Watch This Space

I know, I know, it looks like I've pretty much abandoned blogging here, doesn't it? I guess I've gotten too used to sharing pictures on facebook, so I hardly use this as a photo-blog anymore. I haven't written my column for almost 2 years now. And when I do write, it ends up being in my religious blog, "Prophet, Priest, and Pirate."

But I think that the old flagship here may be seeing a lot more action later on this summer when I attend the Iowa Writing Project at Morningside University. It's 3 week course in July, partly to help teachers integrate writing across their curriculum, and partly to practice the lost art. For years I've done okay with opinion and humor essays, but I think I need to learn some more about fiction. We'll see how it goes. At any rate, I imagine that I will post some of what I work on here.

Meanwhile I have been working on getting all of my blogs to link to one another and compliment one another. I figured out a way to have the posts from most of them automatically show up on facebook, and after much consideration and some consternation, I'm even giving Twitter a try. Much of these developments are due to the conference my wife Bethany and I recently attended at Buena Vista University on technology integration and instruction for 21st century learners (TICL).

As usual, I also plan on cleaning, rearranging, streamlining and updating all of my blogs a little bit this summer. It seems to me that this one in particular could stand a little sprucing up.
Please feel free to explore them all and leave comments on any posts you like. Notice that they all have a similar navigation bar of buttons on the right side to help you explore.

If you'd like a brief explanation of each site, you could visit the "Internet Empire" links page on my new wiki, Mr. Mallory's Art Dog Wiki, which is still under construction, but promises to be a useful way to provide resources for and communicate with students.

If you're interested in reading any of my new writing next month- make sure you look for the link over on the right, toward the bottom that will let you become a "follower" of this blog. I promise that most posts will be a lot more entertaining than this one.

In the meantime, have a great summer and come back soon.

Trying something new

I'm trying to make all of my blogs share a more consistent graphic style, so that they'll look more like they belong together and hopefully will eventually navigate more like they're all pages on the same website. Please be patient with me, but do please send me your feedback and tell me what you think.

I'm not sure I like the background color yet- or the entire color scheme for that matter. I may go with plain white or pale gray. I was hoping for sort of a desert thing. The previous work blue and international orange were derived from 1950's/early 60's American Airlines logos. This new look is based on more of a contemporary Southwestern taste. Partly from my home state of Arizona, with a little South Dakota prairie thrown in. I like the turquoise accent, but I'm still partial to that orange.

The tan background isn't quite as pleasant as I had hoped for. I'd really love to figure out some kind of graduated/variegated background, but I think that requires loading an image which will take more code writing than I'm up for and slow down page loading.

I'm hoping that the slightly more shallow masthead/banner will draw more attention to the content on each blog.

Let me know if you have an opinion or any suggestions. Hopefully I'll manage to standardize the layouts a little more and redesign the navigation buttons soon. Meanwhile, thank you for your patience.