I made this post from my Sidekick, which theoretically means that I should be able to make entries anywhere I get service.

As an aside, the Sidekick's autocorrect feature likes to change "Mo" to "Month".

Let's call this the first official post. Howdy to all of you. This, A Small, Self-Centered Universe, is the semi-secret blog of Jonathan Rosenberg, Goats cartoonist and happy guy.

Let's set up some ground rules, shall we?

• I'll try not to censor myself in here, unless my wife complains -- her privacy is paramount (her name is Amy, but we'll call her SnuggleCheeks McGee from here on in so as to protect her identity). Everything else is fair game.
• Since I'm not censoring myself, try not to tell too many people about this. If you find it, good. If you know someone who might find it interesting, fine. But please don't go posting the URL on the Goats forums (or any other forums, or through any sort of mass communication, for that matter) without my permission. It would be appreciated, and in exchange, I'll be as forthcoming as possible.

I think that should do it -- rules suck, anyway.

So what is this blog for? For the most part, it's just a personal blog, allowing me to sort through my thoughts and findings, post new and interesting developments, and it's an ideal brain dump. You may not find it terribly interesting, but it's mostly here for my use.

It's also a way for me to better understand the blogging phenomenon. As someone who has an active interest in building web communities, I find that first-hand knowledge of these sorts of activities often comes in handy.

And finally, it's a good place for me to post stuff about Goats activities that fall under one of the two following categories:

• Stuff that wouldn't interest the general public
• Stuff that wouldn't be appropriate for whatever reason for posting on the Goats site.

Basically (for now at least), I can vent and fume about Goats and cartooning in general and assume that anyone who manages to find this is at least somewhat friendly. That's until the general public finds it, the URL gets passed around, and all the other cartoonists I slag form a lynch mob.

So, I was going to take off this Friday from the strip, partially because no one will be around to see it and I don't want to continue the storyline without everyone's full attention (my mom is a schoolteacher), but mostly 'cause I'm lazy.

On the way back from picking up lunch, though, I had an idea. Or, rather, I remembered an idea (since I can't possibly have any original ones left). I'm gonna break into the story for one day, confuse everyone, and then pick up right back where we left off. People who are away for the weekend won't miss a thing, and everyone else will get a nice non sequitur-ish treat.

I'm beginning to feel like I'm talking to myself. Which I am, of course. The scary part is that I think I like it.

Anyway, things are moving along swimmingly; most of the styles and general look and feel are in place; lots of items have been componentized for ease of maintenance, and I''m almost there. A few things left to do:

• Ask Phillip about image and file uploading -- right now there's a permissions problem with uploading images. This would be a useful thing to have generally on the site, especially if we can fix the next item, which is...
• Frequent mirroring to live isn't working. I'm pretty sure these directories are supposed to be monitored for changes, but it's not updating until the overall synching that happens each night.
• Because things don't sync properly, it's difficult to navigate the staging blog because all the URLs are absolute. I keep jumping to pages on the live server that don't exist.
• Probably most importantly, I want to create some evergreen content like a faq and bio and such, so people have a place to go when they first arrive. Assuming anyone ever sees this at all.
• Fix the bug that doesn't allow me to unset the Convert Line Breaks option in the prefs section.
• Figure out what the hell the pings stuff is for.

Well, that's a lot to do, so I should get to work, I suppose.