The Wicomico County Board of Education is maintaining a blog on the Daily Times web site at delmarvanow.com. Recent posts include news about the JMB High School Boys’ Soccer State Champions and a CSI night at Salisbury Middle School. A total of 22 posts have been entered over the two months that the blog has been in existence. Any effort to improve communication about our local schools is a positive sign.

I am studying the template that is in use for this blog to see how I might modify it to be more pleasing to the eye. Things might look a little funny every once in awhile as I change images and titles around. Please bear with me through this ongoing experiment. I did figure out how to change the header image, but the picture I selected doesn’t really match the color scheme. At least I know that I can modify a PHP file without making the blog disappear.

There are classes available to educate students in HTML programming or other web applications, but the process of selecting the best web hosting company is not usually part of the lesson plan. In order to publish your web site, you have to have some internet real estate to establish your presence. I am happy with my current web host, but there are many choices out there, and WebHostingReport.com ranks what they consider to be the top five web hosts. The site studies various aspects of the web hosting companies, including a category for best blog hosting. A good web hosting company will provide complete solutions for everything from e-commerce to e-mail along with full stats on your traffic. The services should also include free web application installation for needs such as content management systems, blog platforms or image galleries. WHR also offers articles to help new users learn more about web hosting.

If you are running a self installed Wordpress blog, I highly recommend the Wordpress Automatic Upgrade plugin. I have used the plugin to move through the last couple of Wordpress versions with great success. The plugin backs up files and databases before upgrading. WAU makes the move to newer versions, should I say it, foolproof.

Although she is not on Delmarva, she is just across the water in Mathews County, Virginia. Chesapeake Bay Woman authors a blog about Life in Mathews that is always engaging and humorous and often insightful. I have enjoyed the posts of CBW for some time now, and I encourage readers on Delmarva to stop by for a visit. Tidbits like horseflies that are practically as big as horses will hit home with readers on the shore.

If you are planning to take a trip to Washington, D.C., this summer, then check out the list of 100 Things to Do With Kids in Washington DC. The list actually includes activities in DC and the surrounding area, and the post is from a blog titled A Parent in Silver Spring, which is a well written and enjoyable blog that you should consider adding to your feed reader for features on parenting, activities in the DC suburbs, and an occasional free giveaway.

The publisher of the blog PostSecret and author of books compiled from thousands of posted secrets will be in Salisbury, MD, on January 31, 2008. Frank Warren will give a lecture at 7:00 PM in the Holloway Hall Auditorium on the campus of Salisbury University. Warren updates his blog on a weekly basis with a post containing a couple of dozen secrets on handmade postcards that people from all over the world mail to his Germantown, MD, address. PostSecret won an award for the Best Weblog of the Year in 2007.

There is a relatively new blog platform out there called tumblr which supports a variation of blogs called tumblelogs. Tumblelogs are a more freeform type of blog which is attractive to users whose blogs are more of a multimedia experience than the typical title..article..title..article blog. Tumblr sends you to Wikipedia for a short attempt at defining tumblelogs. Anarchaia is a blog that is cited as an early example of tumblelogs. Tumblelogs are great for people who use their blogs as a sort of scrapbook of stuff they want to remember, which is the intent of my Random Signals.

Tumblr is amazingly easy to sign up for. Enter an email address, password and your blog name. Done. Tumblr gives you a dashboard of buttons for text, photo, quote, link, chat, audio and video posts. I set up a new blog in less than five minutes with a couple of test posts. Very simple, yet the results are quite satisfying.

See a short film created by J.B. Greenbaugh of Milton, DE. It was shown at the Rehoboth Beach Independent Film Festival last fall.

Lavinia in Tango

See more creations by this multitalented citizen of Delmarva who contributes to a blog HERE.