Abandoned Posts

I'm feeling a bit under the weather, so I'm using it as an excuse to sit down and make some contributions to the internet again. We have a list of about 50 posts we want to make before the year is out, so get ready and hold on for the ride of your lives! Or the ride of our lives really. These posts will be brought to you from a shiny new Macbook Pro that we bought recently. Part of the reason we let our blog become a relic is that our old computer was moved down to the basement, and we just never made it down there to make updates. Also, I'm afraid of the basement. Now I've finally moved all our pictures and videos from the old computer to this new one, and set up a pretty finicky wireless internet connection, so we're out of reasons to not publish glad tidings again. Well most are glad, some will just be regular, everyday tidings. I'm also shopping for a new template to go with the new content, but this is all I got for now.

Is This What You See?

I've been fiddling around with the HTML in my template in an attempt to try and customize the look of our blog. I don't really know anything about HTML, but I'm just kinda hacking my way through it. I'm just curious as to how our page looks on other computers. We have a wide screen monitor and I've set the resolution to 1680 x 1050, which makes our home page look like the image above. I'm sure not everyone has the same monitor settings as we do, so let me know if it appears differently on your computer (by "differently" I mean does the image get completely covered up by the text boxes, etc.). While you're at it, let me know if there's a way to arrange it so it appears the same way on all monitors, or maybe just the 4 monitors of those who read this blog. Thanks.

Templates

I've had a few people tell me that the blog template we previously used, showed through our pictures too much to make them enjoyable. I think it has something to do with screen resolution settings, because it looked fine on our monitor. It's too bad because I liked that template, so until I find another one that I like, we're now the happiest home in the Matrix. I'd actually like to learn how to make my own template, but when it comes to HTML, I'm more of a neophyte than a Neo.

Visitor 5000

I added a free counter to the blog that tells us how many visitors we are getting. I started the counter at 4500 because according to Google Analytics, that's about how many visitors we've had since we started the site. One of the downsides of the counter is that it doesn't filter out visits made by us, so the numbers do get a bit fudged.

As you can see, the number is fast approaching 5000, and that's a bit of a milestone, so I'd like to celebrate the person who becomes "Visitor 5000". If anyone visits the site and notices that the counter reads 5000, please let me know, and you will be publicly heralded, with your name and fame becoming a part of "Them Bournes" history, for ages to come.

T.E.A.M. Bournes

One of the names we originally tossed around when we found out we were most likely having a girl again, was Heidi. With Tammy's Norwegian roots, and the high probability of the girl having blonde hair and blue eyes, we thought it would be a good fit. Another good reason for the name Heidi would be that we could use the "Them" in "Them Bournes" as an acronym of all our first names, much like Marc Gilchrist does with his site. The down side of using Heidi is the high probability that I would never remember the order of the "e" and the "i".

When Ashley was born, we just thought she looked like an Ashley, and so Ashley she became. Now the question is, do we forget the acronym thing, or change the name of the site? We could go with T.E.A.M. Bournes, which is an ok substitute, and a pretty accurate pecking order, but there's something about M.E.A.T. Bournes that sounds so much better. It's still up for review, and will probably never change, but visitor input is still appreciated.

Visitors from Afar

I have a feature installed on my website that tells me where in the world people are visiting our blog from. This is the map it generated for the month of January. The big blob represents Calgary, as that is naturally where we get most of our visits from, but it's interesting to see that we do get visits from across the nation as well as from the United States. I can usually narrow it down to who the visitor is from the location given, but some have me stumped. I chalk those ones up to folks who link from other friends websites, or people accidentally finding our blog through some kind of search on awesomeness.

The feature tells me a couple other things as well, like how many visits I get in a day, how many of those visits are new visitors compared to returning visitors, and all credit card information and passwords of those who visit. Just a little joke there, I could tell by your expressions that you were a bit worried for a second, oh yeah the feature also allows me to see you.

Links

It's too bad that blogger isn't set up as a pyramid scheme, we could be living the posh life of Amway executives, I'm talking the brass ring. Since we've moved over to this new site, we've assisted in the birth of four new blogs that can all be found in our links section. A couple of them, namely "The Depo" and "Wonderful World", are members only sites, but I invite you to check out "David and Cheryl" which belongs to the Walkers, and "The Wonderful World of Will" which belongs to my sister Heather and the family Williamson. Their business is now your business. You know, the real money-maker in this marketing ploy would be D from "Our Sesame Seed", as he's the one who introduced me to the scheme. Maybe someday we'll be worthy to make it into his links section.

Going Public

I've decided that the whole idea of allowing limited access to this site is a bit of a hassle, so I've gone and made the site available to anyone in cyberspace. Most readers from the old site don't even know this site exists yet, but a few bulk e-mails should help clear that up.

The Best of Comments

One of our readers brought up a good point about us losing all the comments that had been left on the old site when we switched to this new one, so I'm going to post up my favorites.

Derek - 10 March 2006 4:35PM

I love your site, it's a real winner! I can only aspire to the standard that you've set!

Derek - 28 May 2006 12:20PM

Once again your site has broken the mold! Top Drawer! Brilliant!

Derek - 19 June 2006 11:23PM

Your site is the reason the Internet was created! All hail the King of Blogs!

Fantastic. We hope that this new site continues to be as popular as the old one, and that the comments continue to flow, so feel free to leave a note whenever you visit.

Test

This is a test entry. I'm just fiddling with settings, trying to see what this blogger is made of. I plan to move a lot of the content from my old logisity site to this new one in a "best of" sort of format. Once that's over with, I'll be starting up again with the fresh stuff. This isn't going to be as public a website as logisity was. I'm going to limit the viewing of this website to close family and friends only. If you're reading this now, congratulations on being one of the chosen ones.