We have launched a new version of our Blog using a powerful blog engine called WordPress. My son, Glen, was both the inspiration and the support team as I did the keyboard entries. Ignition was the evening of December 17th and lift-off came on Saturday morning the 18th.

I patterned my blog style after Glen’s blog called The  Salty Geek. Glen is busy becoming an expert on marine reef aquariums, and is writing a blog as he learns, as a guide to guide others. He has outdone even his own blog in the re-design for my blog, however. Since I have four main topics that that I write about periodically we created four different headers. They are sensitive to the category of the post. Try each of these four categories to preview the differences. (Travel, Sailing, Bluegrass and Bicycle Construction)

There are several interesting features about this blog engine.

1. The posts can be sorted by category, so that you can follow only the posts that deal with bicycle construction, for example.

2. When I finish editing a post, I choose a few tags that represent the topics included in the post. Selecting a tag from the tag cloud at the right of the page will present a group of posts that include that tag.

3. You can also search for a specific word or phrase in the search bar. At this time it does not have so-called “fuzzy search” capabilities, so the word has to be exact including capitalization.

4. You are encouraged to leave comments on each post. I will retain the ability to open them up for all to view, just in case I get some malicious comments. There are two ways to comment:

• Just click on the comment space at the end of the post. Write your comment and enter your name and e-mail address. You will be required to solve a reCAPTCHA puzzle to prove that you are really you and not a robot.

• Click “register” in the side-panel and register. You can fill in more details about who you are, and you will still need to solve a reCAPTCHA puzzle. Once you have registered, you can sign in any time and you will not have to solve puzzles for me again.

5. The blog has rss feed capabilities. If you subscribe to one of the rss feeds your subscription server will notify you whenever that event occurs. There are feeds for entries to the blog and for comments.

Finally: I will e-mail this entire blog to all in my mailing list. In the future, however, I plan to send only the first paragraph or so as a tease. Following the tease will be a link to the full topic including photos. You will need to click the link and read the blog in your web browser. If that is a problem for some of my readers, send me an e-mail and I will create a mailing list of those people who can only get e-mail, and need the full text.

This has gotten quite long, so I will sign off. Judy and I wish you all a very merry Christmas.