Last Night's Fun

Revelers.

I have to pay homage to several bloggers, because their terrific sites have helped me tweak this blog. There's Terrierman, of course, with his smart posts and rabbit-hole of a sidebar. [How did I wind up playing this rice game?]

I took a page from Terrierman --- and LibraryThing --- and added my own virtual bookshelf in the sidebar. The titles change, but you might spot Last Night's Fun, a classic by the Belfast poet [and musician] Ciaran Carson. [Insert obligatory "keeping it reel" joke here.] It's a fave. A glass of Guinness, please! I'll be adding more dog books and and sheep books and organizing everything by subject eventually.

Thanks also to Carol of Frogdog Blog, Absolut Bullmarket and French Bulldog Z, a trio of sites sharing great design and a wealth of information: they raise the standard for breed web pages and have given me all sorts of ideas for improving this blog.

And a big yay to a couple of very haimish bloggers: BirdChick and Julie Zickefoose. Always something interesting going on with those two.

Dilemma: I thought I'd add Snap Shots [the cool web preview add-on] to this site, but it wasn't as helpful as I thought it would be. [You can see Snap Shots in action at Terrierman's Daily Dose.] I gave Snap Shots a test spin and found that the previews didn't always capture the link in question, and if I've gone to the trouble to actually add a link, then I by God expect that link to be shown in the preview. There's some online debate as to whether Snap Shots is the new best thing or a horribly distracting annoyance that makes pages take forever to load. I love it for the books in the sidebar, and wish it were more accurate with everything else.

Note the Local Harvest link: more ag links on the way.

Also in the sidebar, you'll find some of the best sheepdog trial videos on the web, thanks to Denise Wall and StilHope. When you click on a video, your selection will play at the top of the page. The current videos were filmed at the 2007 Edgeworth Sheepdog Trial, a beautiful big course with a 600 yard outrun. Check out Bev Lambert and Pippa: Pippa had the winning run both days. She's eleven. Eleven.