Saturday, November 13, 2010

The New and Improved Penrose Blood Family Blog

Liz called me this morning to titter, teehee, giggle and make fun of me when she could see I was struggling to fine tune the blog a bit.  Reminded me of when Dad was trying to milk Old Red, the meanest cow I remember.  I got rid of the books for Ann, and I didn't like them either.  I adjusted the column widths so stuff doesn't slop over in the two main columns.  Now we have a poppy or is it a pansy, it has whiskers.  I do not want any comments, complaints, bloviations, or other verbiage, thoughts, or expressions for at least six weeks.  I hate blogger.  Too many limitations on what you can do.  I've thought about moving the blog over either to Typepad or Wordpress, but we seem to have adjusted to blogger so I'd better let well enough alone.

We do have some work to do.  I would suggest we focus a bit on telling short stories and anecdotes and reproducing documents and such in addition to just commenting on the blog posts, though the latter comments are important.  We need to encourage family members who are members of the extended Blood family to feel at home on this blog.  I also encourage readers who visit our blog who are not members of our family to share their experiences in developing family blogs and the benefits their families have received from their blogs.  Finally, we need a major streamlining of the categories to make it easier to archive similar material.  I hope that in the next year or two, heaven willing, that we can compile one or a series of family printed books from archived material.  I hereby resign from fiddling with the blog.  If I could learn HTML I could likely post our own photo on the side backgrounds and maybe in the next life I will be shown by some kindly young person how to do that.

Thank you all for your patience with me and for your continued interest and participation in this blog.  I think we have all found a home here and that we have been blessed with closer contact than we would ever have experienced without Penrose Mornings.  The future of this blog is limited only by the ingenuity of our participants and readers.  I would like to think we would be smart enough to take family blogging and family history blogging to a new and higher level that would not only benefit us, but also be of help to countless others who are considering starting such a blog, or who have started one and then seen it languish.  The benefits are simply too great, the family ties too important, and the heritage to be passed on too valuable and fleeting, to not take this project seriously.  Cheers, dmb

6 comments:

Elizabeth said...

Very good - and since I got to "tee-hee" and "haw-haw" with you yesterday, I get to respond first. We will persevere. There are so many stories and pictures and other things to share. As I look back on the blog, there is much history there, as well as an increased appreciation for our heritage. And, if we do some occasional re-runs, it doesn't matter- just brings events back to remembrance. (By the way, pansies were one of Mother's favorites. Much better than the books.)

Steve Blood said...

I miss the books.

Judy said...

I want strawberries. Can't you find strawberries?

Steve Blood said...

So many trouble makers, so little time.

Ann said...

Books? What books?
It is always fun to open up the blog and see what is new. As I am copying the blog over to create a PDF document, I have to say that some of the funnest stuff is the running commentary on what begins as a very innocuous posting. Please don't stop with the comments. They will provide a great insight to anyone who may read the copy and not know us, or for us as we all get older and forget about funny stuff - in the comments we become our true selves.
In an attempt to be diplomatic,I must admit I miss the color in heading photo. I know you are tired of messing with this, but another thought is the title of the blog gets really lost on my computer - maybe if I had a MAC I wouldn't have that problem. It will be interesting to see how the larger font copies over, but I suspect I can change the font in my copy once it is pasted into the new document. Any suggestions?

Steve Blood said...

Classy