Carol Foltz

Many websites are dark today in protest of two bills before Congress right now. The danger if the bills pass is that the Internet will be crippled, sites will be taken down for suspected copyright infringement/piracy without due process, ordinary people will be prosecuted for doing so much as posting a video of themselves singing a copyrighted song or quoting a copyrighted work.

I’m not tech-savvy enough to take my sites down and get them back up, so my support is this: watch this video and see the dangers, then contact your senators and representatives. Tell them that SOPA and PIPA are not going to solve the problem of piracy and they are likely to cause more problems in the long run.

PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.

I’ve been slacking off at In Old Fort Dodge. I’m missing a day in June, and about two weeks each in July and August.

I’m keeping up with September so far (it’s only been four days).

And I’ve got pages to work on: the Slide for Life, Gowrie Town Marshal killed, Frank Gotch. I’ve already got articles to type, but I need to go back to July and August and get things organized. I had a system, but slacked off on that, too.

I’m slacking off on my other sites, as well. So I’ll try to do a little here and there and it will add up.

I just went through 44 comments that have been piling up since at least June.

Not one was a “real” comment. By real, I mean a person who read my blog post with the intent of just finding out what it was about. Every last comment was someone with an agenda – a spam link agenda.

Some of the comments appeared to be genuine, but when I look at the website that came with it, it was a giveaway.

So, don’t expect to see your comments here any time soon. I’m pretty picky.

While I discovered that I can pre-date posts and they will show up in the past, and have taken advantage of that fact (stop procrastinating!), I have also found out that Networked Blogs on Facebook hasn’t done any of my updates from In Old Fort Dodge since May 12.

Ouch.

This means that I will have to post the links myself – at least until I can figure out what went wrong. I keep hoping that I’ll just sit down and do several days’ worth of posts – scheduled for the proper days – but this means I’ll still have to access the Internet on a daily basis.

And I haven’t done anything with A Vague Recollection or A Wiser Steward in some time. I need to get going with them, as well.

In Old Fort Dodge is easier, in a way. Once I pick an article, I just have to type it and schedule it – I don’t have to plan it out in my head. Some of the articles have a lot of typing – I’m still not finished with the June 2 article about when President Theodore Roosevelt visited Fort Dodge. But I’ve since entered an article that was nearly that long, so I really don’t have an excuse now.

So, on to typing.

I have sorted (I think) all of the copies of old newspapers that I have between 1903 and 1907 by month. I have sorted January through March by day. Now I can grab one day’s worth and pick an article that I would like to share at In Old Fort Dodge. I might have at least one for each day in March, which would mean I don’t have to rush to the library.

I do want to make sure I represent other years, though, so I will be going to the library sometime.

And I want to include photos when possible. I’ll have to talk to someone at the historical society to see if I can scan some of their photos for this project. I’ve got a new scanner that is very portable, although it only scans up to 4-by-6 inches.

I also made some cover inserts for family history binders for church. We’ll see if anyone likes them. They aren’t mandatory, so if someone wants to do their own or just doesn’t want the decoration, that’s fine. And I need to make some that aren’t so girly. 😉

I had let my hosting lapse, so this is a brand-new beginning for this site.

I have several projects in the works. I’ve got a new site up and running: In Old Fort Dodge. I will post news articles from the early days of Fort Dodge, Iowa, and the surrounding area. The articles will be posted on the same day they were originally published, beginning March 1 with an article from March 1, 1904.

I registered a couple of other new domains but haven’t gotten started with them yet. This site will tie everything together.