Tuesday, February 3, 2009

The Search Continues

Well, my search for which blogger tool to use continues. It has been interesting. I started off with a little known program called VineType. It's made by a single programmer. It's free for non-profit use. (The programmer is a Christian, and he's sympathetic to non-profits.) I bought a license for commercial use of it. The app didn't really work out very well for me.

So, I'm currently experimenting with the free offerings of Blogger.com, which is owned and operated by gargantuan Google. Speaking of which, I found out tonight an interesting tidbit about their name. I'm a bit of a trivia buff when it comes to etymology. I'll have to tell you some time the origin of the expression "OK." Hint: It's not from a woman's name, so quit spelling it as "okay." Anyhow, back to Google's name origin.

Obviously, the word "goggles" refers to eye pieces, and "oogle" refers to looking something over real thoroughly. Not hard to see the combination there for naming a website that's made for looking stuff up. But now think about how very many websites Google has to index. A very big number, yes? Now, we're onto something little known and rather interesting.

According to a NOVA article on the PBS website, "A Googol is 10100, or 1 followed by 100 zeroes, and is the largest named number in the West." Who knew? Some power-Geek at NOVA, apparently.

The author went on to say that, "The Buddhists have an even more robust number, 10140, which they know as asankhyeya."

Since asankhyeya translated into English means "most terrible name for a website", I can see why the bright Geeks at Google didn't choose to try to infuse that big number name into their company moniker. (Who in the West could even say asankhyeya, let alone spell it?)

5 comments:

  1. Good luck on your blog tool search. I've used Blogger for a long time and have been pretty satisfied with it except for the template editing. It can be annoying and the templates that you can find to use with your blog (from 3rd party sources) can be good but it seems that many of their functions don't work correctly once attached with your blog.

    In any case, if you find a better tool let me know; I'm always on the look too.

    Lord Bless you!

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  2. CC: Thanks! What a coincidence. We used to live in Florissant, MO, and we worked for a non-profit (church organization headquarters) while we lived there. What a coincidence! Thanks for posting.

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  3. CC: We lived in Florissant from 1996 until 2002. We worked in Hazelwood at the United Pentecostal Church International office building. We left there to come pastor a church here in Clarksburg that needed a shepherd. What great memories came flooding back when we saw the word "Florissant" in your comment. :-)

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  4. CC: Regarding blogger tools, my friend Paul Pavolni, founder and owner of Voppa Design, uses the WordPress platform. You can check out his site at http://voppa.com/

    I really like his site, but I'm needing to look at free blogger resources, and WordPress charges for extras like having your blog on your own domain (from what I can tell). I like the Blogger.com offering so far, but I don't care for the Blogger.com "strip" across the top. I have not even checked yet to see if there is a way to hide that somewhere, or otherwise minimize its presence.

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  5. Update: I did find that it is doable to hide/delete the generic Blogger.com "strip" across the top, which I have now done.

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