BlogPrologue: This post is an experiment in readability.
I’m using a new copy of ecto to compose this because ecto has some slick editing shortcuts for adding HTML tags. I decided to do this after I visited the Cool Cat Teacher Blog by Vickie Davis, and saw how she uses typography in her design. Her blog has a fun feel to it because she changes-up with her typefaces and formatting frequently, making liberal use of subheadings, font sizes, etc. I frequently post articles that are on the long side, and I see the need to use formatting to improve readability for the long articles. I’ve enjoyed reading Vickie’s blog in my Bloglines feeds for a while. She has good insights, and she leaves links to useful resources. I’m trying to apply some of the information I found at Reading on the Web to Borderland. With ecto I can set up a style sheet that mirrors Borderland’s to preview my post and I can add different text styles on the fly with CSS typography tags that I have added to the tags template.

Acknowledgements
After getting highlighted in Will’s Quote ‘O the Day last week, Borderland picked up several new subscribers. That’s fun. Thanks to all of you who are linked to Borderland. The circle has grown, and I’ve found several new blogs to follow as a result of watching my referrer traffic.

Lurking in del.icio.us
One of my favorite places to find information on the web is my del.icio.us inbox. I especially like it when people use the text field to summarize or comment on the bookmark. I just passed the 2000 mark in my own account. One of the ways that I’ve found people to subscribe to is with a del.icio.us search engine called toptaggers. It used to be called Collaborative Rank. If you do a search, you can find out who the early linkers are to sites that are given certain tags. Those are the “experts.” I’ve put some of them in my inbox, as well as many of the bloggers who I follow. One nice little tool that I recently came upon lets you search the flickr creative commons photos.

I’ve noticed that my inbox is slow lately. It seemed current for a while, then it remained static for a few days, then it seemed to catch up with a flood of links, and now it’s a day behind again. I don’t understand it, but I created a backup with BlogBridge that works pretty good. It even allows me to bookmark directly into del.icio.us from the aggregator.

Bringing it Home
I don’t normally post about technology tools because that isn’t my area of expertise. I’m more aligned with English teachers than technology specialists. But I can learn from anyone. It wasn’t very long after I began blogging (about a year ago) that I noticed there is a blogger food chain. Chris, who regrettably (for me) seems to be retiring from public life“[Ha, Ha, April fools!], commented on this a while back in a post called Gatekeeperology. Links are the currency that makes blogging work as a knowledge resource. The reason I’m writing on Borderland is to bear witness to my experience as a teacher in a confusing era in which political pressure on teachers and students is working to narrow our focus (with standards, testing, NCLB) while, ironically, technological advances are opening new possibilities for making meaning. Sharing classroom experiences and threads of ideas with others who can help make sense of it all is immeasurably valuable. It’s good to be linked.

update: This didn’t format the way I wanted/expected it to. I should have waited to hit the ‘publish’ button for a time I when I could spend some more time troubleshooting. Ah. Well. It’s what it is. For now.
again! This is more like what I was after. I needed to do a little CSS doctoring.

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