So can I just skip back a couple of days and have a do over? After talking things over with my wife, I axed the whole Digest thing. True, I want to talk a lot about science and faith. But I also decided I don’t want a second blog. If I’ve got something funny to share, I don’t want to have to put it one place and not the other. I just felt horrible after moving all those old posts and having everything split off like that. So, for those still with me, I’m terribly sorry for jerking you around like this. Everything’s back to normal now. Just pretend it never happened.

Family, friends, and complete strangers – I now have a blog. It’s actually been a lot of fun (and a little stressful) getting it all setup. For me (and my intended audience) to enjoy this, I wanted something more substantial than the many free blog services around the internet. I wanted multiple categories to allow people to sift through my posts to see things of greater interest to them. I wanted picture galleries where I could share what I capture with my camera as I travel places. And particularly, I wanted a solution that was skinnable, meaning I could give it my own design from top to bottom. I didn’t want something that placed limitations on me. For those that know me, you’ll know that I don’t particularly do things half-heartedly. And so in that spirit, I give you Ocellated.

Keeping up to date with RSS

One thing that can be a huge help in keeping track of what’s going on at Ocellated is my RSS feeds. (See the Syndication link in the navigation). For those unfamiliar with RSS, on that page, I’ve linked to a post describing what it is and how you can get it. By using RSS, you can see what I’m posting about, without having to come to the site. This way, you can subscribe to an RSS feed of everything that’s getting posted to the site, or (and this is the cool part) you can subscribe to only those categories that interest you.

So what is Ocellated?

Ocellated Antbird

I would imagine that many of you are wondering what Ocellated is and thinking I misspelled oscillated. I didn’t. Ocellated comes from the latin word ocellatus, which means little eyes. Basically, it’s a biology word that means spotted. One of the very cool birds I’ve seen in the tropics is Ocellated Antbird (pictured here), and so it seemed a good fit for my website. (Not to mention the domain name was available).

What is the purpose of Ocellated?

I guess there are a number of things I hope to achieve with this site. First and foremost, I’ve noticed that when good friends move away, there’s a tendancy to talk at best every few months, and when you do, the conversations are boring and stale. “Hey, what’s going on…” “Not much, really busy. Got a new job. School’s great.” And after a year with three or four conversations like this, the friendship has mostly died. Since we are likely moving in a few months, I hope that my site will serve the same purpose for the many friendships I’ve formed over my life. I also hope it will better connect me with distant friends I don’t talk with much.

I also want to use my blog to talk about issues that interest me. It will become apparent what those are by looking at the categories I post under. Issues of science, particularly evolutionary biology and ecology. I also have a deep interest in technology, and I’m sure there will be a healthy dose of that.

So sit back, grab a cup of coffee, and let the fun began. In the future, I’ll add a contact form for getting ahold of me, but for now, most everybody has my email address, so if you have any questions, feel free to ask.

Thanks for stopping by, leave a comment and say hi, and I hope you’ll come back often.

Having gone to the trouble to provide RSS feeds to various areas on my site (see the syndication link in the navigation menu), I wanted to give some help to those interested but confused as to what this technology is and what it does.

RSS stands for really simple syndication. Among other things, it’s a technology that allows you to get a list and summary of the content available from a website. What’s the big deal you ask? I can go out to that website and see the content myself! You’re right — you can. But what if you had 30 websites that you wanted to keep an eye on. Some you really liked, some you kind of liked, others just occasionally had things that interested you. And what if many of those website infrequently add new content? You’d be wasting an awful lot of time going to each individual site. Read the rest of this entry »