All that comes with it

Greg pointed out to me yesterday that I haven’t posted in about five days. That just might be a new world record for me. Although the comment feels a bit rich coming from someone who updates his own blog whenever Brigadoon makes a reappearance.

I’ve got various amounts of stuff on my plate at the moment, both good and bad, and the impulse to babble on this blog just hasn’t been there recently. Don’t worry, it will come back, but it’ll probably be pretty quiet here for another couple of days.

But that’s not the reason I’m posting today. The reason I’m breaking my silence is that I wanted to point you all in the direction of my favorite new blog discovery:

I’m Ian. A 30 year old widower, and parent to the most brilliant young boy in the world. Max is 3 and his name really suits him. By day I’m a freelance writer and child dropper-off-er/picker-up-er. At any other time, I’m trying to be a superhero dad, albeit hindered by dodgy knees. Enjoy this blog.

Ian from Single Parent Dad has a touching story to tell and he does it with great writing and humor. This guy deserves to be warmly embraced by the Daddyblogging community.

Go to it.

I know that many of you are in awe of my blogging prowess. You sit awake at night marveling at my sheer unadulterated talent and ability. This is understandable, my genius staggers me sometimes too.

But envy is a sin. Granted, it’s not one of the more interesting sins. in fact it comes pretty low down the rankings. If you take into account the Pope’s recent additions it probably wouldn’t even make the top ten. But it’s a sin never the less.

And so to relieve you of its burden I am going to drop my veil of perfection, I’m going to let you see behind my mask.

This time last month I’d had enough. I’d begun to feel like blogging was a chore rather than a pleasure. I felt like my posts had become hackneyed and predictable, that I was somehow trying to impress others rather than writing for enjoyment. This feeling didn’t come out of the blue, nor had it been the first time I’ve experienced it. I had a blog-life crisis in the middle of last year, I know what to do when this happens. Keep your head down, keep writing, and work through it. I’m not planning to give this up any time soon, as tempting as that delete all button looks at times I know I’d regret it.

But I felt I could do with a break. The Dales Walk is taking up increasing chunks of my time and I wanted to devote some serious energy into getting the local fundraising rolling. Initially I was planning on handing over All That Comes With It to guest bloggers for a couple of weeks, but then something Miss Britt said scared me into thinking I’d lose all of my readers. So I changed the plan to having a weekly guest posts, throwing in a few easy photo’s now and again, and trying not to put myself under false pressure to post every single day.

And by and large it worked. The blue funk has passed, I’m back to being enthusiastic about blogging again. I still wanted a bit of time off though, and so last week I cobbled together a bunch of posts in advance and set them up to go online throughout this week.

Except there is a problem.

Today I’ve had to take the day off sick from work. My throat feels like it’s lined with acid, every bone in my body aches, and my hacking is periodically splattering my laptop in germ ridden goo. In short, I am dying a dreaded death. Pity me, oh pity me.

However the post that was scheduled to be published today is all about me blogging from a pub. There is even a picture of me sitting in there enjoying it’s comforts.

People I work with read this blog, although most of them very kindly pretend they don’t. I think it would piss them off a tad to be reading about me drinking beer and enjoying myself while they struggle to deal with the inevitable Friday night rush (why do people wait until Friday before becoming mentally unwell?).

So I’m pulling the piece. It was a good one though. I even published it by accident yesterday and got a couple of comments:

Oli said:
Bloody coffee.?And why didn’t I get to see the videos and pictures? I’m all and sundry too, you know.

I did once receive an interesting video of a young lady, while I was sitting on a train. That’ll teach me to have bluetooth switched on while on public transport.?I’ve not received anything quite as interesting since.

CamiKaos said:
I wanted to hear the juicy bits too!
Damn coffee…

There; you’re intrigued now aren’t you! But no, it will have to wait until another day. And when I do publish it you will all have to pretend that you don’t know that it was written last Thursday.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a lung I need to cough up and pitiful groaning and whimpering noises to make.

Oh, and if anyone is feeling there own bit of blogging blues, I highly recommend reading NYCWD’s excellent pep talk.

The honeymoon period between me and my iPod touch is still far from over. I remain enthralled with it’s beauty and captivated by it’s intelligence. Sure, I have become aware of a few faults, and I admit that it may have picked up a few blemishes along the way. But these things have only added more depth to our relationship. I am still in love and my fingers still caress it’s sleek smooth curves with the same tenderness as on the first day we met. And you should see the size of it’s hard drive! Wowser!

My Macbook and I on the other hand have become somewhat estranged. Perhaps I am more jaded these days. I am no longer the fresh faced Windows XP escapee, easily dazzled by hansom good looks and a promise not to give me a virus. But to be honest I think the reason things have gone cold between us is that it hasn’t been very well recently.

I think it all started when I downloaded a system update and it froze during the installation process. I force rebooted it and things seemed to be OK, but then the internet slowed to a complete crawl. I was getting speeds that wouldn’t have looked out of place coming from a 56k phone modem. I wasn’t so much surfing the web as slowly sinking in it.

After two weeks of increasing frustration I bit the bullet and reinstalled the operating system. Thankfully things appear to have sped right up. This means I’ll be more present on your blogs than I have been recently. You may not have noticed but due to general net slugishness I was forced to cut right back on my blog reading. Such has been my backlog that I’ve even had to click the “mark all as read” button on google reader a couple of times. an act of betrayal for which I shall feel eternally guilty.

So I’m back. Now if you’ll excuse me I’m going to have to go again. I need tinker with the settings a bit more. I’ve found that a computer is a lot like a pair of walking boots - you have to wear them in a bit before they feel truly comfortable.

Oh, and go check out Dan Leone’s 20 Ways to tell if blogging is taking over your life. It hit me so close to the bone I had to go have an x-ray.

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In July of this year I shall be walking 78 miles in 6 days in aid of the Joseph Salmon Trust, a charity founded by my close friends in memorial to their son Joseph who died aged 3 in April of 2005. Please look here for further details and consider sponsoring me. Thank you.

I’m not sure if this is supposed to be a secret, but it looks like my brother is getting ready to switch his site from blogger to a self hosted wordpress blog.

So, you think you can run with the big boys eh Sam? You think you’ve got what it takes? Well I’m not going to be able to shield you forever little guy. You have to make your way into the big bad world sometime. Just remember, I’m not going to be there to dry your tears if you accidentally urinate on your Thundercats duvet this time.

Nevertheless I am able to give him some pointers. Here are some wordpress plugins that I rather partial to:

Around this Date

Picture the scene. There you are at a high-powered business meeting. The room is packed to the rafters with executives and important clients and customers. The very course of your career could well be dictated by your performance over the next forty five minutes. And yet you can’t seem to focus. Your concentration just isn’t there. When you should be thinking about amalgamated beef packaging and incorporated chicken benchmarks all you can think about is something that has been niggling you ever since you got up this morning: “What was Dan doing this time last year??”

OK, maybe not. In fact I think the only person who looks at the this time last year section on the left had side of the blog is me. But that’s ok. It’s really quite nice to revisit those old posts now and again. It’s what I started blogging for in the first place, to have a record of things that otherwise I’d forget (of course now I blog purely for the glamour and fame).

Get it here

Comment Email Responder

Received blog wisdom states that one of the best ways to encourage readers is to respond individually to the comments you receive. Some people are excellent at this, Whit for example always emails you an amusing retort to whatever half baked blathering you sully his comments section with. Me, I’m not so good. It’s not that I don’t value people’s comments, quite the contrary - I leap on them like a ravenous wolf (a ravenous wolf that’s self esteem is dictated by the number of blog comments it gets). But the process of going into my control panel, cutting and pasting a commenter’s email address, then going into my mail account and composing a witty and erudite response is organisational task that is quite frankly beyond me.

The comment email responder plugin however allows the blog administrator to respond in the comments section and have a copy by email simultaneously, thus making the whole process one hundred percent easier.

Of course I still don’t respond to peoples comments as often as I should do. This is because I am crap.

Get it here

Commentluv

My newest acquisition. I saw this over at Lee’s blog and had to have it. Basically whenever anyone leaves a comment the plugin adds a link to the most recent entry from their own blog at the bottom of the comment. Here’s an example of it in action. Unfortunately it will only link to blogs which have RSS feeds available (So Greg, Deb, Rachel & Henry and Steve, you need to get your sites sorted out. It’s not 2005 anymore guys. Sheesh, get with the program).

Get it here

Extended Live Archives

I bet you haven’t even looked at my archive page have you? Well go have a quick look now, I’ll be waiting for you when you come back.

…

You taken a look? Liar, you’ve done no such thing. I have a stat counter you know, I can tell where you’ve been (and sometimes even where you came from – Paul you should be ashamed of yourself). You’re going to have to take it on trust then, my Archive page is a wonder to behold. It is glorious in its sleek and smooth bountiful beauty. It’s even been praised in reviews of my blog. And all of this could be yours too if you install the Extended Live Archive Plugin.

Get it here

Wordpress Database Backup

The server where I host my blog has yet to spontaneously burst into flame, but with my track record with technology I know this is only a matter of time. This plugin allows you to email a backup copy of your entire blog to yourself whenever you want. Very handy.

Get it here

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I apologise for all those who still use blogger, and for whom this post will have had little relevance. However I consider it as payback for your damn blogs commenting system refusing to let me link back to my site unless I have an account with google. Bloody imperialists trying to take over the world.

I’ve recently started to read a blog by someone who lives in the same village as me. I’m not going to link to it because I don’t want him to follow me back here. The idea of people who live near me reading my blog sort of creeps me out.

According to my statcounter the majority of visitors to this site are from overseas. There are a few who live within 30 miles (Paul, Gary, Steve, and various blogless friends and relations). But I know who they are and I’m pretty comfortable with all of them. However I’m not sure I want many more readers who might be able to track me down and pop round on the off chance of a cup of tea.

And they could, very easily. I’ve never made much of an effort to hide our identities here on the blog. I read plenty of other bloggers who only refer to their kids as “banana breath” or “pumpkin face” or some such pseudonym; but until recently I’ve never really considered disguising who we are as something I wanted to do.

Whit’s recent excellent post over at DadCentric on the topic of blogging about our children started a train of thought for me. Like him I started to blog both out of pride in my family and in order to leave a record of the love I have for them. But in doing so I have shoved my children onto a stage on which they never asked to perform. Their exploits, foibles, and bon mots are held up for examination and used as entertainment for people all over the world. Granted my audience probably numbers in the low twenties, but the fact still remains that someone in Australia knows my son has recently vomited in my bed.

I don’t worry too much about crazed pedophiles tracking us down. I’ve met enough people who have been abused as children to know that “stranger danger” is much less worrying than “neighbor, friend and relative danger”. But I am concerned that in ten years time Amy and Evan’s school friends will stick their names into google and stumble upon this site. They will then be able to uncover enough valuable ammunition in order to torment them for months on end. Childhood can be tough enough without your father leaking damaging information to the enemy.

I also worry a little that one day one of my my patients might come across the site. I don’t blog about work as a rule, and so there are no confidentiality issues at stake. But there are certainly a few people I work with that I don’t want knowing too much about my personal life.

So I’ve made a decision. Over the next couple of weeks I’m going to work my way through my archives and modify any post which could be used to pinpoint us. I’m not planning to change Amy and Evan’s names to “Dishmop” and “The Admiral” or anything drastic like that, but I do intend to erase any reference to our last names or where we live. Mostly the changes will be unnoticeable, but I estimate three or four entries will probably have to go completely. Of course a determined stalker will still be able to track us down if they want to, but I see no reason to make it easy for them.

Do you think Dooce ever worries about this sort of stuff? Teasing poor old Leta is going to be like shooting fish in a barrel.