Leave It Behind > Brian Bailey

Family Reading Time

It was in May, 1918, that a new friend and companion came into my life: a character, a personality, and a ring-tailed wonder.

So begins one of my favorite books, Rascal by Sterling North. When you start your own family, you have the wonderful thrill of introducing your own traditions, while incorporating your favorite childhood memories. Four years ago, my family began what is for me a personal favorite that I thought I would share.

Each year, on Thanksgiving night, we begin reading a book together as a family. We pace ourselves as we read to finish the book on Christmas Eve. We've found that this is an incredibly special time during the holidays for each us. Reading together each night is the one thing that forces us to sit down, relax, and spend a few minutes together as a family during such a busy season. When we first started, Lori and I took turns reading, but now that Ben is old enough, he gets to be part of it as well. In fact, we combine this with our Advent chain reading each night, making this a quiet ending to our day.

Since we began this tradition, we've actually read Rascal each year. It is a wonderful story of a boy growing up in Wisconsin who takes in a raccoon as a pet. The book is humorous, tender-hearted, and adventuresome. I can't recommend it enough for those whose children are 6 or older. For a true treat, track down a copy of the perfect Jim Weis recording, which is unfortunately only available on cassette.

Find a favorite book and enjoy a family reading time during the holidays; you'll find it is one of your sweetest memories of your little ones.

Fair Warning for IT

InfoWorld's Chad Dickerson shares the Top 20 IT Mistakes to Avoid. The article covers a lot of great stuff for anyone in IT. I thought his comments about PHP were particularly interesting.

Building a Better TypePad

As TypePad continues to grow and improve, I'd like share my three main feature requests, proving every developer's suspicion that even the most loyal and satisfied user always wants more!

Subscribe to comments

The author of a weblog can be notified whenever a comment is posted on his or her weblog and this works very well. But as a reader of other blogs, I know how often I stumble upon an interesting conversation, contribute my comments, and then have to remember to visit that exact post again in the future to see what else was said. Userland's Manila software allows anyone to subscribe to a conversation and be notified via email whenever a new comment is posted. I've received emails months later from someone who found the thread via Google and is just now offering a new perspective or solution.

Better site stats

As services like FeedBurner become more popular, they begin to pull people away from where their stats should be. TypePad provides a minimal amount of information: total number of hits since the site launched, the average per day, and the total for the past 24 hours. It would be great if you could view a trend report of your site's traffic along with simple totals such as 5 Highest Traffic Days and 5 Most-Read Posts. It would also be wonderful if TypePad could track the number of RSS subscribers.

Preview = Draft

My third request is a minor one, but something that strikes me as simple and intuitive. When you click Preview while composing a post, why not have that automatically save a Draft of the post? Currently, Preview refreshes the page, but does not save your work even though the average user would expect this to be the case. As desktop apps such as Outlook and Word save drafts without user intervention, I believe it is even more essential that web apps offer similar help, particularly when you're dealing with unreliable browsers and internet connections.

I have every confidence that these improvements and more are being worked at this very moment! I eagerly await the next year of TypePad development.

A Stocking Filled with Typepad

Six Apart is beginning a holiday promotion featuring the fantastic TypePad software that powers this blog. They are smartly appealing to the already convinced to help spread the news about TypePad to others.

TypePad is by far the best blogging software available, for both beginning and advanced users. TypePad is completely stable, intuitive, elegant, and constantly improving. If that isn't enough, the customer service is first-class; attentive, timely, and enthusiastic (they recently promised to double-check to make sure a problem was resolved on Thanksgiving morning).

Share TypePad with the closet writers in your inner circle!

Give the Gift of Apple

Derrick Story with O'Reilly gives us Gifts, Gadgets, and Software for Mac Geeks. Fair warning: you're likely to have less money by the time you finish the article!

Thankful

I have so much to be thankful for this year. I'm simply blessed beyond words.

I am thankful for

...a loving God who desires nothing more than a personal relationship with his creation.

...my beautiful, inspiring, creative, and giving wife Lori who is a daily reminder of God's grace and love.

...my son Ben who truly has the ability to think different and force me to do the same. He also happens to be incredibly fun to be with and, if he doesn't mind me saying so, is the sweetest boy on earth.

...Fellowship Church, the amazing place where I am privileged to work and worship. God has used Fellowship and the wonderful people I work with to teach,  challenge, and change me in innumerable ways. When I first started attending Fellowship, I said I would give anything to be a part of it. I still can't believe I get paid to do what I love in an environment overflowing with change and creativity.

...friends and family.

...and each of you, who take the time to read this rather eclectic collection of thoughts and share your insights and opinions.

Enjoy the rest of your Thanksgiving Weekend!

Today's Lyric

I am thankful
that I'm incapable
Of doing any good on my own

'Cause by grace I have been saved
Through faith that's not my own
It is a gift of God and not by works
Lest anyone should boast

I'm so thankful
that I'm incapable
Of doing any good on my own

> Caedmon's Call > Thankful > 40 Acres

EdYoung.org

Earlier today, Fellowship Church launched a brand-new website: EdYoung.org!

This site serves the radio and television ministry which reaches people across the country. View the broadcast schedule, click your state, and find out when Ed is on in your area, including the USA Network. Corresponding with the site launch, the television show debuts a fantastic new look this weekend with the series In the Zone, on what it means to live a blessed life. Well worth checking out.

My team did a fantastic job pulling this off, only nine weeks after our last site launch. We were actually able to release it while the sun was still out and with few significant issues, which those of you in the web world know is somewhat atypical.

My recent inquires about e-commerce solutions were focused on creating a new store for this site. For now, we are continuing to use the existing one (a Creative Connection site existed prior to this release) while we choose the best option and begin implementation.

Feel free to offer any feedback. I have every confidence that the site will have a number of changes by next week!

How About Them Apples!

AppleInsider is reporting with complete confidence that Texas will eventually gain its 5th Apple Store, and in one of the best shopping locations in my immediate vicinity: Southlake Town Square!

This will be a fantastic location for Apple. Southlake Town Square is a true shopping destination, with a number of great stores and restaurants and a very casual, community feel. Unfortunately, the store may be more than a year away.

Keep the Main Thing the Main Thing

My manager, Terry Storch, has a great post that seems to resonate with everyone that reads it: Don't Perfect the Irrelevant!

I think each of us can relate to this, both personally and professionally. How much time do we spend on things that aren't part of our core mission? We are all called to accomplish so much is such a small amount of time. One of the easiest ways for us to fall short is to simply work hard on the good things, while the great things are ignored.

What are some examples? The ongoing quest for fully W3C, standards-compliant websites comes to mind. A good thing? Of course. Irrelevant? Completely. Our goal through technology is to be a tool for life-change. We must make our sites fully accessible to as many browsers and platforms as possible (an ongoing challenge), but striving for standards compliance for its own sake is a waste of our limited resources.

The fact is that we must constantly re-evaluate. Take time each week to look at what you and your team are working on and see if the work meets this standard.