It’s hard to believe that it has been well over a year since I started my blog on October 16, 2005. I hit 200 posts on my old Blogger account last night, one of those numbers that makes you step back and say “Woah, how did that build up so fast?” A lot like how I recently snapped IMG_5036.jpg on my digital camera. (Though I admit, I don’t think it started at 0001… The earliest picture I can find is IMG_1971.jpg, which was taken from the airplane on the way to Europe, within 2 weeks of buying my camera. I can remember earlier pictures of home & Lambeau field, but can’t find them at the moment.) Unreal. Anyways.

Welcome!
Over this, my Spring Break, I finally decided it was time to switch my blog over to a new home here, at http://www.mccambridge.org/blog. I considered using FTP publishing on Blogger to keep the same look and feel, but ultimately decided it would be more fun to try a new blogging software package as well. Enter WordPress. I haven’t worked out all the kinks yet, but it’s been a pretty cool process so far, and I’ve felt like I have more low-level control of what’s going on, as well, which is pretty cool from a nerd standpoint 🙂

Whats new?

• Well, the URL, obviously, which is now: http://www.mccambridge.org/blog
• Also the RSS and Atom feed URLs. If you subscribe by either of those, please update your readers.
• The name: The Spark Between. This actually came verbatim from the same source as my previous blog title <Collaboration Collective>, but has a bit of a different feel and was taken more out of context. I sat and stared at the “Blog Title” field of WordPress’s installation for at least as long as I originally stared at Blogger’s prompt. The only inspiration I had was not to use < and > again, due to screwing up Paul’s (and probably others’) readers in the past. There’s not much for backstory this time… I went back and read the poem where I got my last title from, and these words stuck in my head. I’m not sure that they really have that much for explicit metaphorical meaning or anything: they’re more like the Chili Peppers; you listen to a song with relatively random lyrics but feel like maybe you’ve heard something profound. They also sound somewhat similar to “The Space Between,” a pretty cool song by Dave Matthews, so that’s always good. If I get sick of the name in the near future, it is certainly subject to change.
• The comment system is slightly different from Blogger’s. Basically, put in your name & email address with your comment. The email address will never be displayed on this webpage, it is only to make sure the comment is not spam. The first time you comment, it won’t show up immediately because I have to approve it first, but after that future comments will appear right away. Note: I’m not sure if this uses cookies or just name & email pairs, so if it becomes a problem, I will figure out how to use something else. Bear with me…
• I have imported all my archived posts from Blogger, so if you’re looking for anything in the past, you should be able to find it here as well.
• There’s a plugin called Lightbox that I think is kindof cool. When you click on thumbnails or links to images in my blog now, if your browser supports it, you will see the image pop up over the page instead of navigating away. (Old browsers will still navigate away as before). I’ve hacked this feature a bit to work with posts I make from my phone as well (that’s why the couple posts about Gramma’s house below 🙂 ) Let me know what you think of this… useful? annoying? indifferent? waste of bandwidth? Do tell.
• I intend to spend some time this weekend going back through my old blog posts and making sure they transitioned alright. At that point I’ll try to also update the Categories (aka tags) I’ve assigned to my posts, since I only bass-ackwardsly used those over on Blogger.

That’s probably about it… Welcome, I hope this new site works out for all involved, and don’t forget to update your links!