Joel Spolsky wrote a few books about software development that are pretty good. He also writes a blog. This morning I was read an essay he wrote: A Field Guide to Developers. It identifies all the reasons I didn’t like my last job.

I think this is the coolest blog I’ve yet found in this wide world of teh intarweb. It’s written by a homeless man, living in Greensboro, NC, and it is about what it’s like to live as a homeless person in America.

“We were taken from the Day Center to a large local church. The volunteer staff had already prepared rollaway beds for each of us and had a meal prepared. The volunteers are some of the nicest people I ever met, so nice in fact, I actually felt guilty about them having to stay and deal with us. It’s always bugged me having to ask for help, and even more so now that I think of these good people spending time away from their own friends and families to be with us. Still, they seem to have no problem with it, and I would observe, have even come to expect it.

“Pay attention, boys and girls; these people are what being Christians are all about. Not Pat Robertson’s political abortions or Jerry Falwell’s overly-smug social dictums, but people helping people as commanded by God. “Out of their works will you know them” I think is how it goes.”

My mother volunteers often at the local homeless shelter, and I’ve gone and helped out a couple times. One of the thoughts I had was that there should be a way for these people to tell their stories. I even thought of a blog, but I wasn’t sure how you might initiate that. The web can only support so many me-too technocrat blogs and full-of-hot-air politicrat blogs. I wish more people would blog because they have an interesting story to tell.

This man’s blog, “View from the Sidewalk,” has also been covered by the Greensboro News-Record.

I made the switch. Hopefully it’s painless on the reader’s end. This allows me to a) host my own data, which should alleviate some of the connection issues I was having with Blogger, and b) integrate my blog with the rest of my site (visually). I like WordPress a lot so far, it’s nice to be able to get into the nitty-gritty of the PHP and change something if I want. Building a theme to match the rest of my site only took a couple of hours. I would still recommend Blogger to someone with no web development experience who wanted to see what blogging is all about. It is fairly easy to use, especially if you are hosting your blog on blogspot.com.

I claimed my feed on FeedBurner. If you are subscribed please change your aggregator to point to http://feeds.feedburner.com/LevelOne from now on. This will allow me to move the feed around on my site, without breaking your subscription. It also lets me track the number of subscribers more easily.

Blogger ate the second half of my template, hence the sudden design change. Additionally, this whole keeping my information on their servers thing is not really working out for me. Last night I was unable to publish a minor template change. Even when I can publish, it takes forever. This blog is not that big, it shouldn’t be so slow to publish.

The solution, of course, is to move away from Blogger. I have started setting up Wordpress (hosted locally), but it’s going to take me a while to get it set up just right. Another advantage to using WP is that it will enable me to more easily integrate the blog with the rest of my site.

Here are a couple of ideas for blogs I would read. Someone may already be doing these, but I haven’t run across them yet.

1. The web’s only Plog. Short for pooplog, this would be a day to day blog about stool. Bloggers could cover their own movements as well as the always hilarious This Week in Poop news segment. Enlightened discussion of poop: that’s what the internet was invented for.

2. Haute Lingua: Hott Language for the Hoi Polloi. I receive Dictionary.com’s word of the day. I would love to see a blogger try to write one entry per day that relates to their own life, is no longer than one paragraph, and uses the word of the day. It would, at least, be an interesting writing exercise.

I was looking at what blogs are out there in the realm of game design. I spent a few hours browsing around a blog devoted to board games. I also read a few of the recent posts on Gamecraft, which were pretty interesting. My favorite game-related blog out there in the blogosphere right now is probably Games * Design * Art * Culture. I am really looking forward to seeing what that guy does with his new project Manifesto Games.