Oh my, how did I miss this great occasion?

May 14th, 2009 was the 10 year anniversary of gentlewhisper.com!

On May 12th, 1999 I turned in my last paper at Evangel University and completed the requirements for my BA degree.  Two days later I registered the domain name gentlewhisper.com.

I have neglected the site a lot since going back to school for my M.Div.  But along the way it has been a good friend to me.  Most of all because it has introduced me to all of you.  My life would be dramatically different if it weren’t for GentleWhisper.com.  Without it, I would have gone crazy when the kids were toddlers and  I wouldn’t have met many of my closest friends.

I decided that the daily “bite sized updates” was cluttering my homepage and probably driving some of my readers crazy.  But… I like having them on my blog.  I don’t always have time to write a full post, but I can share an interesting link or give you a brief insight into my life in a status update.

So… I moved the daily updates to a new category called 140 Characters.  It’s called that because that’s the limit that Twitter places on posts.  For some reason, I really enjoy the art of using exactly 140 characters.  I’m not sure why.

The new category is hidden from the main page and my RSS feed.  If you miss it, you can read those posts here.  They’re updated each night at midnight.  You can also subscribe in a feed reader.

Subscribe to 140 Characters in a reader

I’m messing around with my blog template so things might look a little crazy for a while.  Sorry about that.  The blue mountain design is so old, it’s just not cutting it anymore.  Meanwhile, you’ll have to endure random themes I’m trying out.   I’m so very professional aren’t I?  If you see one you don’t like… don’t worry it probably won’t be around for long.

It occurs to me that I can no longer consider myself a ‘blogger.’ After twelve years and 1,878 posts… I somehow stopped writing.

A few factors have led to my exit from the blogosphere.

1. Facebook: I post all of my stuff there now. Photos, links etc.

2. The ubiquitous nature of blogging: I know it’s not a good reason… but blogging isn’t cool anymore. When I got my own domain name almost 9 and a half years ago, having a website was unusual, unique. Now it’s normal and boring, and well… so what you have a blog everyone has a blog.

3. I’m busy: You knew that already though didn’t you? Well maybe not since I never write.

4. Friends: I used to tell gentlewhisper.com all of my stuff. Now I tell people at school or on the phone. Sorry. It doesn’t mean I don’t love you all. I just get it out of my system and forget to write.

5. Complicated topics: The stuff I want to write about seems like it would take a long time to write. I don’t have time to research and write a good post… so I don’t write at all. Sorry bout that!

So there are my reasons/excuses. I’m sure in different phases of my life I’ll feel I have more to write about … I guess I do right now, I just forgot to write.

I think I broke my blog… this is a test. I’m trying to get rid of all the crazy characters that showed up in old posts when I upgraded a while back…

This: ’ shows up randomly where there should be apostrophes.

Some sites suggest editing the wp-config file by removing “utf8?, so it becomes: define(’DB_CHARSET’, ”);

This got rid of the ’ … but replaced each post that contained it with only one character [an a]. That’s no good.
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I think the problem is that my database thinks it’s speaking latin1_swedish_ci and my Blog thinks it’s speaking utf-8… and all of you think I’m speaking a bunch of gibberish.

Hello tech-savvy friends.  If you rely on a feed reader to keep up to speed with Gentlewhisper.com you probably missed all the posts I’ve written since May 19th.  Sorry about that!  I think a recent upgrade messed things up a bit.  Hopefully you’ll find this in your reader and come back soon!  I think you missed about 7 posts.  Some had photos… one was pretty funny.

Hello friends, if you choose to leave me a message in the Meebo Me chat box on the right, please leave your email address and name. I’m often getting messages that I can’t respond to. Here’s the last one:

“Amy, have you heard from Joel yet? I read the news this morning. call me if you like…”

I’m not really sure who to call or even what day this was sent, because I’ve not logged into Meebo for a couple days. So um…

Thanks! Yes, I’ve heard from Joel. He’s doing well. I miss him. A Lot.