Rodent Regatta

At any given time, I may have four or five Moleskine notebooks in use. One tracks changes I want to make to this web site. A second tracks notes for my company and its site. I keep a spiritual journal in a third. The fourth one that I’m using right now tracks new ideas and opportunities. Other people may have as many as seven or eight notebooks going at once.

Glance at a stack of these on a desk or in a brief case and you won’t be able to tell them apart. How do you keep them straight? Here are some ideas:

• Avery’s adhesive dots on the front or back cover; ok, but again difficult or impossible to see if the notebooks are stacked.
• Title page indicator; ok, but requires that you unfasten the elastic closure and open the book.
• Best Idea? Use colored markers to make page-edge indicators. Preferably, use a fine point marker, squeeze the closed notebook tightly shut and make geometric, numeric or alphabetic codes on the top, bottom or side edges of the pages. Cleverly done, the colors and/or a series of letters or numbers will provide an easy-to-see indentifier for as many notebooks as you might have active at once.

I’m in Instapundit’s territory. He’s out of town, but I’m hoping to drop in at the Downtown Grill and Brewery on Friday or Saturday and inhale a little of his blogging mojo.

This thing called personal publishing has really flourished since 9-11-2001. In my case, the events of that day served as a catalyst for me to get started doing some things I had been putting off.

Content management systems (CMS) or personal publishing platforms became intriguing to me as I began to realize what a person, group or a corporation might achieve by communicating 24/7 with something other than a static web site.

If any of this makes sense to you and you’re interested, you should take a look at Whose blog is it? Don’t overlook the comments, either!

Several weblog tools have hit the outer edges of the radar screen in recent weeks. I’m anxiously awaiting Movable Type 3.0 so that I can make some changes to my existing design and incorporate some new features. I want to see the product before launching those changes, because I want to make sure that plugins or other configuration settings don’t require a lot of work when upgrading from MT 2.66x to MT 3.0.

In the course of digging for information, these are the tools of some greater interest to me:

• WordPress
• Textpattern
• TypePad
• pMachine

If you’ve been tempted, but resisted the urge to develop your own weblog, any of these provide a great starting point.