Changes To This Blog (And More Clarifications)

I have just finished a major overhaul of this blog, though you wouldn't notice it unless you checked the archives.  You see, my blog posts written before December 2009 did not have titles, and the margins in my posts were not justified in their alignment.  So I spent all of the past month titling them and justifying their margins.  I just finished it up this past weekend.

Why did I do all that?  First,  I wanted to make my entire blog consistent.  Secondly, I wanted to make it easy for myself and anyone else who cared to access individual posts published before December 2009; you can't click on a single blog post and read it in isolation unless it has a title.  I also reverted them all to drafts and republished them to match the URL of each post to the title - something I found out I could do while undertaking this massive effort.  Thirdly, I wanted to clean up the posts themselves; I fixed numerous typos, inconsistencies in punctuation styles, and the like.  If there was a post with a link to a page that has since been removed (one such link has since been connected to a virus - yes, I escaped infection!), or if the post had content that was rendered obsolete or redundant later on, well, I deleted it.

The result is a blog that is now consistent and much more well-edited, as I strive to push what the Japanese call kaizen - continuous improvement.  And I know that I haven't improved it to perfection; it's an ongoing process.  This is, not counting deleted blog posts, the 4,267th post on this blog; even after another 4,267 posts, I'll still be working to try to make it better.  

One reason I keep changing this blog is because Blogger.com keeps changing.  When I started this blog in September 2002, there was not, as I recall, a feature that allowed bloggers to title posts; there were also different templates, and coding for fonts and print types (boldface, italics, et. al.) were different.  I've found old posts in which I complained about Blogger.com's changes, but I'm happy to say that I've gotten accustomed to them.

Also, when I started, I couldn't put a YouTube video on a separate page.  Blogger.com didn't have extra pages for a single blog, and as it was 2002, YouTube didn't exist.  Ironically, both Blogger.com and YouTube have since become part of the Google network.  

Another thing is that I'm bringing back tags (or "labels," as Blogger.com calls them), starting now.  I dropped them in April 2012 when I had problems with Google Chrome as I transferred to that from Internet Explorer, but my friend Clarisel suggested I should bring them back to make my blog posts easier to find (she was also the one who suggested using titles, for the same reason).  I'm much more comfortable with Google Chrome now than I could ever be with a Microsoft browser, so I'm ready to return to using tags.

So why didn't I add tags to all the posts that didn't have them before? Look, I may be crazy, but I'm not that crazy! :-D

I guess that's it. But, before I conclude, I'd like to add two clarifications to earlier posts.  In my post about the twentieth anniversary of the Centennial Olympic Park bombing during the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, I did not mention that the hostage crisis at the 1972 Munich Olympics was perpetrated by Palestinian commandos.  Also, in my June 2 post about the atomic bomb, I wrote that the idea of war crimes "may sound oxymoronic any man who had the misfortune of serving in combat."  "Oxymoronic?"  That was plain moronic; the word I meant to use was "redundant."  And Fussell wrote his essay in 1981, not 1988.  These errors, which I so obviously regret, have been corrected in the original posts.

All right, I'm done for now.  Back soon with more musings.  I hope to write a lot about the Olympics - and not so much about the election.