I missed the opportunity to officially add my picture to the Second Annual Blue Beanie Day events on November 28, 2008. Blue Beanie Day is the idea of Doug Vos. He created the Designing With Web Standards group on Facebook and invented Blue Beanie Day in 2007. By wearing a blue beanie on that day you are showing your support for web standards and accessibility and acknowledging the work and influence of Jeffrey Zeldman towards this end.
I am a definite believer in the web standards doctrine, but last November I was hesitant to claim an association with a group I respected given the disheveled state of Porkopolis.org then. The new Porkopolis.org site design, v5.0, had been on line about two months by November of 2008, but it still had a few obvious coding difficulties that I was struggling with, and the planned blog section was only impressive on the pages of my Moleskin.
But mostly these procrastinations took a back seat to another difficulty I felt – a perceived lack of cyber social connectedness. This became apparent when I investigated the links to the 2008 Blue Beanie Day invitation on Zeldman’s blog. I needed to be a member of Facebook and Flickr to really join in, and I was neither. While a PAM score for any number of pigs and me is quite high, I have yet to develop much cyber-interconnectedness with any group or individuals outside my family and close friends of long, post-internet association.
Yesterday was National Pig Day. Porkopolis.org’s coding difficulties have been [fingers crossed] corrected. The Porkopolis blog is now free foraging. And new Facebook and Flickr accounts have been opened and associated with Porkopolis.org. So I have placed my Blue Beanie Day image here, and await Blue Beanie Day #3 in November 2009.
Best of all, my family and my friends of long standing continue to keep me around. They do this even when any number of my actions like obsessive Black Pig Dyke hunting and utterances akin to “ham is not a toy” repeatedly give them cause to think that it is time I be placed under the psychoanalytic pig wing of the nearest mental institution.
[the winged swine represent] the angelic spirits of all the pigs that were slaughtered and were building blocks of Cincinnati's prosperity. So they're up there paying one last tribute - singing the 'Hallelujah Chorus' - to all their [dead] brethren who flowed into the 