Here I am trying to bring my friends over from Facebook so that they will (hopefully) leave comments on the blog, and what?  Comments were broken.  It was a malformed URL on the comment form which led to a 404 “Page Not Found” error when you hit the “Submit” button.

Kudos to the spammer who actually took the time and effort to manually modify the page source, enter the captcha and submit.  Your dedication to your trade is commendable!  If only your trade wasn’t so despicable.

That’s actually what led me to discover the problem.  I noticed the spam comment, then went in to figure out how he could have bypassed the captcha, and then realized my page was broke.

Apologies to anyone who actually tried to leave a real comment (anyone?)  Rest assured it is fixed now, so let the comments flow…

…

Anyone?

*crickets chirping loudly off-stage*

I know, I know.  ”Post something worth commenting on garden dork“.  :)

I did some cosmetics today.

• Added the gradient to the sidebar and post headings to brighten the dull grey page up a bit. I think it is a big improvement.
• Framed and added a lighter background for the most recent post.
• Added a cosmetic border for inline post images as well.
• Added the Sam Devol’s About Me widget at the top of the sidebar, which also includes a link to the new contact form.
• Added Rob Miller’s Now Reading widget near the bottom of the sidebar.
• Rearranged some of the widgets in the sidebar and added headings for some that didn’t have them.

I just noticed I was one of the “Featured Bloggers” on Technorati. I’m not anymore, but I managed to grab a screenshot:

Looks like I had to share my brief spotlight with Scooby Doo and Guy Smiley. Sheesh.

Based on my tags and most of the posts here so far, you’d think that this blog was going to be all about biking. One may even think that “Three Times Daily” is referring to how many times I ride. Well, it’s not. I bike at most two times daily — to and from my bus-stop most days — and as explained in this post, “Three Times Daily” is my stab at tongue-in-cheek humor.

What there is
I do plan to talk about lots of other stuff that interests me, I’m just waiting for the right time. And working up the nerve I guess. Some of the subjects you could expect to see here in the future are computer games, theology and religeon (Lutheran) and technology. I’m not an expert in any of these fields, so it’s difficult for me to talk about them with a bunch of people I don’t know. So if you don’t mind, I’ll just continue to pretend that nobody reads this blog anyway (true enough for now).

What there is not
Subjects you probably will NOT see on this blog are sports and politics. I’m just not interested enough or knowledgeable enough in those areas to want to discuss them. I also promise not talk about how stuff makes me feel. I’m not really an emotional person — I’m a logical person, and while emotional blogs can be amusing to read once in a while, they get old (for me) really fast.

Future plans
I’m still trying to figure out how this thing is going to work. For awhile it will probably continue to be random thoughts as they come to me, but eventually I would like it to be more organized and structured. It’s hard to organize stuff when there’s nothing to organize, so look for there to be lots of changes to the site as we go along. I’ve already added a tagging system, and probably will add/change more stuff like that from time to time.

When I started this blog a couple weeks ago, I opened a Blogger account and set up a new blog. I soon realized that I had inadvertently landed in the Google beta version of Blogger (Blogspot?), and when I tried following instructions to make changes to my template, the changes described and the menus referenced did not exist.

So I spent a couple days designing my own page layout and set it up in WordPress running on my shared hosting site. That’s what you’re seeing now. It’s still a work in progress, and I’m contemplating adding other features to it, but for now it is what it is.

There’s something very rewarding about designing your own “look and feel” to your blog, and being liberated from the Blogger “hand-holding” site. I still have no readers, but what can I expect – I’m only a couple weeks old, and I haven’t exactly been updating it that much.

I came across this site for increasing your blog readership. I haven’t looked into it yet, but I flagged it in my Diigo list and will get to it one of these days. I have an account on Technorati and ping them every time I add an entry. I noticed they have had some trouble with tags the last few days, but once in awhile I noticed my blog come up when I searched for “biking”, so that’s cool.