"I wish she'd just send the funny ones!"

FOR THOSE WHO DONT KNOW OR NEED A REFRESHER……. I wonder how many people know about this

A 36 year old female had an accident several weeks ago and totaled her car.. It was raining, though not excessively, when her car suddenly began to hydro-plane and literally flew through the air. She was not seriously injured but very stunned at the sudden occurrence! When she explained to the highway patrolman what had happened he told her something that every driver should know – NEVER DRIVE IN THE RAIN WITH YOUR CRUISE CONTROL ON. She thought she was being cautious by setting the cruise control and maintaining a safe consistent speed in the rain.

But the highway patrolman told her that if the cruise control is on when your car begins to hydro-plane and your tires lose contact with the pavement, your car will accelerate to a higher rate of speed making you take off like an airplane. She told the patrolman that was exactly what had occurred.

The patrolman said this warning should be listed, on the driver’s seat sun-visor – NEVER USE THE CRUISE CONTROL WHEN THE PAVEMENT IS WET OR ICY, along with the airbag warning. We tell our teenagers to set the cruise control and drive a safe
speed – but we don’t tell them to use the cruise control only when the pavement is dry.

The only person the accident victim found, who knew this (besides the patrolman), was a man who had a similar accident, totaled his car and sustained severe injuries.

If you send this to 15 people and only one of them doesn’t know about this, then it was all worth it. You might have saved a life.

HIS NOTE: Some vehicles (like the Toyota Sienna Limited XLE) will not allow you to set the cruise control when the windshield wipers are on..
HER NOTE: If you’ve never had this happen to you, it isn’t quite like that but close enough. This is more like what happens on ice with cruise control on, still I bet that girl was a purty blonde and had maybe had a glass of vino or something.

Blog Header Before Functions Moved

It was a pretty simple matter to delete the functions from the header.php file in the Theme Editor section of the Design Tab.  Reinserting the functions into the sidebar was a little trickier in this theme as there are actually 3 files for the sidebar.  I also had to edit the main style sheet to make the functions display as I wanted them to.

While I was doing all this, I added an email subscribe because many of you are probably old people like me and don’t really think RSS feeds are all that great either.  I use them if I can’t subscribe via email but I’d rather get everything I need in my inbox :)

I’d also been experimenting lately with the number of posts I displayed on the front page of this blog.  I started with 10 and that made an awfully long page as I get pretty long-winded in some of my posts.  Then I changed it to 4 posts and visitors only got a smattering of all the things I write about here.  I didn’t like that either.

I knew I could switch to using all excerpts of my posts but I didn’t think that was so cool to have to click to read every single post on the page.  I knew there had to be a solution to print some posts in their entirety and make the rest shorter so, off to Google.

First I found some code that purported to do this and probably worked with some version.  But after 3 hours of messing with my blog on my local machine, it was back to Google.

Should have looked at one of my favorite sites, Daily Blog Tips, first.  Sure enough, they had just the plugin that I wanted.

So whadda ya think of the new look?

Decided I wanted to make some change in a post over at my Blogger.com weblog by adding a strikethrough or line through some text.  As that’s not something I do everyday, I thought I remembered the HTML code was <s></s> but thought I’d better do a quick check.

Well, that was the code back when I learnt’it but now the HTML code is <del>.

In my WordPress wysiwyg HTML editor, I have an option to choose that same strike through text so, just now, I did.

WordPress presents the code by declaring it a CSS style which is, of course, the preferred way today.  The code is <span style=”text-decoration: line-through;”>line through</span>.

Maybe I’d better take a basic HTML class again if I wannabe a web designer, huh?

“Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young. The greatest thing in life is to keep your mind young.”

I’m not building products a whole new way like Ford or number one on Google for “make money online” like this really bright young boy (who writes in English) but I am constantly learning new things and I hope to continue to learn until I drop in my tracks.

When I first got online in late December of 2001, the first thing I did was sign up for a basic skills course from MindLeaders.  Not only did I quickly learn how to use the Internet but I learned how to use most of the programs that came with my computer months before.

That was my first experience with the video format of online learning and it works great for me.  On March 17, 2002, I launched my first ezine and a month or so later, my first website.

Now, I’m thinking of taking a few more online classes but I don’t know whether I want to go back to MindLeaders or on to Lynda.com. I’d love a few comments from anyone with experience at either of these or any other online learning you found useful.

I also found an interesting article by a web design professional that tells me I’m on the right path here.  Web design is a life-long learning process and it really doesn’t matter you forget to go back to school as long as you learn.

Absolutely!  If you think you’ve got something you’d like to write or pictures to share, you should be doing it.  Newbie doesn’t really mean all that much anymore when “software” has made blogging as easy as using your favorite word processor.

Unless you have a reason not to, a free blog site would be a good place for the beginner to test the water.

One good reason you might not want a free blog would be if it was a company blog or you already have a game plan that says you need your own domain name.

Otherwise, a free blog will work just fine to try blogging.  You will want to name your blog creatively though and it may take some thought to find the right words for your subject that aren’t already taken.  Just did a quick search and darkdays can’t be yours at WordPress, for instance.

Anyway, a quick google turns up many free blog spots but there are two that are the big kahunas in the blogsphere, Blogger.com and WordPress.com. If you choose a popular blog site, you will find a lot more available help if you do get stuck.

I have a spot at Blogger and this is a WordPress blog but on my own domain.  Both blogging sites are completely free and are easy to learn how to use.

Which is better?  Personally, I like WordPress but I’ve really neglected my Blogger.com gig so my opinion may be influenced by guilt pangs.

I did find a really great chart the other evening detailing the differences between WordPress and Blogger.   Things may have changed a little since September but the feature list gives you an idea of some of the things you might want.

I believe either site is very easy to register on and get started with your blog.  Do it!

If you do have any problems rolling out your new blog, drop me a comment from the link below.  I’ll be more than willing to help another blogger out :)  Even if you don’t have problems, drop me a comment and let me know you did it!

When I’m talking about a beginner on this blog, I’m talking about someone new to WordPress.  That doesn’t necessarily mean new to the Internet and to web sites in general.

I’m not going to start all over but I am going to post some tips and instructions for the true “beginner” as well as refine some of the posts I’ve already made for the “WordPress beginner”.

If you are a true beginner just starting out on the web,  I think WordPress is a good place to start.  We’ll have a post on just that topic here in the next few days because there are other options that would work well for you too.  I just don’t have the time today to go into them.

It’s just a little hard to get started with WordPress if you don’t have the first idea of how to get a domain or get things to a domain so we’ll take a quick detour here and have a “‘Net Beginner” category, too.

I should have made all this clear in the first post on this blog but here you have it :)