Hmm. Accomplishments for Saturday, the first day of October? Well, I got out of bed and watched the Virginia Tech football game. Eventually, the drugs made me dizzy/sleepy so there were two different naps.

Then I fiddled about with the Gettysburg lesson plan. I think I’ve nearly convinced myself that the original idea I had was a bad one. The thing is I have a lot of raw material, so I really need to do something with this text. It would be a shame to scrap it when I’ve gathered lots of good stuff. Mostly they are great Web sites that include drafts and other historical information. There’s also an iMovie site that has a student-produced movie of Civil War photos with the class reading the Gettysburg Address as the narration. Perhaps the oddest resource is from ourdocuments.gov. For some unknown reason, they have included a Flash version of the a draft of the Address. The resource allows you to move the piece of paper around so that you can see different parts of it on screen. It’s beyond me why they’ve done this. It’s more frustrating than it is useful. If you really want to see the original drafts and use them in class, I strongly urge you to use the Library of Congress pages, which show the entire page of the draft on screen. Much easier to use.

Beyond that, my only other accomplishment was adding a little calendar to my blog template. There’s some woman trying to sell something to add calendars. I wasn’t impressed with her work. First her page loads strangely with Google Ads flashing about. Second that blog page of hers is more then a year old. That’s dead for us Blogshares players, so I’m skeptical of the tool. Instead, I found a free javascript that does the job. I tweaked it slightly because I wanted the calendar on ever page, but I’m no longer sure that that was a good idea. Maybe it should only show up on archives. I’m figuring that I’ll look at it this way for a while, and then change it if I decide it functions too strangely. The problem on the homepage is that it builds a calendar for the entries on the page, starting from the bottom up. So today, for instance, I’m posting an October entry, but the little calendar in the right navigation bar will be for September—and not all of September, just from the entries on this page. The script works perfectly for archive pages, which is what it was designed to do. I just wanted one on the homepage, but I’m realizing the folly of that desire.