I’ve updated the header picture with one I took this past weekend of the lighthouse on the breakwater protecting the Nepean Sailing Club’s harbour, CAN-1352 on the Amateur Radio Lighthouse Society‘s World List of Lights.

For the curious, the previous picture (seen below) was taken in 2004 on the Noire River in Quebec near the Noire 5050 geocache (GC7C99).

A Lifehacker article talks about the top 10 tools to help with blogging.  It lists things like tools to help you cut and paste, Google Alerts to help you find things to write about and things like that.  But it doesn’t actually talk about any editing tools, in particular Windows Live Writer.

My friend Rob tipped me off to Windows Live Writer a few months ago.  I was a little skeptical, but tried it out anyway.  I haven’t look back since.

Microsoft’s Windows Live Writer is probably the single most useful program I’ve downloaded off the Internet in quite some time.  It’s a free program that allows you to create and edit blog entries offline for most of the major blog systems out there.  But it’s not some cheesy kludge — it’s a full-featured rich-content editor.  You can create a list of frequency used links that you can easily insert into an entry and plug-ins you can add to give you extra formatting and other options.  One I use allows me to insert pre-formatted source code and add line numbers and alternating shading.

There are even instructions out there to show you how to create a stand-alone version you can install on a USB flash drive so you can use it anywhere without having to install it anew.  Very cool.

I’ve been blogging for more than ten years.

Initially, it consisted of putting up some HTML pages when I was on a trip or when I did something particularly noteworthy, such as my first flight with a passenger as a licensed pilot.  Eventually, I found a piece of software called Pivot, which made it easier to blog, but I found it a bit cumbersome to customize.  One thing that set Pivot aside from other blog systems is that it did not rely on a database behind the scenes, meaning it was fairly straight-forward to set it up.  Instead, it generated HTML files for each entry.  But I couldn’t do everything I wanted to with it and updating the look-and-feel was becoming increasingly frustrating.

So, I looked at other blog systems out there and eventually settled on WordPress.  A slick, database-driven system, it had lots of bells and whistles and it was just easier.  My frustration level went down significantly.

Since then, WordPress has become very popular and is used by some of the largest blogs on the Internet.  The user community is very active and they hold events called WordCamps, one- or two-day events with various speakers and networking activities.  I noticed that there’s going to be one held the first weekend of October in Toronto, so I signed up.  It’s only $25 and for that I get lunch both days and a t-shirt, too.  Hopefully, my schedule won’t change between now and then. 🙂

WordPress 2.5.1 was released earlier today.  It fixes some bugs and has some performance enhancements.  More importantly, it contains a very important security fix.

The security fixes affect the following files:

• wp-includes/pluggable.php
• wp-admin/includes/media.php
• wp-admin/media.php

If you’re using Subversion to maintain your WordPress installation, you should only need to login to the server, switch to the root directory of your blog and enter the following command:

svn sw http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.5.1/

Since WordPress 2.5.1 does contain a security fix, you should upgrade immediately.

So, CSS Naked Day on gordon.dewis.ca has finished.  For 24 hours, my blog didn’t have its usual fancy trappings because the cascading style sheet (CSS) was disabled.  I was quite impressed how it looked sans CSS, so kudos to the WordPress developers for creating such a robust system.

As of the time of this post, there were 1983 sites listed on the CSS Naked Day site.  Congrats to the organizers!

As I mentioned a couple of days ago, I’m celebrating CSS Naked Day today by disabling the cascading style sheets on my blog.  Don’t worry, they’ll be back in about 24 hours or so.

In the meantime, I hope you enjoy it in all its nakedness. 🙂

The third annual CSS Naked Day is going to be celebrated on April 9th. Its goal is to promote Web Standards, including proper use of (x)html, semantic markup, and a good hierarchy structure.

How it works is this: A webmaster registers their site at http://naked.dustindiaz.com/ and then on April 9th they remove all CSS (cascading style sheets — the things that make the web pretty) from their website.

There were at least 580 sites listed on the CSS Naked Day website when I registered my blog. In 2006, there were 763 sites that participated. 2007 saw 1689 sites participate. They’re expecting a lot more sites this year. Some sites go naked for longer than 24 hours to ensure they’re naked for 24 hours in all the various timezones around the world. I’ve installed the WordPress CSS Naked Day plugin, which offers a local time mode (just 24 hours) and a 48-hour mode, which is the “recommended” setting.

So, when you visit my blog on the 9th it’ll be naked for all to see. 🙂