This site will be abandoned and replaced by www.LifeTwoPointOh.com – Life Happens.
The new site will be home to a new blog of regular web columns of a more personal nature, dealing with observations about daily life in general.
Archive for 2010|Yearly archive page
Vox News Magazine – all new!
In Blogosphere, Li'l Ol' Me on March 11, 2010 at 12:01 amFinished! Vox News Magazine is now up and running the way it should be – an online “newspaper” or “magazine”.
No doubt readers will enjoy the newspaper-style sections (Canada, Alberta, International, Business, Opinion, etc.).
For those who like RSS feeds, here’s some good news: simply subscribe to the RSS feed of the section or sections you’re interested in, and skip the rest (but I strongly advice against it 
).
There’ll be a few more tweaks (e.g., section-specific lists of links, etc.), but overall, this project is now complete.
What’s new in the world of “Werner Patels 2.0”?
In Blogosphere, Li'l Ol' Me on March 5, 2010 at 6:15 pmWell, in between a lot of translation and other projects, I have finally been able to revamp my web properties (aka “Werner Patels 2.0”).
I have weeded out a lot of old stuff from my various sites, changed and improved category titles in a way that made more sense, and modified some of the design and CSS.
Sometimes people ask me, “Why do you have so many sites?” Well, because like in the world of specialty TV on cable, it’s always a good thing to specialize.
So, let’s do a quick summary rundown of my web properties and explain what each one is for.
This is my web column. It is like any editorial or op-ed column you find in quality newspapers or magazines, with the only difference being that it is published online, instead of on paper. As a result, each column is anywhere from 400 and 600 to 1,500 or 2,000 words long.
This is my other web column or online portfolio of issues-driven opinion columns and feature articles (the latter are usually at least 1,000 words). As well, readers are welcome to submit their own guest columns or articles. This site deals only with Canadian issues and topics, or ones that affect Canadians in one way or another.
This is my actual blog where I post relatively brief notes on current events, from Canada and around the world. Essentially, anything that’s too short for my web columns or feature articles, i.e., doesn’t add up to at least 400 to 600 words, will be posted here.
Heads-up …
In Blogosphere, Li'l Ol' Me on February 25, 2010 at 1:32 pm… Just a quick heads-up:
Today I will relaunch my Web 2.0 properties:
I haven’t been quite happy with the “flavour”, if you will, and general “feel” of those sites lately, which is why I have embarked on a major overhaul. I also think that readers will enjoy the relaunched sites more than before.
Updates and information on this relaunch will be posted in this space throughout the day.
Update:
www.CanadianViews.com is now live (12:44pm MT)
www.VoxNewsMagazine.com is now live (1:22pm MT)
www.WernerPatels.com is now live (1:39pm MT) – Please note that you can find older, archived web columns at www.WernerPatels.ca.
Blogger.com much improved
In Blogosphere on February 23, 2010 at 1:10 pmThe other day I went into my Blogger.com-hosted WernerPatels.ca (where I mirror my web column for backup purposes), and discovered the “new” Blogger.
Its new editor now allows for jumps, i.e. “Read more”, which you can use to shorten an entry on the main blog page. Unfortunately, though, Blogger has done away with the “<p>” tag, which means that all paragraphs are now instead separated by line breaks (“<br/>”), which increases the spacing between paragraph considerably. It doesn’t always look pretty.
There’s a way around it, however, when you write and publish your posts from an external application, like Live Writer. But once you go into the Blogger editor to make changes to an existing post, all bets are off, and you’ll be trapped in line-break hell.
The other thing I like is that images uploaded to your blog are now hosted on Google’s Picasa, which gives you 1GB of storage. It also adds new tools, like adding frames or shadows to your images, which wasn’t possible before when images embedded in blog posts were hosted on a separate Blogger.com server. Also, with Picasa, you can now go in and manage the stock of images, even delete some you no longer need (e.g., because the blog post in question no longer exists). When images were hosted on Blogger.com, users had no control over the images and were unable to delete previously uploaded images even after the post had been deleted, thus reducing the available storage space.
Finally, with Blogger.com you can now create pages and place them in a navigation bar (not unlike those found with WordPress or Typepad).
In short, the new and improved Blogger.com really is much better now. All Google has to do now is fix the issue of line breaks. (Why don’t they simply reactivate the paragraph coding and tags?)
Happy Family Day!
In Li'l Ol' Me on February 15, 2010 at 11:06 pmSpent Family Day working on a complex project, while sorting and rearranging some stuff on my computer …. also managed to read my 3 dailies and dip into four different news magazines …. boy, I’m exhausted …. oh, and I also caught tonight’s 24, of course
I suppose the torture Jack Bauer suffered tonight was worse than my workload today….
Sorry, no show tonight
In BlogTalkRadio, Li'l Ol' Me on February 12, 2010 at 4:47 pmMy apologies, but I have to pre-empt my BlogTalkRadio show tonight again … scheduling conflicts, tons of work, you name it. Besides, I think most people will be glued to their TV sets tonight watching the Vancouver Olympics opening ceremony.
Maybe I’ll be able to schedule a “make-up” show in the next few days. Time will tell.
About comments …
In Blogosphere, Li'l Ol' Me on February 9, 2010 at 12:27 pmIf you’ve been to any of my web properties (e.g., www.WernerPatels.com or www.VoxNewsMagazine.com), you’ll have noticed that comments are now moderated across the board. If you look again, you’ll also see that I don’t withhold any comments (even those posted by lefties!).
The reason why I switched to moderation has to do with security concerns. I had noticed a drastic increase in malicious spam comments, which didn’t always get caught by the antispam software built into the blog application. Then, I’d read some troubling news about how those types of spam comments can be used to insert malicious code that could harm my readers’ computers.
Since I can’t monitor my sites all the time and, say, delete such malicious spam instantly, I’ve decided to switch to moderation. The only comments that are deleted are outright spam. No legit comment, whether the poster agrees or disagrees with my views, will ever be rejected. That’s my solemn promise and guarantee.
Seeing how most political bloggers – at least, the ones I read on a more or less regular basis – have taken to comment moderation in recent months, I feel I’m in good company.
Again: No legit comment will ever be rejected. Only spam messages will be nuked.
I need to say this …
In Blogosphere, Li'l Ol' Me, Personal Observations on February 9, 2010 at 12:18 pmI’ve been mad as hell in recent weeks (if not months). To me, it’s felt as if common sense had been tossed into the garbage by the majority of people out there – not only in Canada, but in the US and everywhere else.
On the one hand, we’ve been hearing nonsense about how capitalism is “dead” (with the recession and its concomitant revival of Keynesian folly being cited as proof). On the other, we’re being fed even bigger nonsense about “man-made global warming”.
I won’t claim to have the ultimate truth, but what I do know is that the “scientists” working on this problem have been politically and ideologically motivated, and many, if not most, of them have acted unethically (“Climategate”). I don’t see any middle ground in this debate. We have radical lefties who insist that we must put ourselves back in the Stone Age, or the planet will be lost. Such exaggerated claims accomplish only one thing: actual proof that it ain’t so.
Remember what mom always said (at least mine did): Anyone who raises his voice and screams, while trying to drown out and gag anyone who thinks differently, is automatically and invariably in the wrong – no matter what.
But whether that BS is real or not is not the issue here. What is, though, is the tone and style with which stuff is being shoved down our throats today – in politics, society, business and “science”. In short, there is a lot more stupidity in the world today, with the really stupid people being absolutely arrogant about their claims to know the “ultimate truths” about everything. And this has kept my PO level at an all-time high recently.
I shouldn’t have allowed this to happen, but my anger has shown through on numerous occasions in recent weeks and months, culminating, for example, in name-calling on blogs or Twitter, etc.
Not making excuses here at all, but let me just say that, if nothing else, it shows that I do care about what happens to our country, our world. If more people cared, we’d actually see a higher turnout at election time for a change. Wouldn’t that be awesome?
So, while I’ll try to keep my anger at “global stupidity” in check, I won’t always succeed. But, at least, I care enough about the issues to get all worked up – which is more than most other people can say about themselves.
News Spectator is now Vox News Magazine
In Li'l Ol' Me on February 6, 2010 at 6:23 pmPlease update your bookmarks. My site The News Spectator is now called Vox News Magazine and can be found at www.VoxNewsMagazine.com. The old URL will remain in effect for some time to come, so old links to previous posts on the site will remain active.
