I now have LiveFyre itself on board to help me troubleshoot things.  I have flipped an additional switch in the LiveFyre settings and if you could continue to leave FB and blog comments I can see what is working and what isn’t.

I’m now about to try some Twitter testing…so hopefully you’ll see comments from Twitter come in on this post, thanks!

In the meantime, here’s another picture for you to enjoy!  Jacob’s team won their baseball game today.  Timmy’s team didn’t win, but they only lost by 3 runs, and Timmy scored a run!  We’re so proud of our guys!  This was taken on the way home from baseball today.

Timmy was happy about (a) doing well at baseball and (b) riding in a convertible on this beautiful day!

I’m trying out a new commenting tool on my blog: LiveFyre.  I’ve seen it work well on a friend’s blog, so I thought I’d give it a go over here.  One of the things it’s supposed to resolve is tying together Facebook and Twitter comments with the blog’s own comments.  So they’re all in one place.  That seemed really cool to me.

So feel free to either comment here or in the Facebook or Twitter forums.  I might have to change my “syndication” hosting some to maximize this, we’ll see with further testing.

Thanks for your patience!  In the meantime, enjoy this picture taken today from our spouses’ club golf scramble!  Today was perfect weather, and the event went off without a (visible) hitch!  It was very well-done!

Cute cake, right? Made/decorated by my friend Steph (of Disney Half Marathon and 80s Party fame).

A closeup of the little alligators! There are 2-3 gators living on the golf course we were at today 🙂

06. April 2012 · Comments Off on Another Test Post · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: , ,

Here’s ANOTHER test post, testing some publishing-related plug-ins.

Thank you for your patience.

In the meantime, I’ve included a random picture for you to enjoy.  This is a “stained glass” project that Timmy did in art class.  Sharpies on a piece of transparency film :-).  This was shown in a Santa Rosa County Public Schools art show 2 weekends ago.

02. April 2012 · 2 comments · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags:

This is yet another test of some additional capabilities for my new blog. I needed to re-establish the connection for those who receive e-mails of my post, but not from FeedBurner.

For the past two days straight, I’ve been tweaking and massaging the settings on my new blog location and I think I’m in a happy place. I can sleep again.

Not only was I trying to transfer the content of the old blog, but I also wanted to replicate the “sidebar” items, such as the Facebook link, the Twitter feed, the weather webcam, the suggested relevant posts after each post, the tag cloud and my subscription box.

My new blogging program, WordPress, uses “plug-ins” to bring those features to the new blog, and it took some work to find all those appropriate plug-ins.

Today was spent working with keeping all my Google/Yahoo search presence established.  Here’s an example, one of the most popular searches this past months that been bringing people to my blog is a search on “Akers of Strawberries.”  A local you-pick farm. I’m flattered that one of the top returns on that search on Google is to this blog post: http://vollmerdp.blogspot.com/2011/04/florida-discoveries-9-akers-of.html. At first, all “redirects” to my new blog — a line of code I had put in the old blog — simply sent readers to my blog homepage. I had to install a “plug in” that allowed that particular post to redirect to its new, more specific, home: http://thevollmerfamily.com/MajorMom/2011/04/florida-discoveries-9-akers-of-strawberries.html.

The last thing on my “New Blog To-Do” list is to get those pictures at the top more personalized. I’m excited about this, I’ve been thinking about what pictures to include, from pictures my flowers to running to Disney to Air Force! I’ll get to that later this week.

Thanks everyone for your patience during this journey. I’m certainly learning a lot by going from HTML-type blog management to the more-flexible PHP-based blogging.

01. April 2012 · Comments Off on This is Another Test Post · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: ,

Testing my post-from-e-mail capability. Please enjoy this picture of what color our foyer is becoming! We’re doing lots of painting this week!

This is a color called “Pismo Dunes” available from Behr.  We also painted the bathroom on Sunday — a lovely icy blue color.

31. March 2012 · Comments Off on Welcome to the New Home of Ground Control to Major Mom! · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags:

Hello!  I’m slowly, but surely, migrating my blog from the Blogger home it’s had since December 2007 to its new home here at my personal domain.  Dave’s been using this domain for quite some time.

Thanks to GeekMom, I’ve been getting pretty comfortable with WordPress and there are some blogging features I’d like to use, and those features haven’t been available via Blogger.

It’ll be a slow process, migrating everything — for now, things will continue to come to you from Blogger, and by the time I’m done, you won’t even need to learn a new URL…Blogger will redirect you for me!

02. January 2012 · Comments Off on Happy New Year! It’s Resolution Time….Again…. · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: , , , ,

Happy New Year everyone!  Our family had a fun weekend celebrating with friends and some folks from Dave’s squadron.  One of his senior NCOs was promoted this week, so he had double reason to celebrate!

As usual, it’s time for everyone to come forward with their resolutions.

“I will eat less and exercise more!”

“I will stop using foul language!”

“I will stop spoiling my children!”

I’ve tried ’em all.  Yet here I am, seemingly no different at the end of the year than I was at the beginning.  One of the very first posts on this particular blog was about the New Year’s resolution.  Why use January 1st as an excuse to institute change?  If you want to change, just start changing, right?

This year, I resolve to better manage my time and stop wasting evenings.  I have started vegging in front of the TV and computer more and more after the kids go to bed, when that ought to be more valuable time to get productive stuff done.

In 2008 I had started knitting and crocheting more after the kids went to bed, and since we moved to Florida I’d been doing less of it — I think the warm weather has something to do with it, but it’s now wintertime and I need to get going again.  It’s so much more productive than just staring at a screen all evening.


Who else made resolutions?

21. November 2011 · Comments Off on NaBloPoMo FAIL · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: , ,

Why I FAILED to post yesterday, and thus FAILED at the NaBloPoMo contest for this year.

1.) I was playing Glitch quite a bit on Sunday.  I was trying to earn enough money for a super-big new house and that took about 3 hours of my day.

2.) I was busy with Cub Scouts.  Timmy’s den took a hike at the Naval Live Oaks nature area and then I spent some time catching up with planning afterwards.  Here’s a picture to enjoy!

After our hike we did leaf rubbings with discussed the kinds of trees we saw.

3.) Dave’s parents took us to a nice dinner at one of the family’s favorite restaurants, Mandarin Moon, in Gulf Breeze.

4.) I have a lot of TV to watch on Sunday nights!  Amazing Race, Dexter, and Boardwalk Empire are all on!  Typically I do my blogging during TV time in the evenings, but last night I think I was vegging more than usual.

5.) I just plain forgot.  It had crossed my mind to write more about the Naval Live Oaks hiking, but simply didn’t get to it.  I might still later today, I have some nice pictures from other times we’d been there, yesterday I only got a couple pictures.

05. November 2011 · Comments Off on November NaBloPoMo — My Attempt to Post Daily for 30 Days… · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags:
NaBloPoMo 2011

Today I added my name…my blog…to the rolls of the National Blog Post Month list, brought to you by BlogHer.com.  Feel free to join in…

I have a lot of talk about this month, including updates on Dave’s post-surgery recovery, which should make this easy to do.  Even if I just take an iPhone picture and e-mail it to the blog (which I’ve done before), I can meet this goal!

By signing up I apparently have a chance to win some prizes.  I’ll let you know if I win — I have to be actually blogging daily in order to get the prize.

25. July 2011 · Comments Off on Pay No Attention, Nothing to See Here…. · Categories: Uncategorized · Tags: , ,

This is just a filler post to run a fun little experiment.  I am going to compare RSS Graffiti with Networked Blogs and see which syndication posts to my Facebook page faster.

I’m leaning towards keeping RSS Graffiti because it didn’t require the widget on my site, nor did it require me to pick 5 blogs to follow like Networked Blogs does (note — I proceeded with the registration after only selecting two blogs to follow: Fotomom and Sergeant Major Mom).  If I keep Networked Blogs I will add more to follow.