manrymission.com

I’m sure all of you recall my riveting post concerning the antenna ball on my vehicle. If you are a visitor to this blog, you can search for “antenna ball” in the sidebar to find the post. I know everyone else has already saved a link to that post in their internet favorites or bookmarks.

Mugs automatically understood my distress at being forced to display an antenna ball that looks like a sailor. Sensing my discomfort, she quickly jumped to my aid and sent me a new antenna ball. So in a small, intimate ceremony, Sailor Antenna Ball was replaced by USA Flag Antenna Ball. The photo below captures the moment in the ceremony when the outgoing and incoming antenna balls changed positions.

Notice the smile on Sailor Antenna Ball’s face as he anticipates being reunited with Mrs. Sailor Antenna Ball.

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.

You may have noticed that I haven’t made any design changes to the blog lately. I’m actually pretty happy with my current design. The changes I’ve made recently have been transparent to the user. I’ve been focused on improving the blog’s position on Google search results. So I did some work on the keywords and description information in the header of the blog’s source code. Then I created a sitemap and indexed the site with Google. I’ve focused my efforts on queries for manry and manry family.

Today, if you Google manry family, the manrymission.com blog appears on page 3 of the results. If you Google manry the blog comes up on page 7. My goal is to make it to #1! So I need your help. You can help move manrymission.com up the Google ladder by searching for manry family or manry in Google and then clicking on the link to manrymission.com in the Google results. Google tracks the link you click in the search results to help decide a page’s search ranking.

Incidentally, if you Google Mugs Manry, manrymission.com comes up as the #1 result!

I’ve been busily re-designing the blog appearance in between meetings, conference calls, and site visits. When you’re working 12-14 hours a day, 7 days a week, there’s plenty of time to play around on the computer. Hopefully (hope is not a course of action) the blog looks a little better than this store on FOB Diamondback.

So what do you think of the new appearance? Incidentally, this is not an actual 7-Eleven. It is a T-shirt shop run by a local contractor. I have no idea where he got the 7-Eleven propaganda materials.