OK, another of the goals I had for this year was to begin putting blogrolls on some of my blogs. Some people say this does a lot to drive traffic; I don't know, I guess I'll see. I've been a little hesitant to start because sometimes I'm not sure if folks want that much attention, but I guess I'll see about that, too.

Unfortunately, I really haven't had much time to learn WordPress, which runs two of my other blogs (and soon hopefully more), so Spaces is the easy place to start.

I'm very Tactile and one of those folks who likes as much info as possible, so I tend to click on a lot of different links and run across a lot of interesting sites. These may be about a lot of different topics, however. Right now I'm not going to try to organize these links; hopefully the description will be plain enough.

There is a service called blogrolling.com that creates topic-oriented blogrolls that you can include on a site, but I haven't tried that out yet. There's so much more that can be done with blogs. I want to try out some affiliate programs soon, for example.

As I've noted before, Spaces is one of the better things Microsoft has done in recent years. I hope they will keep enhancing it. It's been bumpy some lately, and Microsoft has just lost their top blogger, but this is the future, whereas it's become obvious this year that Windows is a dinosaur, though I still think Office could be a good opportunity for them.

Also, I see on the MSN Spaces home page that:

"In the summer of 2006, we will unveil a more powerful version of MSN Spaces which will be called Windows Live Spaces! Stay tuned!"

That should be interesting. The Spaces team has a blog, The Space Craft (gotta love the name), to help us keep up with this.

Well, at first I couldn't figure out how other folks were putting a guestbook in their spaces page, since it's not clear to me how to just add a page that allows comments. So I took another look and realized it's just a blog entry tied to a list.

So here's the entry - my guestbook. I hope you enjoy my page and I look forward to reading everyone's comments! If you want to know more you might want to check out the About This Blog or About Me categories.

I'm beginning to see a little more clearly why folks often go so long between updating their weblogs. As I read through them, especially ones where the last update was months ago, I can't help but think, "Why don't you write something!"

One of the main reasons I wanted to get into blogging was that I hoped it would make it easier for me to write consistently. No big outline, full-blown article or whatever, just a few thoughts. So far I haven't quite gotten to where I can just sit down and write on a daily basis. I think as I get more posts in my blogs (2 blogs so far) it will be easier to write another one, without thinking I'm veering off on a tangent (since there will be lots of tangents/semi-random ideas, to balance it out).

The problem is, in my thinking I'm struggling with the sense that the first few posts will set the overall direction for the blog, which isn't really supposed to be so specific. Of course, the other problem is simply that some days, it's hard to find time to get online at all, so email piles up, which makes it hard to focus my thoughts enough to write (unless something were to make me upset, I suppose - maybe that's why some people rant so much in their blogs!).

OK, the paragraph tag worked. So all you Mac users just add the P tag.

The nice thing is, Spaces seems to work fine in Safari, which is what I use unless a form just won't work except in IE.

Okay, I went back and fixed the first entry.

I've been trying for two days to add carriage returns to my first entry, but keep getting told the space isn't available and to try again later. The carriage return issue is unique to Macs, apparently. There may be an HTML workaround but I'd also just like to see if this blog is working or not!

Let's see if this worked.

I've been wanting to start a blog for a long time but have been hung up by various issues. I decided recently that I'm going to probably want to start a few other blogs anyway, what I would call "feeder blogs" into the commercial stuff I want to do, so I'll work out the commercial details about domain names, etc., later. This will be more of a personal blog focusing more on the lighter side of things.

I have been running across MSN Spaces more and more frequently and just like it, at least so far, so thought this would be a good place to start. While I'm a Mac user from the beginning, i.e. 1984 and the 128K, I've been a Microsoft customer for nearly 25 years now (since I got Level II Basic for my TRS-80) and despite some troublesome products, sometimes MS is quite capable of getting things right. Hopefully MSN Spaces will be one of those times, and not just a Google/Blogger killer that will languish later.

So thanks to Microsoft for a free site. And thanks to whoever visits and I hope you benefit in some way from this.