Personal Blogs

I had 73 kids come for trick or treat in Huntington West Virginia. I was very pleasantly surprised. I sat out on the front porch and handed out the candy bars to the kids. I usually give extra for the neighborhood children who had creative costumes. I had a can of Pepsi with me on the front porch. One little kid about 4 years old wanted my Pepsi, rather than candy. I went into the house and got him a can of soda. He was one happy camper. His mom was a wee bit embarrassed at his asking, but that's OK. I gave out about 2 lbs. of candy and a can of soda pop and had a good time doing it. So did the kids. Trick or Treat went well for the children of Huntington West Virginia.

I wish to thank a California Judge for removing Paris Hilton from our face for a while. This will give the girls at the jailhouse hair salon somthing to gossip about.

The First Congregational Church of Ceredo West Virginia has just gone online with a brand new website. http://ceredochurch.org This will be a nice addition to the local West Virginia churches who have embraced technology.

The First Congregational Church of Ceredo is a mainline (middle of the road) protestant church in Ceredo WV. They have recently retained Reverend Peter Barclay as the new Pastor, and he has been working hard to make his church grow in spirit and in numbers. The church website is coming along nicely and is a work in progress.

It deeply saddens me that 33 students have been killed at Virginia Tech University. The Virginia Tech killings shock the concience of civillied people who cannot comprehend what kind of insanity motivates a human being to engage in this level of violence.

This level of horrible tragedy has not been been seen at a university since the Marshall University Plane Crash in November 1970.

It has been a while since I have blogged regularly. Health issues. Nothing much has changed recently in Huntington West Virginia. The citys budget is still in the red and the bridges are still pink. so much for chromatic harmony. Money is still in short supply in Huntington, however things seem to be picking up and I am optimistic. I understand that RIAA is filing federal lawsuits against 12 Marshall University Students for illegal downloads on the University computer network. On one hand the students were wrong, on the other hand the network dministrators should be fired if they failed to stop illegal activity on the network.

Stephanie

Note to readers

I have recently been ill. (Back Injury) this is why postings have been sparse recently. I am recovering.

Stephanie

You can now subscribe to my blog by e-mail and get new articles as they are published my e-mail. We have a pretty good size readership and this feature has been requested by several readers. The subscription service for this feed is managed by FeedBlitz and they are quite reputable.

Stephanie Heck  http://feeds.feedburner.com/huntington

Ladies: Do not forget to send your EX a Mother's day card, just to remind him that he is a real mother too. I realize you miss your ex, but a few trips to the firing range should improve your marksmanship !

Stephanie Heck
Cabell County, Huntington West Virginia

Are bloggers legitimate Journalists ? The answer to that question is not always easy, lets just say that all the major news outlets use RSS technologies to promulgate the news to various mirror feeds online. All major newspapers and TV networks use blogs online. So are bloggers becoming journalists, or are journalists becoming bloggers? This might well be a legitimate question as well for the foreseeable future.

If someone is writing a blog with several thousand readers based upon their profession, I would say yes it is a professional publication. However your average Joe who has a blog with 40 renders a week would be seen as an amateur endeavor.

500 years ago the printing press was invented and there was a great deal of contention at that time as to what constituted legitimate publishing, the argument centered around the credibility of books copied by hand by the traditional scribes, or or the credibility of books printed on the new printing press machine.

Rather than concentrate on the credibility of the author, the contention centered on the credibility of the method of publishing 500 years ago. Five hundred years later the argument is rehashed by those "scribes" in the traditional media who claim the neo-media of the blogosphere is not legitimate. Alas, history repeats itself, not only in contention but in error as well.

Stephanie Heck.

Huntington WV

I have learned that a blogger named Lance Dutson in Maine has been sued by a state contractor for the Maine Departmentof Tourism. He is being sued by the contractor for his blog articles that are overtly critical of a ad agency operating under state auspices.

I contend that the right of the Maine blogger to redress grievance with the state, and to critique the state, includes the right to critique any contractor acting as an agent of the state. The advertising agency was acting as a contractor for the Maine Department of Tourism and is therefore subject to critique and parody as "Fair Use" from dissenting Maine residents as a contracting agent of the state.

Bloggers use technologies called XML and RSS that promulgates stories and postings much faster than traditional web pages. In short I can post something on a popular blog and it is promulgated globally as an RSS feed 2 hours later. The technology can be used for great good or it can also be used irresponsibly. Some people are getting sued for misusing the technology, and in some cases industry is trying to intimidate bloggers into silence by abusing the Digital Millenium Copyright Act in a manner similar to what the music industry has done to file sharing networks.

Blogging is a combination of technical skills and also of content writing skills. The majority of poorly written blog material or badly formatted blogs never make it into the search engines. Google has a big BS meter. However if one is an experienced programmer or an experienced writer, it is possible to make quite a popular blog with many readers. A soapbox of sorts. This blogger in Maine is a website developer just like I am.

I worry that free speech is in danger in Maine and I am perterbed at the state of Maine for failing to protect its citizens rights from an overtly aggressive state contrator. Shame on the state of Maine!

I too am a website publisher and a prominent blogger in this state, and I am all too aware that slap-suits are being filed on a regular basis against bloggers. The Bloggers have a growing amount of clout and therefore industry and political leaders are becoming more aware of it all the time.

Yesterday was my birthday. Had a nice evening. Thought I would update the personal blogs section. Went out with a group of friends.

Personal Blogs

It seems that personal blogs are becoming very popular online, over 10 million personal blogs exist globally. I started out with a personal blogs site last year and expanded it to a multiple category blog that goes beyond a personal blog to the point it becomes a popular local news and commentary site. I still keep one section of the blog as a personal blog.  A place for a few profound and whimsical thoughts that are near and dear to me. I talk about personal events and professional events. There are many types of personal blogs on many topics. Some personal blogs are on hobby topics, and some personal blogs are on technical matters. You can find personal blogs on almost any topic from A to Z.

There are many online providers that provide free personal blogs for their users, however these free personal blogs have limited capacities, and frequently have a lot of ads posted by the blogging provider. Full fledged blogging is best accomplished by using a full featured blogging program installed on a web server under an domain name owned by the blogger. Most of these sites are owned by companies or personal blogs that seek to do a first class job. I recommend a free personal blogs software called Serendipity. The link to this personal blogs site is below.

http://s9y.info/ Serendipity Personal Blogs Software

There are also professional blogs written by members of various professions, where the blogger will give advice from their particular profession or area of expertise. Not all blogs are personal in nature, some blogs will be of a professional nature. The majority of professional blogs are reputable, however I suggest you get your medical and legal advice from licensed professionals in your own home state. Medical and legal blogs are a good source of generic educational information, but let your local doctor or lawyer make the final call.

Personal Blogs rely on a technology called RSS ( Really Simple Syndication ) that developed in the late 1990's. Personal Blog owners allow their content to be syndicated to multiple sources that make for massive capacity to get the word out about a particular news event. Yahoo, Google and MSN all collect postings from blogs as an alternative news source. Personal Blogs are indexed by the search engines much more frequently than standard web sites because the RSS technology makes indexing much more easier to do. Personal Blogs and Professional Blogs are sometimes referred to as RSS FEEDS as opposed to your traditional news feed via wire service.

As the traditional national media is trusted less and less by your average American , who no longer believes what they hear on TV and radio, Personal Blogs have arisen from relative nerdy obscurity to constitute a form of home grown journalism by average people who are a bit more articulate than most. This gives the news consumer a choice if they want to get news of a particular event from a national news source, or get the news from?the personal blogs?guy who lives just up the street from where the event happened.

10 million bloggers globally constitutes the biggest news network in the history of the world. There are specialized search engine to index blog postings and these are important in the syndication of blog news.

The bloggers call their collective writings the "BLOGOSPHERE". The blogosphere is a network of networked syndicated blogs

Nowhere have personal blogs (RSS FEEDS) had more impact than in the field of politics. Millions of dollars were raised by bloggers of all different political persuasions in the 2004 election by large numbers of grassroots personal blog owners and personal blog readers. As the 2006 election approaches, it promises to be an interesting year for personal blog owners who are homegrown activists. Somewhere between 30 and 60 million dollars was raised by bloggers and their readers in the 2004 election. Personal Blogs have made an impact on American politics but nobody is sure at this point what that impact is. The blog phenomenon is still developing and the technology of syndication of blogs is still developing. There is a new type of blog technology called ATOM and OPML that has great potential.

Some large corporations are using a premium version of personal blog software to distribute information throughout the company rapidly to all employees. There are some advantages to using blogs to circulate company newsletters and corporate memo's and therefore increase the efficiency of business communications exponentially. Even religious institutions are getting into blogs as a means of decreasing printing costs and decreasing paper usage and thus being environmentally sensitive.

Stephanie Heck

stephanie@sheck.com

Huntington Cabell County West Virginia

There was an Air France Airliner that crashed in Toronto Canada yesterday, the plane burst into flames and incinerated itself. What is a profound miracle is that all 309 people on board survived. This is a note to the personal blogs: I feel a kinship and profound empathy for those people, I am a survivor too. Sometimes I feel like the unsinkable Molly Brown. Best wishes to all the plane crash survivors. Being from Huntington West Virginia , I remember all too well the night of the Marshall University Plane Crash in 1970 where there were no survivors. I admire and have great empathy for anyone who survives the horror of a plane crash.

Stephanie

I spent most of the day doing housework. The dishes were impersonating Pikes Peak while the laundry pile looked like it was impersonating the Swiss Alp's. It was a mountain of a job. Alas, it is springtime, so it is time to clean house with a bulldozer and a shovel. (Dynamite helps) Massive quantities of Clorox, 409, and detergent make the job much easier ( The climbing gear makes the trek to the top of the laundry pile go so much faster.)

I actually think there is a black hole in the bottom of the washing machine that devours missing socks that are never heard from again.

I hear a squeak in the washing machine belt that convinces me that the machine is making lamentations over the work load. If I look in the back end of the dryer I am afraid I will find all the missing lint. The dryer quit working last February. I think it gave up Lint for Lent.

Anyway the cat seems enormously pleased that I am am cleaning up her place, because the cat is convinced I am trespassing in her house, but she seems content to tolerate my presence as long as I am doing housework.

Stephanie Heck

I ran into Bobby Nelson yesterday evening in a public place. The years have been kind to Bobby Nelson. He appears to be in good health and in a good mood. I have known Bobby Nelson since I was a child, at that time Bobby Nelson was Congressman Ken Hechler's assistant.

The Catholic Church elected a new Pope yesterday.

The New Pope appears to a hard line conservative with a history of service to Germany during the second world war.

I am greatly suprised the Catholic Church would choose someone who is so profoundly controversial. I cannot help but wondering how the people of Isreal are going to take this?

Pope John Paul tried to reach out to the Jewish people to heal old wounds caused by centuries of religious antagonism. This New Pope ... A man who once served in Hitlers Army, will certainly have no credibility with the Jewish people and will be seen as a source of religious antagonism.

It is my understanding that the new pope got drafted / conscripted into the Nazi Army as a young man. He had no choice but to serve Hitler, or to die for resisting the Nazi cause. His faith was put to the test and he served in the legions of a bloodthirsty German Ceasear Impersonator rather than go to the coleseum / concentration camps to meet his maker like a christian.

If given that choice.....I and many others would be dead.

There are some things worth dying for as a matter of concience and principle to human beings with a moral backbone. There were thousands of good honest Germans who willingly chose to die, rather than serve Adolph Hitler's barbaric Nazi agenda. Many of them were Catholic priests and ministers of protestant sects. These were the saints who had the unmitigated guts to say no to an evil German dictator who was the closest thing to the antichrist that the world has seen for a thousand years.

They met thier maker as a result. These Germans who refused were frequently summarily executed and sometimes died in the concentration camps alongside of the Jewish and Gypsy and Gay prisoners. What I am truly wondering is how this will all be perceived by the secular liberals who detest the Papal institution?

Will gay veterans groups in the United States now start claiming that thier military record is much more honorable than that of the Pope?

By selecting an elderly German the church has opened itself to very harsh critique from its foes.

Stephanie Heck

Here is a list of some of the articles that I have written. Feedback would be nice.

Robin on my Window Sill

I was in the kitchen today and A Robin landed on my window sill. An early arrival for spring in West Virginia. Just to think that crazy bird flew home early just to stop by my window and brighten my day with the anticipation of spring. Stephanie From Stephanie Heck's Blog from Huntington WV

Cabell County Metro Government

Cabell County needs Metro Government badly, When I was a child thirty years ago, Lexington Ky. was just a wee bit bigger than Huntington, However the Lexington and Fayette County government merged into a metro government and the elimination of redundant.

Iraq Election

It bothers me a lot that U.S. Servicemen have died in Iraq, merely to facilitate an election that for the most part has been a beauty contest between Shiite and Sunni politicians in Iraq . If we allow the election of a theocratic Moslem government to

Cost of medication

Every time I turn on the television I am seeing a commercial for some sort of pharmaceutical medication or drug. The cost of medicine is much too high in the U.S.A. and frequently seniors are forced to choose between food and drugs that they need to stay healthy.

Linux

Thoughts about Linux: The newest Macintosh / Apple machines have the traditional Apple/Mac desktop interface but the OS is a Linux Kernel ported to the Motorola processor. That's right folks the newest Mac's are an Apple version of Linux that differs

Spring Fashion

I have been looking at some of the new spring fashion selections in the department stores. Pastels are big along with bright colors, hemlines are up just a wee bit in spring fashion for the younger set and anything goes for mature women. Heel heights.

Good Computer Advice

Good Computer Advice By Stephanie Heck There are too many people opening infected e mail attachments, and getting virus infected machines as a result. Too many young children are using computers without proper supervision. The rules and guidelines for..

Yahoo Users

You can now add this blog as a news feed to your personalized MyYahoo web page. You need to be signed into yahoo when you click onthe link below.

  A page from yahoo will come up and ask.

Huntington WV

I was born and raised in Huntington WV and attended school in Huntington and Ceredo-Kenova. I have been working on computers and websites for a long time and can do almost anything web related. I am in Huntington for the purpose of supporting my...

Iraq Election

President Bush is patting himself on the back as the result of a successful election in Iraq. 44 people are dead yesterday as the result of Iraqi election violence. Some success! I wish to note for the historical record that the Hatfield and McCoy..

Is free web hosting really free?

The purpose of this posting is to bluntly present the facts as it relates to "FREE" web hosting services. I am in the web hosting business and the point of my blog is to articulate rather than make money. I am out to make a point or two, offer

A Picture of Stephanie

Well I have had a few friends inquire as to what I look like! This is me.

Inauguration

The Presidential Inauguration is costing several million dollars. I am deeply concerned for the security of the event as I understand that several thousand federal and local officials are involved in security to abate any potential threat. It pleases me.

Poem: Marks Upon The Wall

Marks Upon The Wall There is an older lady On the other side of town. The outside of her house is pretty. The inside is run down. I wanted to hire a painter. Momma would not hear of it at all Nobody is painting over, Momma's marks upon the wall.  It..

Stephanie Heck

Send email to: webmaster at sheck dot com

I was in the kitchen today and A Robin landed on my window sill. An early arrival for spring in West Virginia. Just to think tha crazy bird flew home early just to stop by my window and brighten my day with the anticipation of spring.

Stephanie / huntington WV

Send email to: webmaster at sheck dot com

You can now add this blog as a newsfeed to your personalized MyYahoo web page.

You need to be signed into yahoo when you click onthe link below.

http://add.my.yahoo.com/rss?url=http://sheck.com/serendipity/rss.php

A page from yahoo will come up and ask you to click ok to add the feed.

Well I have had a few

friends inquire as to

what I look like! This is me.