Renewal

As you can see, I've begun creating this site to replace my original Bucs' news site that was hosted on Road Runner. The reason for doing this is simple: time. Due to limitations in place for Road Runner home pages, I had to do a lot of manual editing to get the look and feel of the site the way I wanted it. Simply creating a post like this involved cutting and pasting the last post's HTML code to a newer block on top, then replacing the text with the appropriate information. Adding a picture was certainly no picnic. But even a slight slip could screw the formatting up, or accidently change the font in use. It also led to silly mistakes such as leaving the date from the copied post on the new one. And this was just the start.

Editing and publishing of the former site was done through Frontpage, an editor that was easy to use, and whose FTP feature worked correctly with Road Runner. Dreamweaver MX was a much better editor, though it required more advanced skills to use (no barrier to me, but maybe to others), but, most importantly, it would not connect with Road Runner, requiring me to use WFTP to load the site up, since Frontpage would screw with the format. Not an ideal situation. Nevertheless, posting through Frontpage represented some interesting challenges at time, but was a process that, when working normally, took 4 times as long, on a fast day, to post as it takes for a post to be published on Blogger. With my son requiring ever greater amounts of attention, my time is now limited in when I can have a chance to post on my site.

Well, now I can simply click a link to go to the Blogger Dashboard, click the blog I want to edit, and throw up a post in a minute or less. A post like this would take roughly 4-5 minutes to format and publish. On Blogger, I just type, and it takes 5-10 seconds to get the post onto the net. It also handles archiving former posts, and provides a comments section. In general, I hope this move will allow me to start writing about the Bucs again without spending more time on formatting and publishing than on the actual content. In order to add graphics to this site and start sprucing it up, I will likely need to make some posts that have nothing but the graphics used on this site. While some sites, like Photobucket, allow you to upload graphics there for use elsewhere, there are usually bandwidth issues, not too mention that I might have this site up, but the photo site is down. That's less likely if I have everything stored here. The template I chose at least has the general feel of my former site, though lighter in background colors, and an inverse of text on background. This site will be modified over the course of the next month or so as the season get's closer.

I'm still deciding what to do about features like The Talking Plank, and the Stats pages. I could maintain them as off-site links, leaving them hosted where they have always been, or drop them all together. I have to way the amount of time and effort used to do those. I'm inclined to drop the stats pages, and just do The Talking Plank. We'll see. At the very least, I'm going to continue to blog about the Bucs and keep the news and opinion flowing.

Until my next post...

Speaking of graphics...ignore these!