The Wilsons

Just a quick update on a new feature.  We’ve added a “recent comments” section in the sidebar on the left to display the most recent 10 comments.

We love hearing from you, but felt like the comments are too hidden, and not easily accessible.  We always get to read them, but we figured others might not; and since we sometimes write responses to the comments, we wondered if you were reading our responses or not.  Adding this section puts the most recent comments up there for all to see.

Clicking on the comments will take you to the comment and the post the comment was written on.

Ok, not that you all needed to know this, but since we’ve added it, I figured I’d explain it.

On the whole, Melodia and I use our website for ourselves (as an organizational tool) just as much as we use it as a communicational tool to our friends and family.  As such, we set this as our homepage and have several things we use often linked to from our site.

About two months ago, we started using google calendar to organize all of our appointments, etc., things I do, things Melodia does, the special dates of our friends and family and so on.  This helps us not double book things.  It’s a great tool.

Today I embedded it into our sidebar so that we can access our calendar directly from our own webpage, rather than having to follow a link to it.  This will make it even easier for us to keep track of things and to add/edit o

ur calendar.  It may not be the most interesting thing to our readers, unless they want to see what appointments we’ve got scheduled, lol, but it helps us. So that’s why it appears there.

On a side note, I am increasingly amazed at all of the different technologies and their ever-increasing ease of use.  Technology seems to get better and better; of course, it’s impossible to keep up with, but it’s nice to run across somethings that seem to help make life easier.  One of the things I absolutely tire of is inefficiency.  I would hate to have to check 2 email addresses, for example.  I’d much rather have a program (like Outlook) that checks them all and dumps them in the same place.  I’m always on the lookout for some of those programs that can help with that.  Google calendar has been one.

It’s not always possible.  Melodia likes Facebook and has an account there.  I’ll probably get on it, too, eventually (i.e. break down and open an account…lol). It means one more place where msgs can be posted, etc. to have to check, and I prefer maintaining our website to maintaining a Facebook account.  At the same time, the Facebook people have spent a ton of money creating a good social networking site that has capabilities beyond those I could ever achieve with our family website.  So, I may have to give in.  But at least for now, our site remains a good general point of connection for family and friends (and hopefully, even Grandma Jo still checks in occasionally to read what we’re up to!)

Ok, I was waiting to post this, but since I’m a posting machine right now, lol, and since we have made some progress developing this page, and since the link to this new page has been available for a few days now…

(that’s a lot of “sinces” huh?)

We’ve added an “About the Wilsons” page to the site.  We’ve much more to add, but we decided to chronicle as much interesting information about us as we can, including some past experiences, etc.

BACKSTORY

I got the idea the other morning when I was websurfing.  I was listening to one of my all-time favorite musicians on my MP3 player, Russ Taff.  He did a good amount of solo albums that were out in my “younger” years as a Christian, and I really just enjoyed some of the life philosophy that is in his music.  At any rate, I’d decided to see if he had anything new out (he’s largely been tourning and working with the Gaither Vocal Band - both as a part of the tour and as a special guest artist over the last 8 years or so; hence, there hadn’t been any new solo stuff).  I’ve really wished Russ Taff would just put out some more solo stuff.  Love this guy’s voice and music.

So I was surfing to see if he had anything new out and came across his website, which had an interesting story on it, that caused me to go straight to his wife, Tori’s blog. Their daughter, Madi, was bit by a shark this summer.  Crazy.  I almost posted a comment on that story, though it’s three months old now, but held back.  Funny thing is, in my random knowledge base, one of the things I’ve often told people are these statistics:

• Number of people killed annually by shark attacks: 78
• Number of people killed annually by falling coconuts: 150
• Number of people killed annually by ball point pen ingestion: 100

Yeah, you have a greater chance of dying by coconut or swallowing that pen-end your sucking on than you do of dying from a shark attack, so quit fearing it, and jump in the ocean! This also gives me a chance to insert one of my alltime fave photos (i used to have it on one of my other websites for a long time, now, it’s in my “About Lonni” bio section.

LOL.  Of course, since Madi did actually get bit, it just wasn’t appropriate to mention.  But luckily, she’s not one of the 78, and is fine (etc. for the 16 stitches on her foot, recovery time, and crazyness of it all). She’s got a great picture of Madi facing her fears on her flickr site.

Once I was on Tori Taff’s site, I poked around a little.  That led me to her “About” page.  She had posted a list of 50 things about her, her life, kids, husband, etc.  I really liked what she did her and decided to do what any good open source web-interested person does, steal… uh… borrow it.

END OF BACKSTORY

Now, she was able to succinctly rattle them off as one-liners.  I, on the other hand (as many of you know), will likely never be a person “of a few words.”  So, our about page is really more of a page of vignettes on the Wilson experience…  yeah, that sounds good.  In fact, I think I’ll add it to the title of this post! LOL.

Anyway, the long backstory on the Taff’s was to tell you how we came about the idea for this new page.  Check out our new “About the Wilsons” page, and make a note to check it again in a month or so.  I’m hoping we will have completed all of the past about us stuff by then.  For now, we still have more to add, but this’ll sure provide further insight into the Wilson family.