After nearly five years on Apple’s MobileMe (née [dot] Mac) servers, this site is moving. You will be able to see new updates at http://simplyrobert.wordpress.com/. It wasn’t an easy decision to migrate the site, and I reserve the right to change my mind at any time. This site will stay live for quite a while, so it gives me some time to try things out before I commit. The move comes down to a couple of issues:

• The URL for my site is just unfriendly, and I don’t want to pay for a domain on top of the cost of an annual MobileMe subscription. It just adds up to a lot of money for a site that I don’t use as a revenue source.
• iDisk has been very flaky these last few months when copying images for use on my site.
• Changing anything about the sidebar would require the entire site to re-upload due to Apple’s lack of PHP support on MobileMe. The larger my site has become (as well as Simply Presentation and Simply Gospel), the more of a deal-breaker this was becoming.

Unfortunately, I won’t be able to use RapidWeaver anymore, and this move will kill my Google page ranking. Still, I think it will be best for my online projects in the long run.

This incarnation of Simply Presentation will stay right here for the next several months until my MobileMe subscription finally expires. This should give you, my kind readers, time to update bookmarks and RSS feeds. The other portions of this site will also be getting new homes on WordPress in the coming months.

It will take time to move all of the old content over. I’m reconstructing many of the old posts and checking links, but all new content will appear only at the new address. Thanks for your continued support of my efforts here, and I look forward to seeing you at my new WordPress home!

It's been a long time since I've updated the site's design (over a year!), but somewhere around 11:00 last night I found a stylesheet variation I liked and went with it. If things look strange, hit the refresh button on your browser, and that should fix things. Otherwise you might have to clear your browser's cache.

I've been contemplating changing things up for a while – mostly because the links to the various parts of my site (Simply Robert, Simply Presentation, and Simply Gospel) weren't clearly clickable. Other than that, the new layout is a bit more streamlined. I also fixed a lot of markup in old posts, such as lists, quotes, and headers.

Thanks for your readership, and I hope you like the new look around here!

Over the last couple of days, both Mac Rumors and Daring Fireball have blogged about possible impending changes to Apple's .Mac service, home to my site here for about three years.

I don't know if these potential changes could affect the domain name of my site (making bookmarks and links invalid) or not. I doubt it will. However, keep an eye on my Twitter page should this site up and disappear!

There's so much going on to blog about and so little time in which to write – the events in Burma, primaries, endless right-wing smear posts to critique, autism research, fun stuff like new video games, the beta of OpenOffice 3.0, Photoshop Express, etc.

Fortunately, the end of the tunnel is approaching, and the school year will be concluding soon. So far I only have one big project slated for the summer, allowing more time to blog (or earn XBox 360 achievements). Until then, there's always Twitter!

The site's going to go down tomorrow for a couple of hours. I hope [dot] Mac will be getting a nice upgrade in the meantime!

It's just that time of year again when it's hard to pay attention to the blog. Right now I'm teaching a Bible class, teaching in my full-time position, taking a grad class, and we're doing some early spring cleaning. I wish I was cool like John Gruber and could blog full time.

That said, I'm currently working on three new posts for my section on presentation tips. Also, my page of presentations is quietly being replaced, but it will be some time before I change the navigation. Finally, my grad class has turned me on to another online project that I'll be ready to share in the summer!

If you frequent my section on presentation tips (uncreatively named just that), then you know it has been going without categories for a long time. Well, that has been rectified. My only regret is that RapidWeaver does not support multiple category tagging for a single post. Hopefully, that will show up in a future release!

Sorry about the recent lack of updates. My schedule has not been affording me much quality time with the computer lately, but things will be slowing down again soon. I still plan on finishing at least three more posts about NeoOffice, and I have a few sets of sermon notes to upload. Finally, I have a couple more posts that tie into the Macworld keynote that should be hitting the Presentation Tips section soon.

Best wishes!

First off, categories and archives are fixed! Unfortunately, in some of my experimenting, I deleted a couple of older entries. As it turns out, the solution was far simpler than I was making it! Oh well, I'm just glad everything is working again.

I've added a temporary page about my talk at ICE 2007 which is on Friday, January 26. Just like last year, this page will come down shortly after the talk, and material from the presentation will be posted to My Presentations. I'll probably write up some thoughts right here on my journal afterwards as well.

Finally, "I'm On My Way" is the most recent of my presentations to receive a facelift. One of these days, I'll get some truly new content posted to that section!

The Presentation Tips category is now its own section – separate and apart from the main blog. It also has its own RSS feed independent of the main blog. Unfortunately, the new blog does not yet have categories, and this is where you come in – I'm open to suggestions on how to best divide those posts into categories. Please email me your suggestions at crysnrob@mac.com, and I'll make some decisions in the next week or so.

On the main blog, I've added an autism category. I just think it makes sense seeing how I'm posting more and more on that topic. Also, the Screen Grab section is completely gone. It never served much of a purpose anyway.

Finally, the site is using a new template. If things look weird, clean your browser cache and refresh. (I am keeping a backup of the old version of the site if I decide this doesn't work out.) I think that's it as far as updates go. Let me know if anything looks messed up or if you find any dead links to parts of this site.

PS: Right now I know the link for February 2006 is broken as is the Technology category on the main blog. Also, the November 2006 archive is broken on the Links blog. Sheesh... I'll post a note when they get fixed...

Update: I'm getting a bad feeling that fixing those broken archives is not going to be a small task. It may have to wait until I'm on Winter Break to get fixed. However, I'll let you know if I make any progress!

The overhaul is coming along slowly. I don't want the site to go dormant while I'm working on it, so normal updates are still a priority (as are my job and my classes). I was wondering, though. The Presentation Tips category is getting pretty epic. Do you think I should separate that out into its own blog with its own categories? Drop me a line on this one.

I'm probably going to eliminate the Screen Grabs section in the long run, and I'm yet to find a RapidWeaver theme I'm really thrilled with. iWeb experimenting has halted – it does not play nice with Internet Explorer. Part of me wants to say "forget it" to IE compatibility, but too many of my friends and family still use IE (Get Firefox already people!) for me to do that. Finally, as of today, the Links Blog will only archive back six months.

I hope everyone had a happy Thanksgiving. Get ready for shop-a-geddon!

PS - I've given the ICE 2006 slides and handout a small overhaul. You can check it out on My Presentations.

I've updated two of the slideshows on my Presentations page. Both "Handling Hard to Handle Kids" and "Salvation Through Water" have seen significant visual updates. In fact, my most recent post in Presentation Tips covers some of the process I went through updating "Hard to Handle." Here are a couple of pictures of the updates:

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"Scrabble in the Classroom" is taking a while to finish up. There are a couple of things I want to illustrate that I'm having a tough time working around – it's just tedious, not really difficult. Also, I've just started assembling a talk on something I've been curious about: "Is God Green?" We'll see if that one goes anywhere. Here's a peek at both:

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Right now I can't confirm anywhere else, but I am planning on presenting "Hard to Handle" and "Scrabble" in the near future at my school. I'm thinking about offering "Simply Presentation" there as well. We have quite a few members of staff who have to speak in front of colleagues from time to time, and I wonder if they would be interested in that material.

I just noticed that the site looks poor on my work computer (Win2000 + IE6). I'm looking into fixing the problem.

I need to find a WinXP machine to see if the same problems appear there: Paragraph spacing is nonexistant, and the Screen Grabs page is really messed up.

Everything should look fine under WebKit and Mozilla based browsers.

New: I've made a new Screen Grabs page. I hope this one works ... I had a little fun with it this time.

You might notice some new badges in the sidebar. The interesting one (not that the other two are merely filler) is the RSS icon. For some time now, my journal, the Links Blog, and Sermon Notes have had RSS feeds available, but, unless you were using a web browser that alerts you to such feeds (such as Firefox), you might not have known they were available. Now, those of you who use news aggregators like NetNewsWire (Mac), NewsMac Pro (Mac), or RssReader (Win) can subscribe to the site. The RSS feed contains entire articles, images and all.

With the availability of subscriptions, I'm going to stop listing additions to the Sermon Notes page on my main blog. I don't mention updates to the Links Blog here, so it just seems inconsistent. The Sermon Notes blog tends to get regular weekly updates. Also, I am considering merging my Spirituality category over to the Sermon Notes blog. It seems like it fits better on that page. I may not, though. We'll see...

FInally, now that I'm getting more comfortable with messing with the site's css, I may begin messing with some of the pages' color schemes in the near future. I miss the different sections being different colors. It won't happen right away, but I don't want y'all to be surprised. ;-)

Finally, for those of you who kept running into broken images or messed-up pages earlier today: here's the extremely helpful error message I kept getting as I was trying to fix that.



Since I'm really enjoying these recently discovered faces, I'm just going to say that this dialog box made me feel this way: :-|

My journal is now what comes up first when you visit "http://homepage.mac.com/crysnrob." You'll notice the Professional and Spiritual categories are now completely gone. The content will be back eventually but categorized differently. I am shooting for a layout that will avoid too much clutter but will also avoid subsites. I've decided subsites annoy me.

Right now, a lot of image links in my journal are broken, but that seems to be the only real problem at the moment. An About Me section will be up soon, and everything else will migrate back online as I figure out how to link to my .Mac Public Folder (to avoid too many uploads). Stay tuned. I'm continuing to update the areas that have remained online.

Update 1(6/26 1:30 pm): I've fixed the images back to April 2006. Everything earlier than that is still broken, but I'm stopping right now to go have a life!

Update 2 (6/26 4:00 pm): Images are updated (or removed) back to November of 2005. Unfortunately, RapidWeaver is not allowing me to edit journal entries past October 2005. I'll have to check their forums and see if anyone else is experiencing this problem. For right now, images in April through October 2005 will remain broken. Sorry about that.

Update 3 (6/27 1:30 am): The new About Me page is live with some facts about me, a cover letter, and a resumé. Additionally, a page is up for my presentations, and I will be adding both church and work related presentations here in QuickTime format. I'm stopping until tomorrow now.

Update 4 (6/28 6:45 am): Except for a few broken images in old blog entries and the Bible Lessons section, everything is pretty much back to normal. I'm going to stop updating this post now, but I've added a category for site updates to this journal. Sometime soon I'll be posting some impressions of my new DS Lite, and a couple of new lessons have been added to my Sermon Notes blog.

I've reloaded the attachment disorder presentation in a smaller resolution (which means a smaller download) with some typos fixed. In the meantime, I'm working on two more presentations for school: another one on classroom management and one on using Scrabble in the classroom. Take a guess which one is turning out to be more fun to put together.

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Additionally, I am overhauling the slides on attachment disorder, but I will probably keep the old slides online. Hopefully, it will make for an interesting comparison of two drastically different approaches to the same content. Here's a sneak peak:



That's all for now!

Here we are at the beginning. Right now, this site is created and maintained with the excellent RapidWeaver created by the good folks at Realmac Software, Ltd. This is, in no uncertain terms, a great piece of software for someone like me who wants a nice, clean layout but also has to operate on a budget. I invite any of my Macintosh-using friends to check RapidWeaver out.

Anyway, welcome to the site, and I hope you visit back often. Who knows what craziness the future will bring this little hamlet in cyberspace.