I don't think we posted this back in August when it was taken. Here's Caty and Hannah examining a toy together. 

Of blogs and browsers

Learned a little more about the blog today, and browser compatibility.

I've been a fan of Mozilla and later Firefox for awhile now, but usually if a site will work well in only one browser, it will work in Internet Explorer. Consequently, I didn't realize until today that our sidebar wasn't loading properly in IE, when I happened to be on a friend's computer and saw it that way for the first time.

I thought something was wrong with the template, but got the same result with each one. Everything looked fine in Firefox and Mozilla, but messed up in IE.

I finally figured out it is because under our old template (which had a wider message area) there was room for the photographs as we laid them out using tables. Those same tables are wider than the message area in the newer templates, though, and that messes up the display in IE.

As it happens, those tables were designed to hold the photos that got lost when the computer crashed anyway, so I will probably just take those messages out altogether and repost the pictures later using newer software that is designed to ease the posting of photos to blogs.

Anyway, I thought it might be useful to those of you who view the site in a browser to know what's going on. If you're one of the 94% of computer users who use Internet Explorer, your viewing experience has been less than ideal since, probably, June. I have now fixed it so that IE views the site as well as Mozilla or Firefox--or, at least, I've fixed the main page and a couple of archives. For the rest of the archives, it's just too much work right now. I'll try to fix them as I have time, but in the meantime perhaps you'll understand why the formatting is not perfect.

And I apologize if you get this more than once--I may have inadvertently let it get out in e-mail earlier than it should have.

By the way, I would encourage you to try out Firefox and/or Mozilla. Both are free, both outperform IE (in my opinion), and both are more secure than IE (in my opinion). You don't have to uninstall IE (you can't!), and you can choose which one to have as your default browser, even if you install all three.

A little bit of news about Hannah. We took her for what we thought was going to be just an evaluation at the UT Speech and Hearing Center today, and she wound up getting fitted for a special "hearing aid"! It's not the kind of hearing aid you and I might think about--you know, amplifiers. This is an FM sender/receiver combination. The hearing aid has the receiver, and mom and I will have the sender/microphone, so that she hears us without being confused by the background noise.

More about this later. But we're encouraged!

By the way, if you haven't noticed directly on the blog, there are a couple of things you might find useful.

1. We have the newsfeed working. If you're getting this via email, you may want to investigate RSS software and subscribe that way--but only if you get several other newsletters that way also. You can look on the blog site for an earlier post about what's involved, and an even earlier one.
2. We have enabled comments on the blog as well. So if you would like to have a conversation with us and with other readers, you are welcome to do so. Just click on the "X Comments" (where X is the number of comments posted) at the bottom to read the existing ones and find a link you can click to add your own.

Again, thank you for your interest in our family, and especially in Hannah.

Haven't had a chance to update for awhile. Does this sound familiar? :) It probably won't change for awhile, but we'll update when we can. We're really grateful for your interest.

Here are several bits of news since the last real news post about Hannah:

• Hannah has had another swallow study. If you don't know about these, the first one kicked off the entire sequence of events connected with her g-tube and digestive challenges. The first one, done January 2004, showed she was aspirating most of what went in her mouth. We had hoped the followup in September would show improvement. Instead, it actually looked worse. Almost everything that went into her mouth went in her lungs. So she will continue on the g-tube indefinitely.
• She's been put on several different high-dollar drugs. After the swallow study, she developed respiratory problems that almost went into pneumonia. Tests showed the presence of pseudomonus, a bug typical of children with cystic fibrosis. She doesn't have CF, but she has a lot of the pulmonary issues that CF kids have. Lots of snot, for instance. That makes a fertile environment for pseudomonus to grow, which irritates the lungs, which causes more snot, which gets a vicious cycle going. They put her on TOBI, an inhaled antibiotic that cost nearly $3,000 for a month's supply. Each application (two a day) took about 15 minutes, and she hated every minute of it. Next, they've put her on colistin, an antibiotic originally intended for intramuscular injection, but that they're having us put in her nebulizer for inhaling. Also nearly $3,000 for the three weeks she is supposed to be on it, also twice a day, but it only takes about five minutes to give (it smells like sour cream, too, which is odd).
• I think she's gotten her own wheelchair since we last posted. Well, I know she has gotten her own wheelchair, it's just the timing I'm not sure about. It has made a huge difference in being able to take care of her and take her places, because it has a head rest and padding and support mechanisms that hold her in the perfect way for her to be able to sit up and look around. She experiences more of the world because of it, and that is good for her.
• Hannah has been evaluated by ETTAC. That stands for East Tennessee Technology Access Center. They do a lot of things, but the practical and immediate thing is that they modify toys so that by pressing a switch, the toy will do what it is designed to do when a non-challenged child plays with it. It's not just nice for Hannah. It helps her to learn cause-effect relationships ("when I press this, it does that"), which is an important part of learning. The evaluation itself gave us a lot of hope, because this trained observer noted that when you asked things like, "Where's the ball?" Hannah looked at the ball, even though she couldn't pick it up. They also saw that she pressed the button on some of their test toys--not at random, either, but on purpose. It's a very important milestone. And, she pressed buttons on a gadget that can be recorded with words that will thus, in essence, speak for her. The observer believes that Hannah used the machine to ask for a hug, for instance. I can't tell you how much that means to us, and they are going to be working with us to get such a machine for Hannah.
• Hannah is going to get evaluated as a candidate for a machine to help her hearing. I'm not completely sure what it is, but her Ear, Nose, and Throat specialist thinks she might benefit from it (it's not just a hearing aid, but that's all I know right now), and she will get evaluated at UT Hearing and Speech on Nov. 22.
  

I'll post more later. Let's just say that, for the most part, we have had a lot of good news, although the challenges certainly continue.

Believe it or not, we've already decided on a format. Those of you who get the Blog in email may want to get a newsreader, add our feed to it, and then unsubscribe from the email version.

You can get the feed details by clicking on the "XML" logo that should now appear over on the right-hand side of the page. If you have any trouble seeing it, the feed address is:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/KinglyNews

It matters, by the way, that the K and the N are capitalized.

By going with Feedburner.com, we are able to have versions that work with older RSS-only newsreaders as well as newer ones that are either Atom-only or both.

Thanks!

We're going to experiment with a publishing innovation to see if it will be preferable to some of our friends who like to keep up with what is happening with us. Right now, you see our new posts in one of two ways:

1. Going to the Blog and reading it when you think to check, in which case there may or may not be any new information.
2. Getting a copy of the latest post in email. Those of you who have followed us for awhile know that we've had ongoing trouble getting the email tie-in to work properly, i.e., sometimes it wouldn't send a copy of the post, and sometimes it would send the latest post and the next-to-latest post that you had already seen. Annoying. But at least you got to see it as soon as it was posted.

An innovation in Web publishing involves news feeds. Some are tied to Web sites, and some are tied to Blogs, but they all use a format called XML and they all can be read by newsreaders. It is a technology that is new enough to lead to format wars (remember Betamax vs. VHS? DVD+RW vs DVD-RW?), so which format we should use is not clear yet. It also takes either a separate reader (there are a lot of free ones out there) or an email program that is feed-enabled (either RSS, the older format, or Atom, the newer-but-open-source format that is likely to take over, the way VHS did and the way the PC platform did (not because they were better necessarily, but because the standards were allowed to develop)).

We are going to try to add the XML format to our site. If you know what that means, great. If you don't, you'll learn along the way (it is, after all, new). It doesn't involve any extra work for us, but it probably will require us to decide on a format at some point, or else work with a service that outputs our Blog in both formats. We'll keep you posted. Just watch for the addition of a button that will tell you the Web address of the newsfeed. With that address, you can add our feed to your newsreader account. Since every newsreader does this differently, I won't even try to tell you how to do it. But we'll list some links to some of the free readers after we've learned a little more about it ourselves.

It's worth mentioning that the major advantage of the newsreader is that it will check for new content on several sites all at once. If you were only going to use it for our Blog, it probably wouldn't be worthwhile. But more and more online newsletters are going to the format, since it's totally opt in and it isn't subject to Spam at all. And more and more Web sites are going to the format, since it gives you instant updates. So it's likely that you will find several of your favorite Web sites and email newsletters are available in the format, which will make it all worthwhile.