I, Shane › Shane Adams’ personal weblog

Every few months I have to remind myself why I blog. Today, I’m here to tell you that I’m not sure I can answer that question to my own satisfaction anymore.

Last week, Alli and I had an amazing time at our church’s Congregational LIFE Workshop, a week dedicated to spiritual growth and helping leaders learn some tactics to implement in their own congregations. I’ve come back with a new look on a lot of things.

In sort-of-related news, I’ve been feeling a strange disconnection to my own blog lately and I’m realizing that I’m not doing it for the reasons I started it for originally. I’m not sure that I want to go back to how it was 4 years ago when I started, but I’m also feeling that I need a focus to my blog rather than it being all over the place. I’ve got some ideas, but nothing concrete yet.

I hope that helps explain my absence lately.

I’m taking a break from blogging for a few days.

I’m still here.

My mind’s not on it, though. I haven’t had the blogging bug these days. I’ve got other things on my mind…work, weddings, church, etc.

There’s plenty going on, but I needed a small break.

I’m back. So here goes…

My wonderful wife, who I love dearly (after all, she did name her blog after me), has a brand new home on the Web. The other day, she let me know that she had an idea for a website and wanted to know how to set it up. She was planning on registering a free Wordpress blog and all that, but I did a quick domain search and saw that the domain was available. Since I had some money with GoDaddy, I went ahead and registered it for her.

I spent last night setting it up and today, she put up her first post. So, I’d like to introduce:

Today’s Favorites

Alli’s new blog is a place where she’s planning on putting up her favorite stuff of every day. I know there are several that read both her and I and I wanted to make sure that those of you out there knew that she’s got a new place. She hasn’t decided what to do with The Shane Fan Club yet, but let’s hope it sticks around, too.

Go and check it out.

So, I’ve been on WordPress since January of 2006. I previously used Blogger, which was nice for a hosted solution (but I wouldn’t pick it today…I’d use WordPress.com) and then when I moved to my own domain, I used WordPress.

Last weekend, I upgraded my WordPress installation to the newly-released 2.5, which represented a complete overhaul of the administrative interface, designed by the fine folks at Happy Cog. There have been a ton of reviews. I’m not going to recount all of them, I’ll just share my experience.

The actual upgrade was easy (as usual).

WordPress is notorious for their 5-minute install or upgrade. I thought there might be a more extensive upgrade process than in the past since 2.5 actually changed some of the MySQL database tables, but it was extremely easy.

The admin interface is clean (but everything is really big).

I’m not sure about how Happy Cog chose to align the grid. I love the new comment bubbles, but getting used to a whole new admin interface is a little weird. I wish there were some tutorials on customizing the interface (there are, but I’m too lazy to look extensively for them), but one thing I’ve always disliked is the Dashboard. I like that I can customize it now with the feeds that I want to see.

I like the fullscreen writing feature, but the default fonts are a little big for my tastes. I’m tempted to go into the CSS for the admin, but I’m scared of it. I don’t want to mess with Stan’s code. I do like that the default font is now Lucida Grande…that I like. Much better typography.

My custom theme held up pretty well.

I’m very happy that my custom theme didn’t break, although one of the plugins I’ve used since the beginning doesn’t work in the sidebar anymore. (If you’re wondering, it was the plugin that showed the recently added comments.) It’s not surprising that it broke the plugin because it was originally written back at the tail end of 2006. For now, that little feature has gone away. I’m not nearly smart enough to write that plugin. Would love for someone to fix it though.

So far, it’s kind of slow.

There seems to be a bit of a lag with publishing posts and loading admin pages. Are any readers out there having speed issues? Maybe it’s just on the admin side…

Anyway, that’s my review. I really like the look of the interface, but it will take some getting used to. I realize that much of what I’m referring to has nothing to do with the readers, but for those that run WordPress, you’ll know what I’m talking about if you decide to upgrade. I know that The D has been experimenting with it and I haven’t seen any profanity-laced WordPress posts from him, so that’s always good.

There’s an outside chance I’m going to redesign the old blog again this summer. The darkness is good and good for the environment and all, but I’m thinking we might need to be a little sunnier.

I am now taking suggestions on colors, but they must be given in HEX value.

Thank you all for your comments on the Complete This Sentence project. I thought the comments were all awesome. There were some that I wish I could have fit into the allotted space, but couldn’t, particularly this one:

Shane…eats lightning and craps thunder.

If you have other ideas, please feel free to leave them in the comments. For now, if you’d like to see what made the cut, just refresh the page and watch the top. Some that I chose were actually variations on suggestions to make them either more accurate or funnier. Or they were edited so they’d fit. Others were ones that I thought of along the way.

Thanks again for your participation. And now, back to your regularly scheduled program…

Don’t forget…you can participate in the design of this website by contributing your pithy quote to completing this sentence:

Shane…

To see examples, just refresh the main page and watch the top banner to see what I’m talking about. There have been some great submissions so far. Keep them coming by commenting on this post.

I’ll be taking submissions a couple more days and then look to my site to see any new banners in the rotation. Thanks for your participation!

OK, so I’m working on some tweaks for my site, one being that the header will be rotating different pithy quotes. I am asking you, dear reader, to help finish this sentence: 

Shane… 

That’s it.

It can’t be too long (see above for examples…refresh the page to see random ones…there are 4 right now) and it must make sense. Put your ideas in the comments and I’ll use the best ideas. Here are some examples:

• Shane… likes cheeseburgers.
• Shane… is my hero. 
• Shane… writes valid XHTML and CSS.

You get the idea. Gimme your best shot.