Technically, this is post 1603 on this blog. I just learned how to determine the number of posts via the WordPress platform, to which I changed this blog from Google’s blogger in April. This is an update about this blog and blogging and so forth from the owner/author. (Notice the updated photo header, too? I try to do that from time to time.)
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Well, here it is — my second post on my new blogging platform powered by WordPress. This new-to-me platform enabled me to move my blog, including more than 1460 of my old posts, to its own dedicated domain, bootedmanblog.com. (The first post didn’t quite work, so I am trying again.)

I am still working out a few bugs with the help of Hostgator Support, my web host, and the WordPress forum, engaging a delightfully helpful guru there. The problems I am having are with images that appear … or not … on various web browsing platforms. I’m sure this will resolve soon.

If you have suggestions or comments about this blog, or some useful solutions for the current minor problems I am experiencing, you can write to me using this form.

Life is short: make alternatives work!

Well, here it is — my first post on my new blogging platform powered by WordPress. This new-to-me platform enabled me to move my blog, including more than 1460 of my old posts, to its own dedicated domain, bootedmanblog.com.

Making this change was not as hard as I thought it would be. I did require web hosting service, which I already have for my website. I have the new domain of this blog hosted within my main website, so now everything is easier to maintain.

And best yet, I got away from the big.ugly.behemoth called Google. Google owns Blogger, as well as YouTube, Picasa, and many other formerly independent web services. I think Google is getting too big for its britches, and I have been considering moving away from “all things Google” for a while. But this past weekend, Google forced me onto its new Graphic User Interface, which in my opinion, SUCKS!

But not to degrade into more ranting, I responded by finding a very useable, workable alternative to Blogger. So welcome to my new blog powered by WordPress. The content will be about the same that it has been, but how it works is easier and is much more in my control. Take that, Google! Your system programmers created a truly sucky blogging environment. I shouldn’t complain much, though, since Blogger is a free site. They can do what they want with it. Fortunately, I had a very good alternative with WordPress, so I was able to switch rather quickly and smoothly.

I still have a few bugs to work out, and will be making tweaks here-and-there. If anyone can explain in plain non-techie English why this thing will not let me post an image to use as a blog header, I would appreciate it. (Yes, I have been to the forums, and yes, I have tried about ten different recommendations found there, but none work.) It also will not show an image that I uploaded to include in this post. It’s there, but not there. I dunno, I’m tired of spending hours trying to figure it out. I have submitted a question to the WordPress user’s forum, and have had responses from a guru, but he/she can’t seem to figure it out either. (I’m afraid it is not a WordPress problem, but a server problem. I fear that the web host I am using is proving that it is not measuring up to promises of site speed… but one thing at a time.)

If you have suggestions or comments about this blog, or some useful solutions for the current minor problems I am experiencing, you can write to me using this form.

Life is short: know your options and instead of complaining, make your move to alternatives.

I enjoy receiving messages from people all over the world who visit this blog and my website.

Unfortunately, there are times when I receive an email bounce, which reads like this:

This is the mail system at host gateway07.xxxx

I’m sorry to have to inform you that your message could not be delivered to one or more recipients.

The mail system

: host mta2.am0.yahoodns.net[xx.xx.xxx.xxx] said: 554
delivery error: dd This user doesn’t have a yahoo.com account
(jimxxxx@yahoo.com) [-5] – mta1434.mail.mud.yahoo.com (in reply to end of DATA command)

[I deliberately obscured the actual email address, but Jim should know who he is]

This is a sample from an actual bounced email that occurred earlier today, January 23. The message from a guy in the U.K. was very nice, and I wrote a reply, but unfortunately, he did not enter his email address correctly on my write to me page, so my effort to respond to him was returned — and he is left thinking that I never responded and probably worse about me as a person. I hate it when that happens.

Please, if you write to me, follow the instructions to double-check your email address. If it is wrong, even by one character, then it will bounce (or perhaps be delivered to someone else.)

If you are the author of a message from my “write to me” page and have not received a reply, then please, write again, and make certain that I have your correct email address! I will reply to all legitimate messages that I receive.

Life is short: ensure accuracy.

Welcome to post #1400 on this blog. Regular readers have been accustomed to a new post each day, but I’ve pretty much run out of new content — or at least enough to write a new post for each day, 365 days/year.

For a while, unless there is breaking news, I will scale back to a new post every other day and see how that goes.

I am still spending most of my waking hours (when I am not at my place of work) caring for my partner, who remains quite ill with an unknown serious medical situation. Caring for him takes the majority of my free time, which includes blogging time. Heck, if I have to spend an hour doing the laundry or cleaning the house so my partner can rest, so be it.

Thank you for reading my musings — ramblings, mostly — on a regular basis. I appreciate it. I like to write (obviously), and share information I have learned, take note of amusing internet behavior, comment on issues related to being a plain ol’ gay man who happens to like wearing boots and leather and who lives in a monogamous, permanent, closed relationship.

I appreciate that I have visitors from near and far. I still have two lurkers from my home town who visit every day — almost predictably at a specific hour. I don’t know if these guys are “secret Bootmen” or are spies from some of my local groups in which I participate, or what… but nonetheless, I hope you’re enjoying finding out more about me, just a regular guy next door who has an alter ego about which you were unaware.

I also appreciate the large number of visitors to this blog from my own country, the United States, as well as from Canada, Mexico, the U.K., Germany, Sweeden, Netherlands, Denmark, Finland, Switzerland, Italy, France, Spain, and the rest of Europe, Russia, Brazil, Japan, and New Zealand and Australia — lands I long to return to visit some day. I also have regular visitors from Japan and a few from Hong Kong, but none from China, as China still shamefully blocks blogs on Blogger from appearing on the internet in that country.

About 90% of the visitors to this blog come from internet searches. Text searches are the majority, but image searches land a lot of visitors here, too. Since Blogger is a Google product, it is not surprising to me that searches using the world’s most frequently-used search engine drive a large number of visitors to this blog every hour of every day. Since this blog is quite mature — 1,400 posts now — there is a lot of content that appears in search results when people look for information about boots, leather, wearing boots, what’s in style for men, and the ongoing obsession about whether to wear jeans inside or outside of boots.

In closing, thank you again for visiting this blog, reading my ramblings, and occasionally commenting. I hope you have a much more pleasant 2012 than ours has started out to be.

Life is short: keep the faith, and keep blogging!

Each year of this blog’s history, I have posted an analysis based on painstaking collection of data on what the “Top 10 blog posts” have been during the year.

This year, the Top 10 posts are…

… listed on this blog on the right side under the column, “Most Popular Posts of All Time.” Wow… Blogger installed a new widget that does all the hard work for me. So now I don’t have to collect data and rank it. It’s all there. So go visit.

Not a surprise that the Tom of Finland post remains number one. It gets visited regularly because a lot of people (guys?) use an image search and get directed to the Bulges and Breeches post. Hundreds each day. This drawing is very popular because it presents a rugged bravado of the traditional Leatherman, which appeals to many men in the gay community.

Also not a surprise that the post about masculine gay men ranks second. Many, many guys are looking for other sane, safe, normal, masculine gay men. Trouble is, guys who act and look like any other guy but who happen to have a same-sex orientation, do not wear a sign, nametag (Hi, I’m a Masculine Gay Man), or show up at frilly-froo-froo events. But there are ways to find masculine gay men. Go visit the post.

I was rather surprised to find that my blog post titled, “Gay Leather Breeches” got ranked among the top 10. Perhaps it is because I featured a photo of a cop in boots and breeches first — demonstrating that lots of guys wear breeches with boots, and doing do implies nothing about the wearer’s sexual orientation. However, for those into “BLUF” (Breeches, Leather, Uniform Fetish) fear, certainly leather breeches make a statement.

Also another post that always ranks highly is one about the obsession — yeah, an absolute obsession — that many guys have when pondering the age-old question, “should guys wear jeans tucked inside boots or not?” I have posted a lot about this silly question, but the post titled, “Cowboy Boots and Jeans Google Searches” is the one that most visitors find when searching that question using a search engine (provided they do not see my tutorial titled, “Cowboy Boots and Jeans” that has become the most popular page on my website by far.

There are a number of interesting, regularly-visited posts on my Top 10. A new one this year was posted this year by a straight friend who calls himself the “Only Booted Man In Town”. He wrote about being the only unbootedman in an unbooted state.

Well, there’s my usual Top 10 listing… go visit those posts, or others on this blog and see if you can change the dynamics of how Blogger’s widget determines what’s in the Top 10.

Life is short: read blogs! Happy New Year!

Sometimes I am late to the party, mostly because I am what is known as a “slow adopter.” I look at various technologies closely before deciding what to do about them — implement, delay, or ignore. Finally, after two years, I have implemented a rather simple technology here on this blog — used on many other blogs — called a “jump break.”

A jump break is simply a method of writing a leading paragraph or two, then inserting a small code snippet, which creates a “read more>>” link when the blog post is published. Then whatever I have to say in more length follows that.

You will not see the “read more” link if you visit the blog post directly, such as through the blog feed connected to the What’s New section of my bootedman.com website, or by using a standard RSS feed, or through the “Google Friend Connect” feature that some of you have signed up for.

However, if you visit what I call “the main blog,” then you should see a leading paragraph or two for each of the last ten blog stories I have posted, followed by the words “read more>>” which is a link to the rest of that particular post. If the leading paragraph intrigues you to read more, then click on the link. If it doesn’t, you can continue scanning through the rest of my blog to see if any of the daily stories interest you, and read more of the posts in which you are interested.

I know that I write about a lot of different things on this blog — from boots and leather to gay issues and masculinity, family, daily life, my partner, motorcycling, and in general, the life of a community-connected, family-oriented, senior-attention-giving, Harley-riding, city-avoiding, frugal, monogamously partnered masculine gay man. I know that not all of my posts are interesting to all of my readers.

That’s okay. It’s my blog. I appreciate it when I write something that appeals to you and you let me know by commenting on this blog or sending me a message. While this blog doesn’t generate a lot of comments or messages, I don’t fret. I have various statistical tracking methods to know that my average readership is increasing, now about 1,050 per day. Not bad! (But it’s also interesting to note that more than 90% of visitors to this blog find it through a search engine, rather than coming here directly.)

Blogging is an interesting hobby and I enjoy writing. It helps me vent a little bit, share a lotta bit, and remains fun. (It better be, with this post being #1,350!)

Thanks for reading and following my crazy notions about life, happiness, and my eclectic and various interests.

Life is short: Read more!

Tell me what about the following commenting policy statement on this blog is so hard to understand:

All comments are reviewed prior to posting. If you do not have a Google ID or Blogger ID, you may use the Anonymous ID option, however, you must type your name with your comment. Comments without a way to know who wrote it may be rejected or deleted. Comments with embedded links to commercial websites WILL BE DELETED–NO EXCEPTIONS!

Unfortunately, about once each week, some boot or leather peddler from India attempts to leave a comment on this blog. (I also get them about once each month from Pakistan.) The comment is usually worded as a compliment, though often includes significant errors in grammar and spelling. One would think that the country of the world that has the largest English-speaking population might have people who can write coherently in the language.

I digress…

Despite my warning against it, inevitably the commenter from India includes a link back to some website offering cheaply-made, inferior boots or gear.

Delete…delete…delete… those kinds of comments are gone. Always. That is what “comments will be deleted … without exception” means.

Here is a recent example of the source of one of those types of comments — and how I can tell where the commenter came from:

I will not be a party to cross-promotion of junk.

Life is short: think before you act, and act responsibly.