May 15, 2001

Moving to Livejournal

Posted by Scott at 05:00 PM
      I will briefly mention that Mother's Day was nice. I've been trying to have Michelle arrange for a sitter so that we can go out alone without the children, or at least without the babies. Perhaps we'll get some chances when Michelle's folks are in town. Even Claire is starting to ask if we're ever going to eat out at a restaurant again. Speaking of Claire, we're in the middle of reading the abridged version of Black Beauty. I don't know why I thought there would be more human character development in this story. I didn't know the whole story is told from the horse's perspective!
      I decided to settle on using LiveJournal.com to handle maintaining these web logs in the near future. If you have any desire to do something like this news page but don't want the hassle of writing/maintaining HTML (either by hand or with some GUI tool like FrontPage) I would recommend them or Blogger.com. They both make entry easy. The difference is that for Blogger all entries must be done via a web browser and it must have access to your web site host. I don't think that services like AOL or Compuserve offer web space, but you can always setup a free web site at some place like GeoCities.com. LiveJournal gives you a variety of simple programs you run on your PC/Macintosh/Palm/Unix machine and it maintains the log/journal on it's site for you. Both handle the auto-archiving of older news. Livejournal also allows others to post comments and followups on your entries. In either case both allow you to quickly type up a little note and let them handle the timestamping, formatting, etc. for your webpage. Part of the reason for the occasional long intervals between updates is that you don't feel you have the time to really "put something down on paper"--so to speak. That is, an update like this one can take half an hour or longer. It discourages you from updating frequently. So check them out if you're interested. You don't need to know about writing web pages to use them, but if you do have some expertise in that area, it can be helpful to enhance the look of your site. Weblog'ing (sometimes just known as 'blogging') definitely rates in my books as one of the "killer apps" of the internet. Your mileage may vary...
      In closing I would mention that if you lose the pointer to this webpage, you can just go to (drumroll, please) BilikFamily.com. I registered it last week. I hope no Biliks are upset that I took this domain. I think that many variations on 'Bilik' are still available. Currently it'll just transparently show you this page, but you never know if things may move around some day. I'll probably have it point to my LiveJournal page and have my LiveJournal page link into certain pages back here within mv.com. If all this is more than you wanted to know, I apologize. At least when the format change occurs, you'll not be totally surprised. I hope that the next posting will have more family info and less tech info.
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