Oh Well Reboot

No, you are not seeing things here--talking to the five people who probably read this blog now. When I started this blog about five years ago, I thought I would write solely on news, economic, and political issues. And I've written quite a bit on the issues of the day. But last year, I just got burnt out on writing about politics and trying to report on every single political issue and story that came up day in and day out. Some of the issues were especially complex, health care as a huge example, that I felt like I didn't have the time to research or think about--much less originally comment on. For that, it was time to step away from Oh Well, and focus on other things. That is not to say that I never lost my interest in news and politics.

For even as I stepped away from Oh Well, I was still thinking of tweaking the site into something more than just a news and politics blog. I have other items that I wondered how to publish--essays from political science and economics classes, short sarcastic stories, and even some photo work that has accumulated on my computer hard drives. For a while, I did have a separate website that I published some of my essays on, but they were never incorporated with my blog as a single portfolio of my work. That was always in the back of my mind. So with a new year, I thought it was time to come back and reboot Oh Well into something new--a combined blog and portfolio of written and photography work that I've accumulated over the years. That is what you're looking at right now.

To start off, the Home page will be my blog. I'll certainly be back writing about news and politics, now that we're in an election year and there has been some fascinating dynamics taking place--especially with the Massachusetts U.S. Senate special election, where GOP state senator Scott Brown trounced Attorney General Martha Coakley (D) for Ted Kennedy's seat. More on that later. I will also be adding more page links of my portfolio. The Essays page will have links to a number of SJSU political science and economic essays that I've written. Some of these essays are over ten years old, but I think they are interesting in showing some of my thinking on political and economic thought. The Fun Essays and Stories link are just that--links to fun essays and stories that I've written, but have never published. I still have a couple of other items to add, but I'll need to go through my files to find them. The Photography page will show some photo work that I've done. For the moment, I've included a link to a photo blog showcasing some work for a Photoshop class that I've taken at West Valley College last fall. But I've got some other photo stuff I want to include--old black-and-white photojournalism work for the West Valley College Norseman, abortion protest photos when Operation Rescue came to San Jose, UCSF bike racing photography, and possibly some newer stuff. Of course, I'm working old school here with 35mm manual focus Canon equipment. But it still works. The Links page will show all my blog links. I'm thinking I want to clean up my front page, and remove a number of the web and blog links that I rarely used. But I do not want to completely delete the links. Instead, I'm going to simplify and clean the links to my front page, showing only the most common links that I regularly go to. The full set of links will be found in the Links page. I'll also probably remove some of the junk, advertising, feeds, and other stuff to be placed on the Links Page--I'm still working on that aspect. I'm definitely getting rid of all the advertising on my blog--I never made any money from Google AdSense, or Amazon.com ads. And I probably never will. So I'm going to simplify the page.

I hope you enjoy this new reboot of Oh Well. I'm still in the process of tweaking my site. If you have any comments, please post them.

Enjoy.

Some editorial changes....

My apologies for the lack of blogging over the past couple of days. I've been looking into the some editorial changes here on Oh Well. The big change is the addition of the entire Big Brass Alliance blogroll here. The Big Brass Alliance was a group of liberal and progressive blogs to provide a forum for discussion of liberal and progressive views during this period of the right-wing extremism of the Bush administration. Over 968 blogs joined the BBA, including Oh Well. Since then, the Big Brass Alliance has been changed into the Big Brass Blog.

But bloglinks for members of the BBA still exist through this Big Brass Alliance blogroll. I have wanted to include this list of bloglinks, but I was hoping to have it placed within a scrolling bar. I have not been able to place a scrolling bar within this template. So, the full BBA blogroll of 968 blogs can be found below the TGIF page element. So enjoy exploring this alliance of big and small blogs in the BBA.

Some editorial changes....

I've added some more fun little sidebar content to my blog. On the right side, you can find The New York Times newsfeed, providing the top national, political, business news, and NY Times opinions. While on the left side, you can check on the current Department of Homeland Security Terror Alert Level--currently set between those evil, liberal, terrorist Sesame Street characters Ernie and Bert. I've also provided a new page element called The Debt Clocks, where you can watch just how many dollars are going up into smoke on both the National Debt, and the U.S. cost of the Iraq War. The numbers just keep going up and up. For a little science fun, I've included The Moon Phase, which currently tracks the phases of the moon. And finally, I've included a little more advertising through AdBrite. But, I'm trying to balance out the content between the left and right sidebars here. One way is to add a little advertising to my site.

Enjoy.

Some editorial changes--TGIF Fun Stuff

As you can see, I’ve added another page element to my blog—TGIF Fun Stuff! This element has a number of little interesting content items from The Free Dictionary. Some of this fun content includes an online reference, an In The News article, an addicting Hangman game, Word of the Day, Quote of the Day, and more. You can find this element right below the links to the Policy Institutions. Enjoy.

Update: I have finally included a Blog & Web Search tool on the right hand side, just above the Internet Search Engines link.

A Whole New Blog Here--3 Columns

What do you think? I haven't been posting for this past week since I've been so busy developing a new template for my blog here. I have always liked the appearance of the 3-column blogs, since it allows you to place sidebar content on both sides of your postings-if you have a large amount of sidebar content in your blog. I've originally
wanted to try to adapt the Blogger Rounders template to 3-column, but there were some serious problems when viewing a 3-column Rounders template in Internet Explorer--the right hand sidebar dropped down to the bottom corner. And adjusting the margins of the sidebars is almost impossible because the Rounders templates uses gif images to round out the corners, and those images are stored on the Google servers. If Google ever creates a 3-column Rounders template, I'd certainly look into it.

So I had to search for another template. I found a 3-column Minima template off of Hackoshpere, which worked in both Firefox and IE Explorer. Then it is customization time with background, text and link colors, adding all the feeds and weblinks, and making sure everything balances out. I'm currently using Blogger Beta, which has some good points and bad points about it. I do like the new labels for postings, although I do wish I could go in and adapt and customize the labels, as you can in Daily Kos. However, Blogger Beta uses XHTML and widgets. The widgets are useful in moving sections of your blog around the page. For example, I could move the News and Information Websites section from the right sidebar to the left sidebar with a simple click of the mouse. However, I cannot edit the URLs located in this News and Information Websites widget, since the data on this widget is located on the Google servers. And if you radically change templates, you can possibly lose the data in these widgets. I've had to go through all the News, Political Blogs, and Interesting Blogs and re-enter those links in through the Google Page Layout program by hand--about three times now. And finally, since this was an extended HTML file, I couldn't do any editing of the template in my Front Page program, since my version of Front Page doesn't supportXHTML.

What fun we can have in editing templates.

On the left sidebar, I’ve placed the Blog Archive, Labels, Feed Links and advertisements. The right sidebar has my profile, News and Information Websites, Political Blogs, Interesting Blogs, a new heading named Conservative Blogs, and the Policy Institutes. I have even added some more links to Oh Well. In the News and Information section, I've added links to some international news sites. You can now access the BBC News, London Times, DerSpiegel, and Financial Times. I've also included some more regional news sites of The Dallas Morning News, Philadelphia Inquirer, New York Daily News, and even the Moonie paper Washington Times. I've added Anderson Cooper's 360 blog, the McClatchy Washington Bureau, Alternet, and CNet News. On the Political Blogs, you can find Brad DeLong, Buzz Flash, Carpetbagger Report, Daou Report, David Sirota, Matt Ygelsias, Progressive Blog Digest, Tom Pain's Common Sense, and YouTube. In the Interesting Blogs, I've added Alas A Blog, All SpinZone, Bitch Ph.D., Brad Blog, Crooked Timber, DC Media Girl, NTodd, Fat Cat Politics, Happy Furry Puppy Story Time (What a mouthful!), Lawyers Guns and Money, T Rex, Two Glasses, Wampum, and Whiskey Bar. And finally, I've created a new section highlighting the Conservative Blogs. I'll admit that I sometimes head over to the Conservative blogs to see what the Right Wing is talking about. If I wanted to go over and see what the conservatives were saying, I usually went through theTTLB Ecosytem, which listed the top conservative blogs that I could link to. Well, I figured it was time to link those blogs to Oh Well. So you'll find Andrew Sullivan, Captain's Quarters, Powerline, Hugh Hewitt, Drudge, Instapundit, Michelle Malkin, and Red State here--let's hope you have the stomach to enter into these sites this close to Halloween.

That's pretty much it. Hope you enjoy reading this blog. Now it is time for me to get back into the news and start posting again. Time to have some more fun here.

Eric A Hopp

Made some more changes here....

Author's note: Well, I guess you can see I made some more changes here. I thought it would make the site a little more interesting by breaking up the links a little, and by adding more links. The basic template is still the same. Here are the changes:

The Internet Search Links are just what they say--links to the different search engines on the web. Instead of just the same old Yahoo, Google and MSN search engines, I thought I'd add a few others such as Altavista, Hotbot, and Ask.com--that would be the old Ask Jeeves engine, revamped and marketed through the humorous television commercial with all the monkeys trying to surf the net in the coffee shop.

News and Information Websites are the mainstream media sites. This is where you can find all the corporate press websites. I've also added some online magazines--American Prospect, Atlantic Monthly, Christian Science Monitor, Fox News, ABC & CBS news, Salon, Slate, NPR, and two of my own local Bay Area papers of The San Francisco Chronicle, and the San Jose Mercury News.

Political Blogs and Resources is something just slightly different. I thought I would take some of the hard-lined political blogs, and group them into their own section. These are the blogs that talk all politics and news. Here you will find Americablog, Bring It On, Daily Kos, Crooks and Liars, Dark Wraith, Huffington Post, Media Matters, Smirking Chimp, Think Progress, and Washington Monthly among others. I've also included Wikipedia--the online encyclopedia here. There has been a few times that I've been posting, and suddenly discovered I needed to get into an encyclopedia for some quick reference work.

Policy Institutes are the websites of different policy institutes. This is a new thing I've decided to try out. Not only can you find a lot of information within the news sites, but you can also discover a wealth of information in policy studies created by these non-profit institutes. And there are even more non-profit institutes I have yet to discover! One interesting note--I've included the Project for a New American Century link here, which will contain the PNAC Doctrine.

Interesting Blogs and Websites are all the other blogs that I've linked to, and a few more. My own personal website is listed at the top. Some of my own favorite, such as Dependable Renegade, Shakespeare's Sister, Catharine Chronicles, Jackie Passey, and Wonkette are found here. And I've included some new ones such as Lance Mannion, Ezra Klein, James Wolcott, Pam's House Blend, and Skippy the Bush Kangaroo. I've also place Mark Fiore's political cartoons here, along with some new comics from uComics and the Association of American Political Cartoonists. While a number of these blogs do talk about politics, they will also take on other social and cultural subjects to both entertain and make you reflect on the issues. It is the reason I've placed these blogs in their own category, rather than lumping them with the Political Blogs.

That is pretty much what I've done. There is also some small shifting around with the Technorati Profile, and an inclusion of a Google Search bar to search both web and my blog postings. I hope you will continue to enjoy reading my blog, and exploring the new links. Eric A Hopp

Thought I'd Try Something Different Here

Author's Note: No--you're not doing a double-take here. I thought I would try something a little different with the templates, try to bring a little more color to my blog. I figured since it was the start of a new year, I should try to make my blog a little fresh. Originally, I started by adding more news sites. Then I added some more blogs that I like to read--and finally, I'm changing the entire template.

There are some things I like about this template. The color scheme is somewhat me--seems I'm always wearing brown, blue and khaki green. I do like the black titles on the posts, over that of the sickening orange titles on the previous template. And I do wonder how the page breaks will be for the quotations--have to check to see if there is a way to shade the quotes a slightly different color (Either darker or lighter). Actually, it turns out it is easier to change the color of the text, than to shade the blockquotes. So any block-quotations of news stories that I place in my blog will be in

dark blue text.

My own comments on the stories will be in black text.

What do you think? What comments and suggestions to you have? I'm always open to improving my blogging experience.

I hope you continue to enjoy reading my blog.

Eric A Hopp

Some New Changes to My Blog

Author's Note: After blogging for about six months now, I thought it was time to try a few changes to the template. The content and general layout of my blog will still be the same--and I'll still try to do the best job that I can in providing commentary on stories that I find interesting. But I've added a few more interesting links to my blog--you can access some of the major online news outlets that I usually check. I've also added some links to other blogsites that I check into. And now that Google has updated its software to allow the easy placement of photos, I'll certainly be adding photos to my blog. It's ironic that when I first started my blog back in May, I wanted to add photos to my posts. But the only way that Google would allow you to post photos was through some crappy software program called Picasso. It is nice to see that they've changed that.

So here it is. I hope you'll enjoy reading it.

Eric A Hopp