Was definitely this one for Flo TV.  This pretty much was my generation.

Cool.

My dad was a Ford dealer.  Until I bought my Toyota Tundra a couple of years ago, I was a loyal Ford customer.  When I bought my Toyota, I felt a little guilty.

No more.

This week, in the wake of the Toyota recalls, I received a very official looking envelope, with a large, ominous message on the front” “IMPORTANT TOYOTA RECALL INFO ENCLOSED.”

So I put it aside, and opened it today.

Much to my surprise and Ford-hate inducing irritation, it was not a letter explaining how to get my truck fixed.  It was an ad from a Ford dealership trying to get me to buy a Ford.  Look, there is one reason and only one reason they dressed-up the envelope like this.  To get me to open some paper-spam that I would otherwise have immediately tossed in the trash.  I don’t know if this is illegal, but it should be.

Candidly, I hope Freeway Ford never sells another vehicle if this is the way it tries to attract customers.

Guess what Freeway Ford?  We are shopping for a car for my wife right now.  Guess what else?  We’re not going to buy a Ford.

So here I sit in a fancy hotel room in Austin, watching Paranormal Activity, which is shaping up to be a scary movie, and feeling irritated that the supposedly world-class fitness center in this hotel closes at 9:00 p.m.  Meanwhile people in Days Inns across America are happily running on lesser treadmills in non-world-class exercise rooms.  That are open.

Compounding my irritation is the fact that after deciding to freeze my butt off and run outside, I found the nearby trails to be pitch black- not a light anywhere.  It was hard to stay upright and on the trails walking.  Running would have been impossible.

It’s annoying.

Sort of like reading and responding to email on my laptop.  It’s too small to create a desktop monitor or keyboard experience, and too big to easily place in my lap or use as a quasi-handheld.  It’s just not a fulfilling experience.

I wonder if the iPad will fill this gap I have fallen into?

It could.  After all, much of the work we do on laptops- reading email, surfing the web, listening to music, etc.- doesn’t require a desktop-like experience.  And, again, how much worse could it really be than trying to hold this laptop and deal with this tiny keyboard?  I can tell you this- I can type emails much faster on my iPhone than this tiny, non-ergonomic keyboard.

For me to fully embrace the iPad, I need three things to happen.

One, I need Microsoft to recognize the huge market for Office applications.  As I have said a million times, Google Docs suck epicly.  Document intensive users are still bound to Word.  Microsoft should not give conflicted users another reason to try to free themselves of Office.  Rather, make it easy to stay hooked by creating some sort of Word app for the iPad.

Two, I need the iPad (and ATT) to permit the iPad to do what the iPhone still can’t do- tether.  That way I can dump my ATT wireless broadband card, and apply that money to 3G service on the iPad.  The lack of standard ports on the iPad doesn’t bode well for this, but I can hope.

Three, I need the rumors about a camera on the iPad to, miraculously, be true.  Maybe I won’t use the camera that much, but philosophically I can’t get past the lack of one.

If that happens, I’m in.  What are your must-have features?

By the way, Paranormal Activity is seriously scary. . .

We have numerous handcrafted Pandora stations to choose from. Start with our Country Rock Station, our Alt. Country Station,  or the Jukebox DeLuxe for a broader mix.

Newsome.Org Country Rock Radio
Newsome.Org Alt. Country Radio
Newsome.Org Blues Radio
Newsome.Org Jukebox Deluxe Radio
Newsome.Org Zydeco Radio
Newsome.Org Early Reggae Radio
All Station QuickMix

You can easily access these stations via the menu in the right hand column of these pages.  Enjoy!

For more great music try:
Errbear Music: Kent Newsome’s original songs (RSS)
Goodsongs.Com: Newsome.Org’s music recommendation page (RSS)
Kent’s MixCloud page: Great, themed, streaming playlists (RSS)

We’re really getting back into the rock and roll of things tonight.  I even did a new RanchoCast.  This edition has some great southern rock, with some deep cuts by the Allman Brothers, the Outlaws, the Ozark Mountain Daredevils, Grinder’s Switch and more.

Rock on.

In honor of the (mostly) success of my WordPress assault, I think it’s time for an Evening Reading post.

What Dwight Said: “In this battle between giants, readers will be collateral damage.” Amen.  Books are the new IM.  Everybody wanted to control the channel, and eventually people just gave up and moved on.

Meanwhile: Scoble displays his love (and hype-susceptibility) by burning his eBook in the name of Apple-love.

Forget Book Fights: JooJoo fights are where it’s at.  I want to interview someone who is buying a JooJoo, and ask one 3-letter question.

Speaking of Tablets:  Why do I have a lurking feeling that Dell is now working on a iPad competitor to be sold in third world countries?

WordPress Question:  I need an iPhone app.  What’s better WordPress or Wordpress 2?

Speaking of IM:  Is there really a market for this?  Seriously, who really relies on IM?  I really want to know.

Lost Turkeys of the New World:  This almost makes me want to be in a band again, so I can name it that.

WordPress Tip:  Very timely advice.  I am fighting a losing battle trying to get my WP permalinks to be the same as my 1600 or so imported-from-Blogger ones.

Yes, But:  So do all ads.  I work hard to have an ad-free existence.  I record all my TV shows.  I listen to radio via XM (until I can get Pandora in my truck).  I have ad-blockers installed in Firefox.

The Deleted World: Here’s a site that helps delete social networking accounts.  It ought to have a function to search via email address, etc. so you can find ones you want to delete.

The Freed Feed: Here’s how to get your Facebook status updates into an RSS feed.

The Day the Music (Label) Died:  If this is right, there’s just depression and acceptance to go.  In 7 years, there will be no record labels, the way we currently think of record labels.  Not a moment too soon.

The WordPress Process is a series of posts at Newsome.Org, documenting my forced march from the comfort of Blogger to the uncharted territories of WordPress.  Parts 1 & 2 are here, Part 3 is here, and Part 4 is here.

Wow, the support I received in response to my last post was amazing.  A million thanks!

The header is a work in progress, but I have fixed the page tabs.

I’ve fixed a lot of the embedded videos that got messed up on the import.  I’ll finish the rest as I work my way through the tagging and categorizing process.

I’ve already been though about a quarter of my old posts and added tags and categories.

Other than the header work, all I have left is to preserve permalinks (probably going to have to pay someone to do that for me) and figure out how to get Disqus comment and reaction numbers to show on the main WordPress pages.  Disqus is a great commenting platform, but this should be part of the plugin installation and/or options.

I have configured Live Writer to work with my WordPress installation, and this is a test post to see how it does.

Update 1: Pretty darn well.  I love the integrated Categories and Tags support.  Once again, I love Live Writer!

More as it develops

This post comes with a bounty.  Design experts can make an easy $200 by fixing some annoying glitches I am struggling with (one payment per problem solved; email me first).

The WordPress Process is a series of posts at Newsome.Org, documenting my forced march from the comfort of Blogger to the uncharted territories of WordPress.  Parts 1 & 2 are here, and Part 3 is here.

I have all posts imported.  Except as noted below, I have a handle on modifying my theme to make things the way I want them.  I have my Twitter widget installed, and I have installed a Feedburner plugin and updated my Feedburner feed.

Here are my theme-related issues:

1. Why does my theme resize up my logo/graphic in the header?  I have looked everywhere for this code to fix it, and I can’t find it.

2. I need to fix the greenish background around the page tabs in the header.  Again, I can’t find this in the files.

Any WordPress designers want to make a quick $100 (via Paypal) by fixing these problems and generally improving my header?

3. I note that my YouTube embedded videos didn’t make the transition. That’s going to be a pain to fix by hand.

I also ran into trouble importing my Disqus comments.  I have Disqus set up for new comments (though I want the number of comments and reactions to show at the bottom of posts on all pages), but I can’t get my existing comments to show on my imported posts.  Another $100 (via Paypal) to anyone who can fix this.

I installed an AddtoAny plugin to allow items to be shared.  It seems to work pretty well, but I absolutely hate the fact that it appends a note to the end of shared Tweets.

I need to lose that somehow.  I tried to hack the php file, but didn’t see the code that adds this.

Overall, things are coming along.

The WordPress Process is a series of posts at Newsome.Org, documenting my forced march from the comfort of Blogger to the uncharted territories of WordPress.  Parts 1 & 2 are here.

OK, I got tired of worrying about this WordPress migration, said screw it and moved my WP installation into my root directory. I think I have figured out a way to import my prior posts and save my permalinks, but at the moment I am held up by a maximum file size limitation in a PHP.ini file that I can’t find on my server. I have sent out an SOS to my web host, and hope to be either up and running or out of business shortly.

More as it develops.

Update 1:

I managed to overcome the maximum size limitation problem and import most of my posts.  Some didn’t make it, and I am working on that now.

Progress is being made.

Update 2:

I think I have all the posts imported.  Tomorrow I’ll fix the permalinks.

Not bad for a days work.

The WordPress Process is a series of posts at Newsome.Org, documenting my forced march from the comfort of Blogger to the uncharted territories of WordPress.

Recapping the latest developments:

1. FTP publishing via Blogger is dead, so I have to move Newsome.Org to either Blogger custom domain publishing or WordPress.

2. I moved Err Bear Music to a blogger custom domain, and the process was easy.

3. I still think WordPress may be a more robust platform, and have put out an RFP for someone to port Newsome.Org into WordPress.  I am close to a deal to get that done.

But I am also a coder and hacker, who would like to know the hows and whys of the process.  So last night I did a few things.

Installing WordPress

First, I installed a test version of WordPress on my server.  I started with the installation instructions, particularly the Famous 5-Minute Install walk-through.  Pair.Com hosts my server, so this post was also very helpful.  In sum, the process was pretty simple.  At the end of the process, I had a working version of WordPress installed.  It ain’t pretty, and God knows how I’ll import all of my blog posts.  But it’s installed.

Finding and Hacking a Theme

I briefly explored recreating my hand-made Blogger theme from whole cloth, but almost immediately that seemed like an insurmountable task.  I’m pretty good with code, and this is when I got my first inkling that maybe WordPress theme-hacking was going to be harder than it should be.

So I located a good 3-column theme, installed and activated it.  When I settle on a starting theme, I will be happy to pay for it (so I can hack it freely, delete the credit links, etc.), but this free theme is a good place to start my WordPress learning experience.  Next, I wanted to modify the colors and content of the theme.  WordPress has a built-in theme editor, but at least initially, I am not impressed with it.  So I took the old-school approach and modified the files directly and uploaded them to my sever.

But, boy, are there a lot of them.  With Blogger, I have two files to be concerned with.  My template and my style sheet.  There are scads of files that affect the look and content of a WordPress blog.  That fact, and my general lack of experience with PHP, discourages me greatly at the moment.  I want the ability to manipulate the content, presentation and order of my blog, the way I can now via my Blogger template.  Perhaps you can in WordPress, but at this point it seems like it will be a chore.

So I did what any right-thinking person should do when faced with a confusing pile of code.  I went to bed.

Next Step

I’m going to need to spend a couple of hours learning the structure and purpose of these various files.  I hope and suspect that things will get easier with familiarity.  I sure hope so.

But at least I’ve taken the first step.

On to Part 2

OK, I now understand better the WordPress page and theme structure, and the editing capabilities are much better than I initially thought.  In fact, I got tired of worrying about all of this and did what I generally do when technologically uncertain: I said screw it and tried to import all of my existing posts to my WordPress blog. . .

Of course, it’s never that easy, even if you are willing to work without a net.

First of all, WordPress cannot directly import files from an FTP published Blogger blog.

Well isn’t that just great.

Never fear, I’ll just export my blog via the Blogger dashboard.

And run that file through the handy online converter, that will convert my exported file to a WordPress WXR file, that can be imported.

But NOOOOO. . .

Turns out that file is too big to be imported.

It just keeps getting better.  There is some discussion of modifying your php.ini file to allow larger uploads, the only problem being that I CAN’T FIND IT.  IT’S NOT IN THE DIRECTORY ON MY SERVER.

So here’s where we are at the moment.

One, I believe I can hack together a WordPress theme that would serve my purposes.

Two, I’m willing to fly without a net and import my posts, and worry about the permalinks later.

Three, none of that frickin’ matters because I can’t import my blog posts thanks to some size limit I can’t find to fix.

At the end of the day, I could convert my blog to a blogspot hosted blog, and import it from there, but that just seems like too much brain damage.

So. . .

I’m going for a run.