tinkr.net

I started blogging in late 2000 when I first got broadband internet.  Sometimes I wish I knew the exact date, or even had some of my old archives, but I didn’t bother taking that stuff with my when I switched to different platforms over the years.

It’s kind of amazing looking at all the different platforms out there now.  When I started blogging there was basically Blogger, or you ran blogging software on your own server.  I started with blogger, but it was a little limiting back then, and it didn’t even allow commenting.  Now with Twitter and Facebook is seems like people are blogging less and less, and probably commenting less too.  I rarely ever comment on blogs, and really couldn’t care less if I had commenting on my blog now.

Blogger has greatly improved since last time I used it, and there are many other blogging options now.  If I was to start blogging right now services like Posterous, Tumblr, or Squarespace would be very tempting.

Posterous has been trying to get people to switch to them these past couple weeks.  I really like Posterous, but I just use it to easily post things here.  It has made it much easier for me to quickly share stuff on my blog that I otherwise wouldn’t bother to spend the time.  That’s really the reason I blog anyway.  I don’t consider myself the best writer, or even like writing all that much, but I love sharing cool things I find in the interwebs.

I’m not going to switch blogging services though.  As tempting as it may be, I like the greater control I have running my own server.

I had a little free time this weekend, so I thought I would try to wrap my head around Final Cut Express. Video editing and photo editing are both things I want to learn to do better, but I don’t do it enough to learn. I am hoping to get a bunch of video from Hawaii and hopefully put together some good videos.

In the past iMovie was just fine for me, but the new version drives me crazy. It’s nice for quick and easy things, but it just feels much more limiting than the older version was. So it was time for me to upgrade to Final Cut Express.

When I first started playing around with Final Cut Express I was lost, but I found an incredible free tutorial online over at IzzyVideo.com. He has a free beginners guide course, and it was so good it made we want to be a subscriber to get his paid videos, but his prices are a little more then I want to spend on something I don’t do all that often.

With the help of the tutorial I feel I can use Final Cut Express as proficient has I did the old version of iMovie, but I still have a lot of learning and playing around with to do. I just need to get off my butt and make more videos so I have more to play around with.

I have been playing around with Google’s embeddable fonts for the last couple weeks. They give a site a little different look without having to worry about anybody else having the fonts installed. There is a fine line between looking different and being easy to read though. Some of the fonts seemed tough to read, and some were missing some special characters. The font selection is a little limited. I finally decided on Vollkorn, and after a few css tweaks, think it looks good. It seems to be working in all the browsers that I have tried. I even opened up IE for the first time in Windows 7 and was surprised that the fonts even worked in IE. If your browser isn’t supported it should fall back to my previous font, Helvetica.