From the Department of Self-Evident Headlines

Feds Say Angry, Suicidal Pilots And Truckers Aren't a Good Idea

... you don't say ...

Testing the ScribeFire posting system

I upgraded to the release candidate of Firefox 3.0 today, and while it disabled most of my add-ons, I found a really cool one called ScribeFire, which lets me blog pretty much anything from anywhere on the Net using a push-button on my browser toolbar. This is my first test post from ScribeFire. Let's see how it looks.

Web 2.0 has been good to me

It's been a few months now since I moved The Newsroom over to the Blogger interface, which allowed for syndicated feeds, permalinks, and better indexing of the blog via Google.

The result, as you can see from the accompanying stats graph, has been a noticeable uptick in my hits and page views. To be sure, a lot of that was traffic generated by Wrestlemania, Ric Flair's retirement, and more recently, the Starfield concert accident I've been blogging about this weekend. But on the whole, my average daily hit count has gone from pathetic single digits to slightly less pathetic double digits.


I'm not going to be winning any blogging traffic awards, but it's mildly satisfying to see that I've generated a small base of regular readers despite no longer having a platform in the pages of the Edmonton Sun from which to generate free name-awareness traffic on this site. (That said, I do get a kick out of seeing the sunpub.com domain show up on my SiteMeter stats generator every once in a while.)

NEW! Shared items

The keen-eyed among you will have noticed that I now have a "shared items" applet along the right-hand side of the page. I have several dozen blog feeds in my Google Reader (an amazing application), and from time to time, I'll be marking items there that I think my readership (all 4 of you) might be interested in reading as well. Or not.

The items can be clicked one at a time, or you can click the "read more" link to read all the items in my list.

Currently, there's some MMA news, a good article on the death of Christian rock pioneer Larry Norman, and and older link to the day I got cut from the Edmonton Sun.

Firefox weirdness

As I mentioned below, I downloaded and installed the Firefox 3 Beta 3 last week, and found it to be quite spiffy, even if had broken most of my extensions.

I had been using it for a few days and not thinking to much about it when I realized that all my extensions were back. And some of the Beta 3 changes were gone.

Apparently, Firefox had downloaded the latest patch for Firefox 2.0 and in the process, it "updated" itself from version 3B3 to version 2.0012. So, now, when I start FF, I get the updated 2.0012 ... except for the odd time it actually starts up version 3B3.

In short, I seem to be using some kind of mutant version 2.0012-Beta3 combo browser. I would download the beta version again, but I much prefer having my extensions back to using the faster Version 3, so at this point, I'm going to wait for the release version of 3 and stick with my mutant hybrid browser.

Firefox 3 Beta 3

On an absolute whim tonight, I decided to download the new Firefox beta browser. I'm about 10 minutes into testing it out, but the 3.0 beta 3 sure feels a lot faster than the 2.0 version.

So far, the only downside is that some of my Firefox extensions have been disabled, but that's to be expected when experimenting with unreleased software. Otherwise, though, it's quite the little upgrade.