katakat.com bytes from a participant observer

Getting this site up and running: I was inspired to do this a few months ago, having seen what other people do on the Web. My old website was pretty lame, and the appeal of blogging was the chance to easily update the content to keep it lively. (Also, I was bound and determined not to mail out my holiday newsletter until I got this done! For those who are waiting anxiously by their mailboxes, I may actually get it out before the New Year, so don't fret, I'm still around.) Sooo, after investigating a few blogging sites (Wordpress, Blogger) and some software products (ecto, MarsEdit,, and iblog), not to mention watching some online videos at Lynda.com, I decided to use Blogger's interface but host the blog on my own domain (avoiding the advertising). It took me several hours to figure out how to configure it all to run correctly, but eventually I did manage to archive my old site and replace it with the blog as the front-end. I was also able to tweak the CSS a little with StyleMaster to include my own graphic in the template. Had I done it all the "easy way," I would have been up and running in just a few minutes. But I like to customize things and ensure good archiving. I created an account on Flickr to post multiple photos, and downloaded FlickrExport a 3rd party plug-in for iPhoto to do batch uploads to it. That was the main appeal of .Mac a few years ago, though I'm encountering limitations with it and may not renew next year. In the meantime, I included a link to my .Mac account photo galleries, since I've paid through November 2006. I see that Blogger has ties to Picasa, so I will probably try that out too, for photo posting. I set up an RSS feed, in case you have a newsreader and want to keep up with the latest goings-on with me; this way you don't have to actually come to my site. I will be adding content and upgrades as I go along. This was the first time in a few years I had large blocks of time to devote to the project. Quite a learning curve for me. But knowing basic HTML and having experience with file management was a great help. I'm still looking into getting a software package to maintain the blog on my local hard drive, but for now, Blogger is ok.