The new site!
Welcome to the brand new smerickson.com!! Please reset your bookmarks to point to http://www.smerickson.com I will be at that domain for a long time. I’m really proud of this site and have lots of plans for development in the future. In this post I hope to highlight some of the “features” of the site so that you can better understand how to use it.
About:
The about page tells all about me. If you want to know about the site or the author head over there.
Blog:
The blog is the main part of the site. As I see it the blog serves many purposes. Blogs are great tools for quickly communicating information to lots of people. They allow for discussion and interaction and provide the context for small communities to form. I like all of these things. This is my personal blog and so it is a good representation of who I am. It includes lots of different things – from theology, to computers/technology, to personal updates, it has a little of everything. This blog has an RSS feed which you can subscribe to. RSS feeds are great and I highly recommend them. If you have no clue what they are go here. Each entry also has a comments section, feel free to join the conversation there.
Sidebar:
Another significant feature of the site is the sidebar. The sidebar contains lots of little pieces of information. They are:- Recent:
- This is a quick list of the most recent posts on the site.
- Reading:
- This is a short list of the books which I am currently reading. They are linked to Amazon.
- Listening:
- This is a short list of the music I am currently listening to. Each of the songs are linked to iTunes if you want to hear more.
- Library:
- This is a short list of objects which have most recently been added to the Library (more below).
- Clippings
- Clippings are links that I come across around the web. I’m constantly finding little things here and there that I would love to share with people. There are two sections: noteworthy and random. The noteworthy section contains those links which I think are important. The random section is for those links that are funny, silly or just plain weird. Both groups have RSS feeds which you can subscribe to.
- Categories:
- The categories section is a list of all the categories of posts as well as the number of posts in that category. You can use this to quickly navigate the site.
- Meta:
- This is all of the meta information about the site.
Archive:
The archive is the place to find everything from the past. It is broken up into 6 sections.- Date – find posts by when they were posted
- Starred – find posts that I have marked as important
- Weighted Archive – find posts by date where the size of the text indicates how many posts were made during that month.
- Weighted Categories – this is similar to the above but with a list of categories.
- Keywords – This is a list of the keywords which can be found in one or many posts.
- The last way to find things from the past is by searching. There are two ways of searching. a. Live Search – Live searching allows you to perform a search in realtime without having to go to another page. If you start typing your query in the orange search field and wait for a second, a list of the posts which correspond to your search term will appear. You can then arrow down and press enter on the post you would like to select; or you can use your mouse. b. Search – You can also perform a “normal” search by simply entering your text and hitting enter or pressing the search button.
Library:
The other main feature of this site is the Library. The Library is the place where I plan on storing most of my digital resources. There is a wealth of information available on the internet today, but it can often be difficult to find valuable resources. This site is an effort to curb that problem. I am constantly coming across articles, books, and lectures around the web which are significant and I would like to hold on to for future reference. The Library is the place where I will store these and they are all freely available to you. I will keep it updated often you make sure you keep it bookmarked. Some of the features of the Library include livesearching, an RSS feed and a Firefox search plugin.
Well, that’s probably more than you ever wanted to know about a website. I will be making a number of updates to this site in the coming weeks, it is still a work in progress. In the end I hope that this site is a helpful resource for a number of different types of people. Please come back often and feel free to contribute to the site. Take Care.