Good on ya, mates, you came through quite nicely!  Plenty of ideas to tide me over until something in the news piques my interest.

Now to figure out where to start.  Where to start, where to start...

Dirk asks:

Hey, that's what AmFam just did... is this national "ask the blogger a question" week?

Yup, I shamelessly stole the "Ask me some questions!  Please!  I'm desperate!" directly from AmFam; it worked for her, so it had to work for me a bit, too.

Why do you use blogger and not one of the other blogging tools?

Because I'm lazy and cheap.  And because, when all my internet buds leaped on the blogging bandwagon, and I, lemming-like, followed them, they were all on Blogger.  So I went there.  It was quick, it was easy, it was painless, and I could concentrate on writing.

When I started posting on a regular basis, I soon realized that Blogger was, at best, a flawed tool.  But it was still cheap--in other words, free!  And there were all these free templates, and I could fiddle with the HTML to customize the templates.  When I looked at other freebies, I either didn't like them enough, or I discovered, as at WordPress.com, that they strictly limited any fiddling, they only had six templates, and they didn't allow any other templates.  Bah.

Then there was wind of BloggerBeta, and I waited, and waited, and waited to get an invite to switch over so I could take advantage of labeling and a few other things they claimed would be there.  Then I got the invite, and tried to switch over.

Bahahahaha!

Let me just say that my blog is too complex (har!) for BloggerBeta.  I was stuck in Blogger-to-BloggerBeta limbo for quite a while.  Any time I logged in, it prompted me to switch over.  I'd try to switch over and would get an error message saying that I had tried previously, and there was an error, and they'd let me know when it was time to switch over.  I'd log in again, and there would be that same "switch to Blogger Beta" message. Over and over and over again.

Many people in that same situation have been unable to post at all.

I, however, overcame both some of the limitations of Blogger and got around the limbo by using LiveWriter.  It's basic, but it has some nice features:  I can blog offline; I can have a WYSIWYG view of my blogging as I write--in other words, it has grabbed my css and layout, and when I write a post, it looks almost exactly what it will look like when I publish and get online (yay!); and it lets me do bold and italic and underlining and strikethrough and colored fonts and numbered or unnumbered lists and blockquotes and weblinks (SBird, here's how!) with a click of the button; AND it let me post to my limbo-ized blog until I could finally figure out how to get the attention of someone in Blogger support who un-limboized me.

That said, I dearly want to move over to a hosted solution, with my Very Own Domain.  I've found a good place, and am planning to move over, using WordPress, with my own personalized template which I am very comfy with.

Why do you post so few pictures?

Well.  Hm.  Sometimes I do a picture post, usually after the dotter and I have gone somewhere and I've gotten lots of pics.  But I have some reservations.

First off, there are Weird Folks on the web.  Some of the WFs take little girls' pictures and w@nk off to them, the idea of which just creeps me out.  Of course, there's nothing I can do about it, and there may be, for all I know, folks who have already downloaded her pics and are--right now!--"doing it".  Ew.  I have decided not to post a few pics of her especially because of this issue, some very cute pictures, that I just don't want creeps messing with.

Then there are the WFs who like to take other people's pictures (and posts, and sometimes entire blogs!) and pass them off as their own.  WTF?  So far, when I search on phrases from my blog, I haven't found them.  But I do know of a few cases where someone's entire blog was plaigiarized. 

Doing pics is a pain sometimes.  You have to download them from the camera.  You have to crop them and resize them.  You have to upload them to a photo-hosting service (or your website if you're on a hosted site).  Then...then...you can put them into your blog. 

I waffle on the privacy issue.  Somewhere along the line, OmegaDotter will turn into a teenager, and be all bristly and touchy about odd things.  She may decide that my blog is okay so long as I disguise stuff...she may think it's okay to post pics of her, she may not...

And then there's the fact that sometimes I'm writing about stuff that I don't have pictures of...like, say, cute little four-celled embryos.  I could always "borrow" them, but if I do, I like to give full credit--a link to the giving site, a person's name if I can find it.  Sometimes I forget.  Eeek!

More later.  See how easy it is for me to spew words out if there's a focus?  You guys have generously given me days--maybe weeks!--worth of posts.  Yay!

Technorati: Q&A, Blogger, Live Writer, pictures