Blog

An earnest New Year's Eve resolution evolved into the chronicles of a 26-year-old locavore. The blogging locavore, Ashley C. Haywood, has been posting anecdotes and recipes and attaching letter grades about her attempts at eating locally harvested food daily on her Wordpress blog,  Haywood Eats Hagerstown. At 26, Haywood is the youngest member of the Hagerstown City Council. She runs Dig In, Hagerstown, the city's community garden program, and is a regular at the city farmers' market.

I recently received an e-mail containing the reposting of a blog written by Rabbi Steven Pruzansky, the spiritual leader of Congregation B'nai Yeshurun in Teaneck, N.J., and a well-known conservative blogger. The rabbi's comments from his blog (several of which I will quote in this column) are both enlightening and, in the end, alarming. Pruzansky writes: “The most charitable way of explaining the election results of 2012 is that Americans voted for the status quo - for the incumbent president and for a divided Congress.

WASHINGTON COUNTY - You won't be hearing Washington County Commissioners President Gregory I. Snook plug his favorite sports team or rant about this year's Emmy nominations on Washington County's new blog. No personal cheers or jeers allowed. What you will find are highlights of County Commissioners meetings, county news and interviews with county officials. The e-George blog for podcasts is an attempt to get county information out in a quick and interesting manner, Public Information Officer Norman Bassett said Thursday.

MIDDLETOWN, Md. (AP) -- A man who killed his wife, their three young children and himself in their northwest Maryland home had a hard time adjusting to his new manager's job for a railroad and it was causing him stress, according a blog entry his wife posted last month. The children's grandfather discovered the murder-suicide Saturday when he went to check on the family at their Middletown home, authorities said. Francis Billotti Wood, 33, and her children suffered "traumatic cuts" and each had at least one wound from a .25-caliber handgun, Frederick County Sheriff Charles Jenkins said.

Readers who have had questions about why we make some of the decisions we make here at The Herald-Mail only have had a couple of avenues available to them in the past. One option was to pick up the phone and ask the city editor, executive editor or whomever else you needed to speak with to make your opinion known. Writing a letter to the editor that would run on our opinion pages was another option. Another option was to just do nothing. Thanks to the ever-expanding Internet and the resources available on our Web site, there now is a new option.

Last Wednesday, I wrote about a new feature launched recently by The Herald-Mail called Hagerstown blogs. If you missed that column, "blog" is short for Web log, as in the World Wide Web. I first read about blogs as something teens were doing as a kind of an online diary that their friends could read to find out what was going on in their lives, what new CDs they'd purchased and so forth. What I didn't realize was that blogs have become political tools as well. Blogs probably affected the last presidential election when bloggers, as they're called, successfully demanded that the mainstream media look at the claims put forth against John Kerry by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.

I was invited to a Webinar the other day. I thought it had something to do with a home appliance. That's Cuisinart, as it turns out. A Webinar, in fact, is a seminar on the Web, thus a Webinar. At a Webinar, parties at different Web sites can communicate with one another like a conference call on the phone, only it's done over the Internet. I got to thinking that we're flinging a lot of Internet-generated words around The Herald-Mail newsroom lately. These words probably are not in the dictionary yet, but they will be. Here are a few more: · Blog - I thought that was something you might have to call a plumber about.

SHEPHERDSTOWN, W.Va. - Halli Casser-Jayne is a woman who likes to share her opinion. When the 2008 presidental election was in full swing in 2007, Casser-Jayne wanted an outlet to give her two cents. So she did what any other politically minded individual would do - she started a blog. "I understood that this was a ground-breaking election, not just over Obama, but where this country was," the Shepherdstown resident said during a telephone interview. While spending a year sharing her insights on politics with the blogosphere, Casser-Jayne discovered she struck a nerve.

Two weeks ago, I wrote in my blog that Boonsboro had become my favorite high school band because it played the Notre Dame fight song. At Friday night's playoff game at Boonsboro, with Allegany in town, there was something missing ... something loud missing. It was a playoff game, and it should have had what it was missing - the feel of a playoff game. Also among the missing was the Boonsboro band. I was told the band director had a previous personal engagement. Because he was unable to be at the event, that meant the band could not be there to perform.

Taylor Hicks is no longer on "American Idol," but he still provides plenty of opportunities for his fan base, collectively dubbed the Soul Patrol, to keep up with him. Hicks, 30, keeps a blog at his Web site, www.taylorhicks.com, and has informal videos of his life behind the scenes posted at www.youtube.com/taylorhicksmusic. While Williamsport resident Geraldine Andrews said she hadn't seen Hicks' blog entries or YouTube videos, she said she checks the news at his Web site regularly.

I recently received an e-mail containing the reposting of a blog written by Rabbi Steven Pruzansky, the spiritual leader of Congregation B'nai Yeshurun in Teaneck, N.J., and a well-known conservative blogger. The rabbi's comments from his blog (several of which I will quote in this column) are both enlightening and, in the end, alarming. Pruzansky writes: “The most charitable way of explaining the election results of 2012 is that Americans voted for the status quo - for the incumbent president and for a divided Congress.

The Continuing Education and Community Services Division at Hagerstown Community College is offering a one-day marketing workshop, “Blogging for Business,” Friday, Feb. 17, from 8:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. at HCC's Valley Mall Center. Taught by veteran blogger and managing editor for Business2Community.com , Renee DeCoskey, the workshop will teach participants how to set up, manage and moderate a business blog. Additional topics include blog design and optimization, building a customer base and other marketing objectives.

"I am doing quite well during my first full day of my most recent chemotherapy cycle. On a stomach scale of 1-10, with 1 being the mildly unsettling feeling you have when you lean back too far in your chair and at the last minute you regain your balance and 10 representing the extreme uneasiness you feel after riding the "Widow-maker" at the County Fair and celebrating with a big bowl of month-old macaroni salad which has been stored outside, with...

An earnest New Year's Eve resolution evolved into the chronicles of a 26-year-old locavore. The blogging locavore, Ashley C. Haywood, has been posting anecdotes and recipes and attaching letter grades about her attempts at eating locally harvested food daily on her Wordpress blog,  Haywood Eats Hagerstown. At 26, Haywood is the youngest member of the Hagerstown City Council. She runs Dig In, Hagerstown, the city's community garden program, and is a regular at the city farmers' market.

MIDDLETOWN, Md. (AP) -- A man who killed his wife, their three young children and himself in their northwest Maryland home had a hard time adjusting to his new manager's job for a railroad and it was causing him stress, according a blog entry his wife posted last month. The children's grandfather discovered the murder-suicide Saturday when he went to check on the family at their Middletown home, authorities said. Francis Billotti Wood, 33, and her children suffered "traumatic cuts" and each had at least one wound from a .25-caliber handgun, Frederick County Sheriff Charles Jenkins said.

SHEPHERDSTOWN, W.Va. - Halli Casser-Jayne is a woman who likes to share her opinion. When the 2008 presidental election was in full swing in 2007, Casser-Jayne wanted an outlet to give her two cents. So she did what any other politically minded individual would do - she started a blog. "I understood that this was a ground-breaking election, not just over Obama, but where this country was," the Shepherdstown resident said during a telephone interview. While spending a year sharing her insights on politics with the blogosphere, Casser-Jayne discovered she struck a nerve.

Robert Keller, 16, is a junior at North Hagerstown High School. Read his latest entry about this NFL season.

Feel the spirit Spirit of America Over Martinsburg Air Show flys in with 11 aerial acts and static plane displays Saturday and Sunday at Eastern West Virginia Regional Airport south of Martinsburg, W.Va. Gates open at 10 a.m. each day. Bring on the bands Martinsburg Band Spectacular has more than a dozen bands perform beginning at 3 p.m. Saturday at Martinsburg High Coburn Field, Martinsburg, W.Va. Martinsburg High School Bulldog Band performing "Rent" and Shepherd University Marching Rams performing "The Rhythm is Gonna Get You. " Turn on the boob tube The fall TV season kicks into gear with several popular shows returning in the upcoming week.

Since I don't have any major issues that I want to write about this week, I'll just give some random thoughts on several different issues instead. · Right now, the leader in the clubhouse for the award of "Most Screwed-up Attempt to Try to Do Something We Thought Was Going to Be Good" has to go to those who were responsible for the strip searches performed Aug. 12 on nine employees at the Maryland Correctional Training Center. Gary D. Maynard, secretary of the Maryland Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services, said in a letter to the editor in the Aug. 27 Herald-Mail that while the strip searches were well-intended, "The hastily organized implementation of these procedures caused stress and embarrassment to some very fine employees.

If you've done even one search on the Internet, you've probably come across what is called a "blog. " The term is a short version of "Weblog. " Most early blogs were online diaries in which people chronicled the events of their daily lives, sometimes adding pictures and video. But blogs have evolved and many who write them now are professionals who share information about what they're doing - and why. For those in the newspaper business, writing a blog is a chance to pass along things that couldn't be included in a regular news story, or a chance to share tidbits that aren't relevant to the subject being covered.