Learned a few things this morning. It is terribly difficult to get out of the house when there’s a Star Trek Next Generation marathon running on SciFi. I have forgotten a great many episodes from this show, it seems. I’m OK with that.

There’s a certain moral philosophy going on in the dialog. I suppose it has always been that way. Perhaps at 13 I was took young to appreciate some of it. Perhaps that means it did not rub off. You’d hate to think the great philosophies of as yet unborn fictional characters did not take hold because you were so easily distracted. On the other hand it is something of a relief to think that I don’t recall episodes and scenes and scripts from 20 years ago.

I remember, about that same time, watching an episode of the original series with people who grew up with it. The syndicated episode ended abruptly — we needed more commercials, I guess — and the last scenes were left unfinished:

Not to worry, someone in the room remembered and recounted it from their childhood. That’s just the tiniest bit depressing. What an odd thing to remember with clarity. But, then, I remember that he’d remembered it. That’s little better.

Anyway. Another day, another class. I have two sections doing lab work on Dreamweaver and learning a bit of HTML and design. They are down to their final hours of classwork now. Next week they present the finished product. For the rest of this week they have to concentrate on making sure their product is finished. Some of the sites are incredibly thoughtful, I’m looking forward to seeing everyone’s reaction when they share them with the class.

Meanwhile watching them design makes me think of my own site.

In this new version of the blog there are all of four or five design elements. Those have been with us for some time now — longtime friends might recall when things changed here constantly — I suppose this means I’ve settled into my style. The picture at the top changed again this week. We’ve been on a recent trend of things I photographed in Las Vegas last month. First there was the Flamingo, then the top of a slot machine. This one is fairly straightforward, and also from Vegas. There’s one more from Vegas for next week.

This page, altogether, is as aesthetically as basic as I care to make it. The bulk of the pages throughout my site are pretty basic with respect to their coding. I went through a phase of trying to strip everything down to as little as possible. After that life got busy with work and still more school. This prompted the still current phase of less change, using the old as templates and copying and pasting in new material. It works. What’s  important, as I tell the students, is the content. Is it clear? Organized? Readily obvious what is going on?

I’d give myself a B if I were grading my site.

Please don’t grade my site. Oh why not, it is a Tuesday. Alexa and Grader say this site is in the top 6.296 percent of all websites. This makes me think Alexa is broken.

Picked up dinner for the student-journalists tonight. This is their last paper of the term and they deserve a little Roly Poly reward. One platter gave us leftovers. They wrote and edited and designed. I cleaned up my office. I started recycling leftover papers.

And then I created a Tumblr because, it was a Tuesday, why not?

So now I have the blog here for the long form material, Twitter for the stuff you must know right now and Tumblr for, I guess, things that don’t go anywhere else. We’ll see what becomes of it. I have the feeling that I’ll be doing a lot of scanning this summer, so much of that may get filtered through Tumblr.

At some point all of these things just become competition for one another. I realize that. I’m a big holdout against it — which is why I’m three years behind on the Tumblr party line. I don’t feel one has to be everywhere. The online brand should be a.) findable (and thanks to search engines and the tiniest bit of SEO, that’s no problem) and b.) where the masses are (achieved via social media). After that, we’re all just competing to see who will be the next post-2008 version of MySpace.

The question is, to import or not import the Tumblr here?

Oh, and yes, what to put on the thing.

And what to put here. Long abandoned projects will soon return to see the light of day. I’ve probably said that 45 times since last fall or so, but next week they’ll become reality. The Glomeratas will return, hopefully with a rapid end to that project. The black and whites will soon make their triumphant comeback. There are a few other things on the drawing board.

All of this really is a fine hobby, and I’m proud you’re willing to take part in a bit of it with me. We’ll get to all of that soon.

In the meantime, tomorrow, there’s the final paper of the school year, a class, cleaning and Twitter and Tumblr and who knows what else.

Have a great Wednesday!