The Wilful Sunflower

Would you say I'm introspective? Ganns certainly thinks so... he's awarded me the title of "Most Introspective Blog" in the Superblessed Christian Blog Awards 2003. Personally, I think he has me pegged but good :)

Apparently, I was also the people's choice (yes, that's all of you out there) for Most Enjoyable Female Christian Blog, but the award deservedly went to Sue instead. Sue is on my blogroll at the left, which just shows what exquisite taste I have in blogs. (Ganns is on my blogroll too, by the way ;))

This is a good time to thank all who have given me technical help with this blog. When I moved to MovableType, this blogging software I'm currently using, several people were instrumental in helping me to set up the blog and tweak all the design/tech problems. In no particular order, they are:

• Bob
  My sole tech support, Bob is the one I call whenever something goes wrong. "Bob? I keep getting some kind of MySQL error when I try to post. What is a MySQL? Never mind, I don't want to know, just — heeeeeellp!" He set this blog up for me and helped me to salvage things after the Big Server Meltdown back in July. Bob's the best :) In fact, yesterday I just emailed him a whole list of things I need his help with in connection to the blog. Oooh boy.

• Jonathan
  Jonathan is my CSS guru. He helped — no, he just out-and-out MADE — the CSS cross-browser compatible. To all the technologically-challenged people such as I, this just means the blog is supposed to look the same no matter what computer you view it on and what browser you're viewing it with ;) He had lots (lots lots lots) of patience with me when it came to tweaking the design — I'm fussy, you see! "Jonathan, the left line is slightly lower than the right line... can they be aligned?"

• Mac
  I don't know how many times I emailed Mac asking him, "How do I do this? And how do I do that?" He gave me lots of advice and taught me which plugins to use and everything. Of course, because I'm slow, I haven't installed ANY of those plugins yet. Look out for real smilies in my posts someday... someday... *grin*

• MeanDean
  When I was tearing my hair out over the blog's template misbehaving in Mozilla, MeanDean (who's not so mean after all — shh! Don't tell anyone!) gave me the key to the secret door. Never underestimate a programmer's sharp eyes.

• Chris
  I emailed Chris out of the blue, asking how he got that "recent comments" thing in his sidebar. It was probably the first time he'd even heard of me; unlike the others I've mentioned here, we had not been reading each other's blogs or interacting or exchanged emails before or anything like that. Yet he willingly helped me, giving me the tags I needed to get the effect I wanted.

• K3
  When I was wrestling with my site design, K3 actually sent me a copy of his template so I could take a look at it and figure out how it all worked. But then Jonathan had a heart attack at the thought of using tables so I asked him to take over, and, as I said, he made everything work with CSS ;)

• Kevin
  Kevin helped me as much as he could. I appreciated very much his willingness to help...

And there you have it... these are the people who should receive awards. Everywhere I turned, I was met with so much kindness and willingness to help. It was really like that Bible verse, "Ask and you shall receive", you know? I felt so bad having to keep on bothering people (especially Bob and Jonathan), asking them for help, but they gave — and continue to give — of their time & energies with no thought of reward. Thanks so much, you guys. Everybody keeps on talking about how we're "building community" in the BlogWorld — well, it's people like you who really make me feel like I'm part of a community.