Category: meta

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meta

More on Journals

My wife has been going through old emails etc in an effort to construct her journal for the past few years. As she has been doing that, I have been going through old blog posts and seeing a little bit of my history for the last two years. The process has given me new perspective on the question of the intersection of blogs and journals.

Because of her efforts I recognize that journals have as much variety about them as I have long known that blogs have. My current position is that I will be blogging without regard to how it might serve as a journal. I can always go through later and decide about including any of my posts in a separate journal.

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meta

7 Minute Lull

Most people have heard of the 7 minute lull. It is the idea that conversations tend to have a lull in them at regular intervals (theoretically 7 minutes). I have come to the conclusion that blogging has a similar phenomenon. This is based not only on my own blogging, but the blogging of many other bloggers I have read over the years. Everybody takes breaks from posting occasionally.

After 12 days of posting every day I discovered that I had not posted for two days in a row. That doesn’t worry me, but it got me thinking about the phenomenon. I have ready many times about the large number of blogs that get started and then die in their infancy. This is why. Many people, once they hit that first lull, never get back to blogging. The experiment ends and their voice goes silent.

I will not argue that everyone should get past that first lull, I know that blogging does not suit all people, but it is interesting to see the pattern. I suspect that most blogs that die do so on the first lull. Put another way, most blogs that survive the first lull will survive long term.

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meta

Blog, Journal, or Both

I am not new to blogging, but in some ways I am blogging from a new angle. On previous blogs I was posting enough to maintain three blogs and often posted multiple times each day. Since I have started this blog, I have managed to post every day so far. Last night I began to ask myself, “What do I want for this blog? Do I want to commit to posting every day?”

I like posting every day, and I hope to continue that, but I’m not sure how strong the commitment is at this point.

For me, there are a variety of purposes that a blog can serve. I have seen them used as a means of keeping in touch with distant friends and relatives. I have seen them used as journals as much as any locked diary. I have seen them used as a creative outlet to practice writing. I have seen them used as an outlet to push an ideological agenda. I have seen them used as a forum for publishing ideas and getting feedback from professional colleagues. The question I am asking myself is, what purpose do I want this blog to fill?

I know I want it as a way of communicating my thoughts and perspectives so that other people can see what I think and what I think about. I have a desire to keep a consistent journal, but do I want it in this blog, a private blog, or something entirely unlike a blog? I don’t know quite yet. It is easy to forget at first (before anyone discovers your blog) that information in blogs is generally available to the public. That is not really suitable for some types of journals. I guess my answer would be easier if I was sure about what type of journal I want to keep.

Why air this pointless monologue on the front page? Because, what little I am sure of in my blogging intentions, this fits. It is what I am thinking and I have no reason to keep it private, even if my public here can be counted on my thumbs – and even if my public were to grow in the future.

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meta technology

Linking to Newspapers

For today’s edition I thought I would share a tool I found back with my previous blogs. It is most useful for those who like to blog their reactions to news items. I used to link to New York Times articles and that would become a problem once those articles left the one week timeframe and were no longer accessible for free. I was not the first to see this problem because someone else made a tool which generates special links to articles in the New York Times which are freely accessible in perpetuity. (They do this with the permission of the people at the New York Times so there is no question regarding the legality of the tool or the practice.)

I don’t know how many other major newspapers pose this challenge for news bloggers nor if any of them also have such tools, but this is a great tool for anyone who does that kind of blogging and likes nytimes.com as a news source.

I was reminded of this tool when I linked to an NPR story yesterday. I don’t know how much I will need it since before I was often commenting on Op/Ed pieces which are mostly only Times Select (paid service) now. Since I don’t pay for that access I may not use the tool much, but hopefully it can be useful for other people.

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meta

Back on the Scene

It’s good to be back in the blogging scene. That may sound strange for a first post, but this is my fifth blog. The first two were little more than experiements. I then began publishing three more – representing different aspects of my life. That was back when I was an unabashed technophile.

Things have changed since I was last blogging. I no longer thrill when I am surfing the web and trying new gadgets. I have settled down to a point where I am finding much more of my joy in more pedestrian pursuits such as gardening, dutch oven cooking, and camping with my family.

None of that is reason enough to dump my previous blogs. They were good. I had more readers than I would have expected. Occationally there were some very stimulating conversations about the topics of interest to me. All of that I would have liked to keep, but my hosting provider changed policies and I was no longer able to get hosting to satisfy me for my domain. My domain is now parked, and I have not yet decided if I will keep it, or give it up.

I have gone for months wishing that I could share some of my new thoughts on a blog, but I did not want to return to blogger after seeing how nice some of the other blogging platforms are. I had moved on to WordPress, b2Evolution, and even Drupal. All of them offered options more advanced than blogger – and I am something of a control freak when it comes to my online persona. Then today I learned about the new Blogger beta and discovered that the folks at Google had helped Blogger to narrow the gap between themselves and other blogging software. Having given up on getting my own site up and running anytime soon, it sounded like just what I was looking for. Free, better than before, and in line with my less demanding requirements for a blog.

So here I am, back on the scene. While my outlook on technology has morphed somewhat, I hope to explore how technology can be really useful in our lives (especially mine) and also to highlight where the technologies of yesterday may actually be superior to their modern counterparts. Honestly I don’t think that the less advanced technology will prove superior very often, but I do think that some less modern perspectives could prove enlightening in the world of the Information Age.

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life meta technology

Spammed Out

The timing could not have been better. I have not been posting anything for months on my site. I have quit school and started working so I am approaching life and the subjects that I used to write about from a new angle and I have yet to find my new voice.Despite the good timing it is still aggravating to have to pull my blog down because I was getting deluged with spam and causing problems for my host. I think that part of my problem was the software that I was using to power my blog. I have heard the complaint many times asking why spammers would attack individuals and educational institutions etc. The answer is “just because they can.” I’m sick of it and I will be working on finding/making a blogging tool that is less vulnerable to spam. This is not because I don’t trust that there is good software out there, but also because I think the root way to really fight spam is to attack it from as many different angles as possible. Unfortunately the only effective method of stopping spammers is to make it financially unprofitable for them. That should be the end goal.

For the time being I will be trying to find my own voice again by commenting on other people’s blogs. Eventually I will be back to running my own blog again, but in the mean time I will leave static pages of some of the latest entries in the blogs that I had to pull.

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meta technology

Moving

I have been looking for a long time to migrate to a new blogging platform. I thought WordPress looked promising, but it could not handle my multi-blog wishes (I am unwilling to install multiple copies of the software just to run multiple blogs). I finally discovered b2Evolution. Why did nobody ever tell me about this before. It springs from the same roots as WordPress, but it supports multiple blogs and multiple languages besides the skins, valid code, open source licensing and everything else that WordPress offers.The installation was a 6 minute installation, not as famous as the “famous 5 minute installation” from WordPress, but still very simple. The only trouble was that I am extremely picky about changing the look of my site, so I started by creating a new skin before I moved over to the new platform. I am now moved and these MovableType blogs will now be consigned to the archives. I will leave the static pages up so that there will be no broken links, but the only change I will make over here from now on will be to make sure that those static pages link back to the live b2E blogs.

My new feed is located here. It is RSS2 but if you go to my new site you can also find feeds to my posts or comments in earlier versions of RSS or Atom.

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life meta technology

WordPress(MU)

I have been hoping to move to WordPress as a show of my support for Open Source Software, and to keep myself free of the constraints of the free license for Movable Type. So far those constraints have not been a problem for my needs, but I would hate to move to another platform in a crunch so I am looking while it is anything but urgent.

Unfortunately my needs include having multiblog support because I am unwilling to run multiple sets of tables to manage my multiple blogs and I want some central control for all my blogging. This meant that I had to find and attempt to use WordPress MU. I finally got it installed, but for some reason it does not produce blogs, just entries in my tables. Well, actually it produced a blog at wp.php rather than index.php but for the non-admin blogs it produced table entries only.

I considered some other OSS platforms for my site blogs, but I decided that – at least for now – they are not what I want. I have finally concluded that I have spent too much time on this project and I would rather devote myself to another, more altruistic, project on another site where I will be combining the wordpress software with phpGedView for a platform which will support online genealogy collaboration

While I will be focusing on that project, I would welcome any suggestions as to how to implement an OSS platform for multiple blogs that I can easily customize to look just like my current site and be fully valid XHTML.

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life meta

Back on Track

I have been busy in my offline life and have not posted for a while, but I am back. I have been wanting to talk about the path, or series of events that have lead me to my current situation. It has been an interesting ride and worthy of reflection (as proven by the fact that I have so often reflected on what has brought me here already.)

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life meta

I’m Back

I have finally moved to Columbia Missouri to start my PhD and I am ready to get back to blogging. During this break I have had decided to change the focus of my blog just a little bit. Previously it was almost exclusively for political commentary, but now I would like to spend a little bit more of the space discussing other things like open source software etc.

I still expect to have plenty of political and social commentary, but not quite as exclusively as before.