A Rubber Door » Blogging

Yet another place for me to write

Spencer — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 00:01:42 +0000

So yesterday I posted that I am writing for the Philadelphia Examiner – it’s about time I mentioned my new blog: Orangeliners.com, a blog about Philly sports.

One thing that I noticed here is that the readership I had cultivated wasn’t as much interested in sports talk, but I wanted to write about it. I figured it would help me to have the two distinct sites. I haven’t quite found my voice there, but I’m hoping to grow that site into an interesting destination covering all Philly sports.

If you’re interested in writing for the site – let me know either through the contact form or leaving a comment here. Kristen will stop in every once in awhile to provide the woman’s point of view. Also would love for to subscribe to the blog or it’s twitter feed.

Or just stop by and join into the conversation.

Under construction

Spencer — Thu, 14 May 2009 23:18:20 +0000

One thing you should always know is that any decent website should always be “under construction”. That’s true here, but currently there’s a little more construction going on.

I’m doing a little spring cleaning in the background – reorganizing things, clearing out some bad code, and hopefully adding a new design.

When I do reveal the new blog, it will likely be more focused than it currently is – that also means that I will be introducing a new blog (or two).

Stay tuned.

Stay tuned: Time to focus on more traffic

Spencer — Thu, 07 May 2009 16:02:52 +0000

I’m thinking I’d l need more readers. More comments. I guess I need to also write more. Working on that. Related posts: Newspaper’s should stay out of blogging More on the wacky Santorum Finally Related posts:

The Post Election Blahs

Spencer — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 05:38:27 +0000

Two weeks after the big day, which was just a week after my Phils won a World Series, and I am struggling to find things to write about. I could blame work or home, but I’ve found reasons to write before. It hasn’t been for lack of subjects; one of my favorite subjects is customer service, and I have good and bad saved up to write about. You’d think that with my guests blogging for me over the past couple of months, that I would be rearing to go.

Quite the opposite. Everything seems to pale in comparison. Everything seems to be less important. I only half joke about 2012 – but I can wait.

One thing I haven’t done is formally thank all the guest bloggers for participating. I truly believe it helped. It was our own little piece. I am happy we had a chance to make A Rubber Door more of a community; less me talking at everyone, and more talking with people.

I’ve thought about changing this blog to arubberdoor.com and making it a group blog, but I realize how much of a commitment that would be, and at least with my blog if it’s silent I have no one to blame but myself. That said, I will make it a normal practice to invite others to write here. And maybe some will decide to slum it here.

Thanks to (in order of appearance):

Howard – The Web Pen Blog
Grace
Radiocynic
Howard Hall –
Jack
Joey – the 49 Percenter
Cynicsgirl – The Suburban Masquerade
Merujo – Church of the Big Sky
Kristen – Abbondanza!
Michael Penn

Their posts can be found forever at the Not Spencer Archives.

Calling out my fellow bloggers on Blogger

Spencer — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 02:32:22 +0000

This is for those of you that use Blogger – you need to open up your comments so that commenters can put their URLs in their comments. This is just plain old part of blogging. Open up your comments. … Continue reading → Related posts:

Yes – another new look

Spencer — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 18:53:15 +0000

I can’t help myself. I just changed the design over at TunesOnTV – and liked the designer I used Design Disease, so I changed things over here also. I think it’s a bit less cluttered than the old look and more professional looking.

Comments please.

Blogger wakes up

Spencer — Sat, 15 Dec 2007 17:47:41 +0000

So Blogger realized the error of their ways and fixed the problem where you needed a Blogger ID to link within a comment. On VDog’s site there’s a great email from Blogger admitting to the fact they eliminated the URL field prematurely.

One thing of note – if you self-host your own site like I do, you need to obtain a OpenID. Great instructions here on getting a OpenID for a self-hosted WordPress site or any other self-hosted site.

Reason 2,362 why Blogger sucks the big one

Spencer — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 00:51:48 +0000

I know this. It’s why I left blogger for a self-hosted WordPress blog over a year ago, but you’d like to think that seeing people leave them would inspire Google to greater heights. Nothing would have pleased me more than to see Blogger become a great option for bloggers and to make me eat my words, but alas they do nothing but validate my decision.

Recently Blogger decided to remove the ability for those that comment on blogs they host to link back to their own blogs. What galls me about this is the total ignorance of what blogging is about. One of the best things about what blogs have done to the Internet is how encourages community, sharing with your peers, to circumvent the structure that we’re so often asked to adhere to for no good reason. It redefines what we call a friend. I had three people at my wedding whom the relationship we have was built primarily through blog comments.

What further galls me is that this change was unannounced, and with all the controversy, there seems to be no response from Google. I talk about poor customer service all the time, but it seems no one gets it. The #1 key to keeping your customers is to talk to them. This change happened at least 11 days ago and nothing.

Apparently Blogger is planning a move to a different system called Open ID at some point, but there are no details of when, does it matter? People need to move off of this system or demand more. If you just look around the web you’ll see that this is raising a big stink (I’ve added some links below). What do I suggest? I moved my blog off of blogger over a year ago and have nothing but good things to say about WordPress. They offer their blogging software for free for self-hosting or you can have WordPress host it. If you don’t like how something works in WordPress, it’s easy to change it. Plus they have a built in tool for moving blogs from blogger. That’s my first thought – otherwise people need to tell Google they’re wrong for doing this.

A Rubber Door makes CNN.com

Spencer — Tue, 27 Feb 2007 22:14:04 +0000

Every once in awhile one of my posts gets picked up on a bigger website. Well my recent post about the Dixie Chicks got picked up by CNN as an example of what the blogosphere was saying about the Chicks.

How cool is that?

Yet another new look

Spencer — Sun, 28 Jan 2007 00:00:14 +0000

~~This is temporary theme. Working on the new one.~~

This is it baby! Get to use my own picture above. Let me know your thoughts.

I tried the other design – and I liked the way it looked, but it was too hard for me to modify, and me not being a programmer – that’s important. So welcome to the new look – everything is pretty much where it was before – just with new underpinnings.