About

About me: See http://stepno.com
About this blog: The subhead pretty much says it all. Details below, though.
About the ads: For now, this site is hosted by the free wordpress.com service in exchange for my letting WordPress post ads at the bottom of some pages. As a logged-in user, I don’t even see the ads, so I certainly do not endorse any of the products or services that appear there. If you see any ads that you find offensive, please let me know by submitting a comment at the bottom of my most recent blog post.

About the picture at the top: It changes with the seasons, or more often. The heading picture is one of the things I can customize in this free WordPress theme, called Coraline, an August 2010 replacement for the simpler “Cutline” that I started with, and liked a lot. Alas, it is no longer available on free WordPress blogs. I’m not as happy with the blockish black menu, but Coraline allows a lot more flexibility, which I may experiment with as time permits.

Picky, picky. It’s still free hosting, a great public service and terrific software. Anyhow, back to the pictures…

My first image was a freight train, possibly as a visual pun about linkage or information overload or something. But mostly because it was my own — a shot I took of a train crossing the New River here in Radford, Va. — and it fit the dimensions of the page header.

When we had record snowfall in the 2009-2010 winter, I posted a  horizontal format picture of the foot of snow on my porch railing. When the snow melted in time for Radford University’s Charter Day celebration, I greeted spring with a slice of the balloon-releasing photo that also appeared in the blog.

I also brought along the camera to graduation, and took one of my all-time favorite photos — the centennial graduating class facing a headwind, but smiling. I put it on the School of Communication homepage and decided not to put it at the top of my personal blog. But here’s a copy:

graduation 2010

Next, for early summertime, I saw my cousin Sarah’s Facebook shot of herself in some (Vermont?) highland meadow, which inspired me to share a shot from my home-office window, one floor up from that previously snowy deck… which began a theme of shooting pictures of that view at different times of the year, and when I’m in different moods.

Late July 2010 hot summer sunset.

Winter 2013 was reluctant to let go, and inspired this spring snowfall picture, followed by one of the cherry blossoms outside the Radford student center. (They had one last shock of snow and a few unseasonably cold days before temperatures rose into the seventies a few days later.)

More about this blog: I started this blog in 2009 as one of three “demo” WordPress blogs (stepno, bstepno, rstepno) for class demonstrations of templates and widgets, then made it my main blog.

Topics here include classes I teach at Radford University, media history, online journalism and Web design.

I continue to post  items  about the newspaper industry and newspaper journalism at http://aejmc.net/news (where I have a co-editor) and more personal, less-academic or less-journalistic items at http://boblog.blogspot.com

For most things that interest me, I just post bookmarks at http://delicious.com/bstepno or tweet at http://twitter.com/bobstep; I use RSS feeds to try to connect this messiness at http://stepno.com and in the blog sidebars.

(The Twitter items also echo on Facebook, giving some friends the impression that I’m on Facebook more than I am.)

With the demise of the radio.weblogs.com hosting that I’d used for most of a decade, I gave this site the name of my old blog. Previous pages archived at http://stepno.com/oldblog. As long as it is my main blog, you can get there with the alias address http://stepno.com/blog

If any of these blog hosts disappear, I’m very findable through my personal home page is http://stepno.com

See also: