9/30: 1. Early in the morning

Well, I'm up and I feel much better. I always get a bad headache when I don't get enough sleep and for the last few days I've been staying up too late and getting up too early. (I don't mean to get up early but the ol' spoon chime in the cereal bowl at 8.30 am is a killer.) So the lack of sleep caught up to me and resulted in a wasted ..... well, half day...since I was able to get in some reading.

Today I'll be going to the Army Transport Museum at Fort Eustis. I've been there several times before and taken photographs of the same things I'm going to take photos of today - rocket pack, etc., but those photos didn't turn out very well so I'm going to try again today and make sure I get good ones. I have a digital camera and can see the photo after I take it, but it's on such a tiny screen it's still hard to tell if its any good.

Anyway, I'm planning on writing a travel article for the November issue on the sci fi related things here in Hampton Roads. Of course this is the home of NASA...there's an Air Power Park full of planes...at the Transport Museum is the jetpack they experimented with in the 50s (and which James Bond used in ....Thunderball, was it?)..other stuff too.

I'm also redesigning the front page of The Thunder Child. Since it's inception my readers have seen just a magazine "cover" which they have to click on to get to the Table of Contents. But I've been reading that this is a bad thing to do so now I'm going to change it. The front page will still be an introductory page, but it'll have lots of text with lots of key words, so this will assist, I hope, in bumping up my rankings in search engines. My stuff is in the engines, but rarely is found on the top page (although these days I think it's people who actually pay who get their sites put at the top of search results, regardless of what their site is about..).

I will be keeping the cover as a thumbnail which interested people can click on to see the life size version, but I do think that this is better. So many people come to the first page of a site and if they don't see something that catches their eye they leave without bothering to go to the rest of the site. Important to get them 'in the door' and wandering around in all the good stuff.