Welcome to the new site of Stand Up and Speak Out. My former site, www.standupandspeakout.blogspot.com, will remain as is for a few days. However, after that, I will then close the comments and direct visitors to this site.

Feedback is greatly appreciated!

Edit- The blog is temporarily back to its old design while I work out the bugs.

As you probably noticed, I’ve changed my blog design to three columns with the help of this template from Thur’s Templates. Needless to say, it took a lot of modifications.

Another new feature is the recent comments section on the left side. For a long time, I’ve been looking for a way to do this with Haloscan comments, after seeing it on some of the other blogs. But, I discovered that if you take the RSS feed for haloscan:

“http://www.haloscan.com/members/rss.php?user=yourusernamehere” (replace “yourusernamehere”),

plug that into a RSS feed viewer (I used RSS to Javascript), and plug the code into your blog, you get a section like the one I have. (You could probably do the same thing with blog posts, only they are xml.) If you do use the directions here to make your own “Recent Comments”, please make a link back to this post.

So, hopefully, the new design will be easier to use and more interactive. I’ve already noticed that the middle section loads last, which could be a problem. Please tell me what you think and make sure to tell me if anything goes wrong.

For Bloggers:

The Truth Laid Bear ecosystem has been updated. That would explain the recent changes in ranking on mine and other blogs…

Since a lot of things have been happening on my blog and in general this week, I have decided to just write about it all in one post.

1. Stand up and Speak Out has some new features such as the side menu, (which took forever to manipulate to work in my blog!)

2. My blog used to be a “large mammal” on the TTLB ecosystem, but since I knew I was getting a lot less visitors and links than some of the people below me, I knew something was wrong. Apparently, I was right. The next day I was a “rodent” and then a “marsupial”.

3. However, things are looking up because now I have been accepted as a member of the Alliance of Free bloggers. They are pretty funny, even if I don’t agree with everything that everyone says in the Alliance. (For those in Sacramento, they kind of remind me of Armstrong and Getty.)

4. I recently went to a college fair and I am considering Stanford as my first choice. I have visited Stanford and I thought that the campus and the atmosphere was awesome. Any other opinions on Stanford and colleges in general?

I finally got Haloscan comments! I have been trying everything I could think of for ages and nothing was working. I suspect that the problem was either that I had altered my blog template, or that I, in one of my unique moments of stupidity, messed up the system by deleting the post that Haloscan puts on your blog before it was time to do so. Either way, I am glad that the frustration has ended.

I have added a a poll to Stand Up and Speak Out. This poll is on your opinion of Proposition 73, which I thought would be an interesting topic. So, please share your opinion and vote!

You’ve probably already noticed this by now, but Stand Up and Speak Out has a new design/layout. However, because I am only a beginner at html, there might be some mistakes. If you notice anything wrong or just have suggestions, please email me or leave a comment.