manrymission.com

You may have noticed a new “Tags” section at the bottom of each post. Mugs noticed:

The endless tags are driving me mad.
What is the point of them? Just curious.

Manrymission.com is powered by Wordpress, a blogging platform. I am currently using version 2.5. When version 2.3 came out late last year, Wordpress added tags functionality. Tags are basically a list of keywords for a specific post or even for an entire website. They are used to aid in searching and finding content on the web. In my understanding, they are different than the categories I already use. Categories are used to describe the main theme of a particular post.

Anyway, I have added the Tags section as an experiment. For the next few weeks, I’ll watch the traffic on the site to see if adding Tags has any impact on the number of visitors.

Mugs commented on the surprising decor of the house I visited for lunch while in Amadiyah. It was definitely very Brady-esque. For a while now, I’ve been meaning to set up an image gallery on the blog. I thought this would be a great opportunity to get the image gallery running so that you can see some more photos of the house in Amadiyah. If you look closely at the flower rug, you might be able to see some muddy boot prints. Can you guess who tracked mud on the rug?

Let me know if you have any problems with the image gallery.

Recently I received a request for an interview from VAJoe.com. According to the VAJoe blog,

The VAJoe.com Blog is the gathering place for the U.S. military community to blog and comment on blogs about the war in Iraq, military news and benefits updates. We will feature interviews with popular military bloggers and guest blogs from well-known and respected bloggers.

You can read the interview by clicking here -> VAJoe Interview.

Over the past week or so, I’ve spent my free time working on a redesign of the blog. Free time for me is basically from 2000 to 2200 each night. The time I spend working on manrymission.com is a means of relaxation. My other outlet is running. I usually go for a run at about 1900, take a shower afterwards, and then watch some TV, read a book, or work on the blog. All of this week has been devoted to the blog redesign.

One of my favorite parts of this design is the cubic globe in the header. To create this, I downloaded some satellite imagery from NASA’s Visible Earth project. I then used GIMP to tile the imagery into 6 tiles. Finally, I used GIMP to create a cube and paste the appropriate image tiles onto the cube faces.

I made a few updates to the comments form today. Hopefully I haven’t broken anything!       

1. Some of you will be happy to see that I’ve embedded support for emoticons (smilies) directly in the comments form. I’m not sure why I did this other than I thought Abby might like it! When you click on the smiley to insert it, you will see the text name for the smiley in the editor. This will be converted to the actual smiley face when you submit your comment.
2. I’ve also added an option to subscribe to the comments for a post. directly beneath the comments form, you’ll see a box the check if you want to receive an email notifying you when new comments appear for that post. But to enable that, you have to submit a comment!
3. If you want to receive an email whenever there is a new post or comment (for any post), you can register to manrymission.com using the register option in the Meta portion of the sidebar on the right.
4. Finally, I’ve completely blocked a specific IP address range. We’ve had two instances of a well known spammer sending spam comments to the blog. I’ve caught both instances and deleted them. If for some reason you receive a blocked URL message when you try to post a comment, just send me an email message using the link in the sidebar.