Thursday, August 14, 2008

WATCH THIS SPACE!


Sounds like a sign on an empty store in a mall. Back when I first decided to set up a website I mocked up some pages in Word to show the guy who ran the small server that I was putting it on what I have in mind. I even had the bookmarks and hyperlinks in it necessary for it to work. He told me to
rename the First page “Index,” to save them as html pages and the site would work the way I had it.

I did and it worked like a charm. I’ve maintained the site in Word for years now. It was fast and very simple. I had a lot of content in it and a lot of people used the library of writing links or went to the blog that I change several times a week. The number of pages looked at went over 3 million and the number of unique visitors is approaching 440,000. It was working.

One of my clients, Bonnie Calhoun, who writes great suspense/thrillers is also the head of the Christian Blog Alliance and the Publisher of the Christian Fiction Online Magazine. In other words, she’s really good at this online stuff. She said the site was getting too big and important to be such a cobbled together bunch of pages and said she’d show me how to do a first class landing page and how I could do a better job with the remaining pages.

Bonnie is a pro and I would be a fool not to listen to her. Watch this space and see how it changes.

Now let me change horses. I don’t know if Elmer Kelton is on a crusade or not, but if he is I want to sign on. I think everybody in the country ought to get a copy of the July issue of Texas Monthly where Elmer decries the current trend of applying the term “Cowboy” in a negative sense, particularly in politics and I couldn’t agree more. When somebody does that, whether the listener supports or opposes the person it is applied to, it angers a good part of the entire population of the west.

A cowboy is a hard-working hand that generally holds to a set of principles no politician could ever hope to match. The name has to be earned, it can’t be purchased in a Western store with a big hat and a pair of boots. I’ve worked on ranches some and did some time at a rodeo, but it still isn’t something I would ever call myself. But if someone else applies it to me I consider it a high honor. Be warned, those of you who insist on applying the word negatively, it could . . . no . . . probably will affect you much more than whoever you are trying to impact.

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