

Welcome to jimporett dot com Version 2.0! If you are a returning visitor you will notice significant changes. I setup the site with dedicated pages for the Blog, Daily News, Links, About and Archives. This can be accessed by the new navigation bar at the top of the sidebar.

You may notice that the title header at the top of the page will change when you move to a new page or refresh the page. If you aren’t sure what I mean by this, click the “refresh’ button in your browser, or just go to a different page on the site. The image will not always change (hence truly random), however just repeat until it does. The photos in the title header are all shot by me. Right now there are only two, however I’ll add a few more to rotate in the near future.

As I mentioned before, I am using WordPress to power this site on my server. You’ll probably see some minor tweaks and changes go on every once in a while. Take a look around and let me know what you think!

UPDATE (11:15pm CST):  If you attempted to come by my site tonight it may have looked strange or had errors.  This was due to me uploading the new site.  It is now in place as appears to be stable.  The old version will hang out at jimporett.blogspot.com for a while, but will not be updated or maintained.

Those of you who frequently or infrequently visit this site will notice big changes beginning the evening of June 1 if all goes according to plan. The rollout of jimporett.com version 2.0 is about to go live. Notice I’m using all of the terms like “launch”, “rollout”, “go live”, etc… Ha! This explains my lack of posts the past month. Lots of work configuring.

As I may have mentioned before I am going to be using WordPress instead of Blogger to power the site. Nothing against Blogger, it has served well, but with WordPress I have complete control over the look and function of the site, adding more pages of content and flexibility to change in the future. Some of the same features will remain and some have been updated or removed.

I spent a lot of time making sure the new version of this site looks consistent in browsers: Firefox, Safari, Opera and dare I say Internet Explorer 6. Though I must say if you are at home and still using Internet Explorer 6 for most of your web surfing. Stop now! Switch to Firefox 1.5! It’s much more secure than IE6 and is much better than anything Microsoft has come up with.

All of the posts and archives from this version will be on the new version. I have yet to find a good way to properly migrate the comments over, but that’s a minor concern at this point.

The home page is still jimporett.com, but the content will be in a different subfolder. Going to jimporett.com will take you there directly so no worries!

I am currently working on a new version of jimporett dot com. I’m not sure I will have it ready for prime time by the one year anniversary of my site (May 15). Either way I am looking forward to it. It will not be powered by Blogger anymore. I am going with WordPress. It is a widely used, open source blogging engine and much more. It powers an entire site, far beyond just a blog. WordPress is much more flexible allowing multi page architecture with added features and a new look. Keep your eye out for it!

Ugh! Finally I can get back to blogging on a semi- regular basis. I’ve been working on some updates to the site. More to come!

Those of you who visit my site frequently will notice a few changes. I like to call it version 1.3 of jimporett dot com. Mainly just a cleaner look and better readability. You may see more subtle revisions in the coming days.

Sorry for the lack of posts in the past month. I didn’t realize the archive of the posts for December/Jan was inadvertently moved to another folder on my website host during some routine maintenance I was performing.

I didn’t notice anything was wrong until a friend stopped by the site today. When they emailed me to say hi, I thought I’d check out how things were looking here and to my surprise nothing from December or January… D’oh!

I’ll spare you the rest of the details. It’s all up and running now and I have reposted those that were missing.

I should be back to more frequently posting now.

Picture credit: Fox

I made some fairly significant additions to the site last night. I added a column on the left side that has news and articles. These are actually RSS feeds connected directly to web sites (as labeled) and update themselves automatically. Meaning when an article is added on a particular site, it will automatically update on the list you see here. I am only showing the 5 most recent articles to save screen space as I will be adding/adjusting the feeds as time goes on. Not too much though. I don’t want the site to become too “busy” looking like some out there.

You can see at the bottom of the left column that the feeds are powered by RSS Digest. It’s a great little site that creates Java code for any RSS feed you enter to make it easy to share feeds on your site. Best of all it is free with no ads.

More design changes to come!

Thanks to feedback from Mary M., I changed the background to a light grey for easier reading. Thanks Mary!

I’m working on a different title header too. I’m creating many, but more work to be done there. One of the possible headers is the red one on my moblog. It doesn’t fit the color scheme right now, but who knows that may change as well.

Add a comment with this post if you have any other design ideas. I’m open as this is a work in progress!

My moblog is up and running! See the moblog section in column to the right for the cool link to it! Click on the moving pictures or the standard link. I’ll try to update it often.

Url: http://jimporett.textamerica.com

FYI… For those who may be thinking, “What in the world is a moblog?” A moblog is a photo album with a mixture of cell phone pictures and regular pictures. The fun thing about a moblog is you can take snapshots with your cell phone and e-mail them from the phone to the moblog directly! Hence the “Mo…” for mobile!

Many use it to capture a variety of moments, scenes, life going by and share with the rest of the world.

I will be using it for all of the above.