In The Border-lands

Went to Border's Books today to soak up some of the discounts at their going-out-of-business sale.  I went earlier, when their bankruptcy was first announced, and even though the discounts weren't very steep (by my estimate - for a place that was selling out to the walls) it was hugely attended.

People at at that sale were lined up to the back of the store loading up on goodies.  I went today, just to see what was left.  I expected it to be pretty well cleaned out to the fixtures, but at the whole store 50-75% off I figured what the hell.

Well, the parking lot was full again, and quite a few folks were still vulturing over the remains.  A lot of the shelves were cleaned out, but got some good deals in the business and computing sections.

It occurred to me the reason they were good deals was because this was what these books SHOULD have been priced at originally!  I mean really, somebody's little breezy business tome in paperback is 25 bucks?  Not worth it.

Chop that down to 10 bucks or so, and I'll give it a look.  And judging from the parking lot, so will a lot of other people.

The printed book isn't dead......it's just overpriced.

Why does it have to be so hard?

Have been trying to use Kompozer, the open-source web-authoring tool.  Can't even figure out how to change a font!

I'm never sure why everything has to be so arcane.  I really support the whole open-source world, but the various communities really need to come up with some usability standards.  Too many times I've downloaded what looks like a useful tool only to find it is crapped up in either it's user interface or the fact that there is no documentation and absolutely no intuitive way of learning about things.

I find myself also torn between the Blogger platform and Wordpress.  Wordpress definitely gets more "play" it seems, but everything on that platform looks the same, and even to get the small number of features I'd like (blogroll, site stats, simple design with a relatively large readable typeface) I'd have to create my own theme.  Which means tweaking around with PHP, etc.  Ugh.

I live the fact I can put ads on Blogger while hosting on blogger.com.  Every little bit helps!

About the 8th re-design

Got rid of the "monk" theme, because I didn't like the legal-pad ruling background to the posts which made things hard to read.  This looks cleaner, until I tweak some HTML to get to where I want to be!

Not Quite There Yet....

Well, this is overall a better theme, but I don't like the way the text looks.....still have some tweaking to do!  But I do like the "monk" themed graphic!

Stay tuned for more tweaking....

A New Look

Finally got around to fooling with this a little bit - this theme seems to fit the Maker Monk style a little more!  Stay tuned for more tweaking!