Huntington West Virginia Blog - Personal Blogs

Trick or Treat in Huntington West Virginia

stephanie@sheck.com (Huntington West Virginia) — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 08:23:39 -0500

I had 73 kids come for trick or treat in Huntington West Virginia. I was very pleasantly surprised. I sat out on the front porch and handed out the candy bars to the kids. I usually give extra for the neighborhood children who had creative costumes. I had a can of Pepsi with me on the front porch. One little kid about 4 years old wanted my Pepsi, rather than candy. I went into the house and got him a can of soda. He was one happy camper. His mom was a wee bit embarrassed at his asking, but that's OK. I gave out about 2 lbs. of candy and a can of soda pop and had a good time doing it. So did the kids. Trick or Treat went well for the children of Huntington West Virginia.

Paris Hilton in Jail

stephanie@sheck.com (Huntington West Virginia) — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 19:59:37 -0400

I wish to thank a California Judge for removing Paris Hilton from our face for a while. This will give the girls at the jailhouse hair salon somthing to gossip about.

FIrst Congregational Church of Ceredo

stephanie@sheck.com (Huntington West Virginia) — Fri, 18 May 2007 21:56:24 -0400

The First Congregational Church of Ceredo West Virginia has just gone online with a brand new website. http://ceredochurch.org This will be a nice addition to the local West Virginia churches who have embraced technology.

The First Congregational Church of Ceredo is a mainline (middle of the road) protestant church in Ceredo WV. They have recently retained Reverend Peter Barclay as the new Pastor, and he has been working hard to make his church grow in spirit and in numbers. The church website is coming along nicely and is a work in progress.

Virginia Tech Killings

stephanie@sheck.com (Huntington West Virginia) — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 00:30:03 -0400

It deeply saddens me that 33 students have been killed at Virginia Tech University. The Virginia Tech killings shock the concience of civillied people who cannot comprehend what kind of insanity motivates a human being to engage in this level of violence.

This level of horrible tragedy has not been been seen at a university since the Marshall University Plane Crash in November 1970.

Update From Huntington West Virginia

stephanie@sheck.com (Huntington West Virginia) — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 17:43:00 -0400

It has been a while since I have blogged regularly. Health issues. Nothing much has changed recently in Huntington West Virginia. The citys budget is still in the red and the bridges are still pink. so much for chromatic harmony. Money is still in short supply in Huntington, however things seem to be picking up and I am optimistic. I understand that RIAA is filing federal lawsuits against 12 Marshall University Students for illegal downloads on the University computer network. On one hand the students were wrong, on the other hand the network dministrators should be fired if they failed to stop illegal activity on the network.

Stephanie

Note to readers

stephanie@sheck.com (Huntington West Virginia) — Mon, 12 Feb 2007 22:43:24 -0500

Note to readers

I have recently been ill. (Back Injury) this is why postings have been sparse recently. I am recovering.

Stephanie

Subscribe to this blog by e-mail

stephanie@sheck.com (Huntington West Virginia) — Fri, 25 Aug 2006 00:09:55 -0400

You can now subscribe to my blog by e-mail and get new articles as they are published my e-mail. We have a pretty good size readership and this feature has been requested by several readers. The subscription service for this feed is managed by FeedBlitz and they are quite reputable.

Stephanie Heck http://feeds.feedburner.com/huntington

Mothers Day

stephanie@sheck.com (Huntington West Virginia) — Sun, 14 May 2006 22:57:11 -0400

Ladies: Do not forget to send your EX a Mother's day card, just to remind him that he is a real mother too. I realize you miss your ex, but a few trips to the firing range should improve your marksmanship !
Stephanie Heck
Cabell County, Huntington West Virginia

Bloggers Legitimate Journalists

stephanie@sheck.com (Huntington West Virginia) — Sun, 30 Apr 2006 21:47:32 -0400

Are bloggers legitimate Journalists ? The answer to that question is not always easy, lets just say that all the major news outlets use RSS technologies to promulgate the news to various mirror feeds online. All major newspapers and TV networks use blogs online. So are bloggers becoming journalists, or are journalists becoming bloggers? This might well be a legitimate question as well for the foreseeable future.

If someone is writing a blog with several thousand readers based upon their profession, I would say yes it is a professional publication. However your average Joe who has a blog with 40 renders a week would be seen as an amateur endeavor.

500 years ago the printing press was invented and there was a great deal of contention at that time as to what constituted legitimate publishing, the argument centered around the credibility of books copied by hand by the traditional scribes, or or the credibility of books printed on the new printing press machine.

Rather than concentrate on the credibility of the author, the contention centered on the credibility of the method of publishing 500 years ago. Five hundred years later the argument is rehashed by those "scribes" in the traditional media who claim the neo-media of the blogosphere is not legitimate. Alas, history repeats itself, not only in contention but in error as well.

Stephanie Heck.

Huntington WV

Maine Blogger Sued

stephanie@sheck.com (Huntington West Virginia) — Sun, 30 Apr 2006 04:43:41 -0400

I have learned that a blogger named Lance Dutson in Maine has been sued by a state contractor for the Maine Departmentof Tourism. He is being sued by the contractor for his blog articles that are overtly critical of a ad agency operating under state auspices.

I contend that the right of the Maine blogger to redress grievance with the state, and to critique the state, includes the right to critique any contractor acting as an agent of the state. The advertising agency was acting as a contractor for the Maine Department of Tourism and is therefore subject to critique and parody as "Fair Use" from dissenting Maine residents as a contracting agent of the state.

Bloggers use technologies called XML and RSS that promulgates stories and postings much faster than traditional web pages. In short I can post something on a popular blog and it is promulgated globally as an RSS feed 2 hours later. The technology can be used for great good or it can also be used irresponsibly. Some people are getting sued for misusing the technology, and in some cases industry is trying to intimidate bloggers into silence by abusing the Digital Millenium Copyright Act in a manner similar to what the music industry has done to file sharing networks.

Blogging is a combination of technical skills and also of content writing skills. The majority of poorly written blog material or badly formatted blogs never make it into the search engines. Google has a big BS meter. However if one is an experienced programmer or an experienced writer, it is possible to make quite a popular blog with many readers. A soapbox of sorts. This blogger in Maine is a website developer just like I am.

I worry that free speech is in danger in Maine and I am perterbed at the state of Maine for failing to protect its citizens rights from an overtly aggressive state contrator. Shame on the state of Maine!

I too am a website publisher and a prominent blogger in this state, and I am all too aware that slap-suits are being filed on a regular basis against bloggers. The Bloggers have a growing amount of clout and therefore industry and political leaders are becoming more aware of it all the time.

Birthday

stephanie@sheck.com (Huntington West Virginia) — Sun, 12 Feb 2006 13:13:01 -0500

Yesterday was my birthday. Had a nice evening. Thought I would update the personal blogs section. Went out with a group of friends.

Personal Blogs

stephanie@sheck.com (Huntington West Virginia) — Thu, 22 Sep 2005 00:50:00 -0400

Personal Blogs

It seems that personal blogs are becoming very popular online, over 10 million personal blogs exist globally. I started out with a personal blogs site last year and expanded it to a multiple category blog that goes beyond a personal blog to the point it becomes a popular local news and commentary site. I still keep one section of the blog as a personal blog. A place for a few profound and whimsical thoughts that are near and dear to me. I talk about personal events and professional events. There are many types of personal blogs on many topics. Some personal blogs are on hobby topics, and some personal blogs are on technical matters. You can find personal blogs on almost any topic from A to Z.

There are many online providers that provide free personal blogs for their users, however these free personal blogs have limited capacities, and frequently have a lot of ads posted by the blogging provider. Full fledged blogging is best accomplished by using a full featured blogging program installed on a web server under an domain name owned by the blogger. Most of these sites are owned by companies or personal blogs that seek to do a first class job. I recommend a free personal blogs software called Serendipity. The link to this personal blogs site is below.

http://s9y.info/ Serendipity Personal Blogs Software

There are also professional blogs written by members of various professions, where the blogger will give advice from their particular profession or area of expertise. Not all blogs are personal in nature, some blogs will be of a professional nature. The majority of professional blogs are reputable, however I suggest you get your medical and legal advice from licensed professionals in your own home state. Medical and legal blogs are a good source of generic educational information, but let your local doctor or lawyer make the final call.

Personal Blogs rely on a technology called RSS ( Really Simple Syndication ) that developed in the late 1990's. Personal Blog owners allow their content to be syndicated to multiple sources that make for massive capacity to get the word out about a particular news event. Yahoo, Google and MSN all collect postings from blogs as an alternative news source. Personal Blogs are indexed by the search engines much more frequently than standard web sites because the RSS technology makes indexing much more easier to do. Personal Blogs and Professional Blogs are sometimes referred to as RSS FEEDS as opposed to your traditional news feed via wire service.

As the traditional national media is trusted less and less by your average American , who no longer believes what they hear on TV and radio, Personal Blogs have arisen from relative nerdy obscurity to constitute a form of home grown journalism by average people who are a bit more articulate than most. This gives the news consumer a choice if they want to get news of a particular event from a national news source, or get the news from?the personal blogs?guy who lives just up the street from where the event happened.

10 million bloggers globally constitutes the biggest news network in the history of the world. There are specialized search engine to index blog postings and these are important in the syndication of blog news.

The bloggers call their collective writings the "BLOGOSPHERE". The blogosphere is a network of networked syndicated blogs

Nowhere have personal blogs (RSS FEEDS) had more impact than in the field of politics. Millions of dollars were raised by bloggers of all different political persuasions in the 2004 election by large numbers of grassroots personal blog owners and personal blog readers. As the 2006 election approaches, it promises to be an interesting year for personal blog owners who are homegrown activists. Somewhere between 30 and 60 million dollars was raised by bloggers and their readers in the 2004 election. Personal Blogs have made an impact on American politics but nobody is sure at this point what that impact is. The blog phenomenon is still developing and the technology of syndication of blogs is still developing. There is a new type of blog technology called ATOM and OPML that has great potential.

Some large corporations are using a premium version of personal blog software to distribute information throughout the company rapidly to all employees. There are some advantages to using blogs to circulate company newsletters and corporate memo's and therefore increase the efficiency of business communications exponentially. Even religious institutions are getting into blogs as a means of decreasing printing costs and decreasing paper usage and thus being environmentally sensitive.

Stephanie Heck

stephanie@sheck.com

Huntington Cabell County West Virginia

Canadian Plane Crash

stephanie@sheck.com (Huntington West Virginia) — Wed, 03 Aug 2005 07:16:52 -0400

There was an Air France Airliner that crashed in Toronto Canada yesterday, the plane burst into flames and incinerated itself. What is a profound miracle is that all 309 people on board survived. This is a note to the personal blogs: I feel a kinship and profound empathy for those people, I am a survivor too. Sometimes I feel like the unsinkable Molly Brown. Best wishes to all the plane crash survivors. Being from Huntington West Virginia , I remember all too well the night of the Marshall University Plane Crash in 1970 where there were no survivors. I admire and have great empathy for anyone who survives the horror of a plane crash.

Stephanie

Housework Humor

stephanie@sheck.com (Huntington West Virginia) — Sat, 14 May 2005 20:59:20 -0400

I spent most of the day doing housework. The dishes were impersonating Pikes Peak while the laundry pile looked like it was impersonating the Swiss Alp's. It was a mountain of a job. Alas, it is springtime, so it is time to clean house with a bulldozer and a shovel. (Dynamite helps) Massive quantities of Clorox, 409, and detergent make the job much easier ( The climbing gear makes the trek to the top of the laundry pile go so much faster.)

I actually think there is a black hole in the bottom of the washing machine that devours missing socks that are never heard from again.

I hear a squeak in the washing machine belt that convinces me that the machine is making lamentations over the work load. If I look in the back end of the dryer I am afraid I will find all the missing lint. The dryer quit working last February. I think it gave up Lint for Lent.

Anyway the cat seems enormously pleased that I am am cleaning up her place, because the cat is convinced I am trespassing in her house, but she seems content to tolerate my presence as long as I am doing housework.

Stephanie Heck

Bobby Nelson

stephanie@sheck.com (Huntington West Virginia) — Sat, 07 May 2005 11:53:06 -0400

I ran into Bobby Nelson yesterday evening in a public place. The years have been kind to Bobby Nelson. He appears to be in good health and in a good mood. I have known Bobby Nelson since I was a child, at that time Bobby Nelson was Congressman Ken Hechler's assistant.