Category: Writing

I’ve read about the danger posed by bloggers to the interests and bottom lines of major corporations, and it is with that in mind that I must freely and happily retract something I recently posted.

On Tuesday, January 6, 2006 I wrote a post entitled Groundhog Year that suggested a product created through the hard work and dedication of the many workers and executives at a big corporate calendar company might be defective. In fact, I am the defective. I did not realize that the calendar was manufactured in Europe, where the week begins, sensibly enough, on the first day of the week – Monday. Wikipedia explains:

According to ISO 8601, the week begins on a Monday. This agrees with the term weekend for Saturday and Sunday. But this differs from the numerical weekday order used in medieval Latin churches, who numbered the first through sixth days of the week (Sunday through Friday). Similarly, weeks now exist in two varieties. The traditional Sunday-first system is used by some English speakers and much of Latin America, while most of continental Europe uses the ISO order. The ISO 8601 order has the potential for confusion with speakers of Church Latin, Portuguese, and Hebrew as in these languages the names for days from Sunday through Friday are numberings out of synchrony with this standard; “Sunday” is “first day,” “Monday” is “second day,” etc.

Not being a speaker of Church Latin, Portuguese or Hebrew, I can only blame my American upbringing and tired eyes since I saw the dates, but did not notice the days at the top of the columns, thus I thought the dates were for 2005.

I humbly and freely apologize for any unintentional damage I may have inadvertently caused the global calendar industry. I apologize for careers ruined, jobs lost, and any dips in stock prices that may have occurred as a result of the lack of editorial oversight at Coyote Mercury.

I know now that we bloggers must watch our words carefully and do our collective duty to police ourselves to help protect big defenseless corporations from the outrageous excesses and self-interested machinations of the little guy.

Perhaps posts that have the potential for confusion and combativeness ought not to be written on Tiw’s day.

In all honesty, it’s a great calendar of the ISO 8601 compliant Gregorian variety full of Ernest Shepard’s Winnie-the Pooh illustrations.

I’ve been blogging a little over two months now, and it seems a good time to stop and take stock of this new world that I’ve joined. One thing I love about the blogosphere is that it’s such a dynamic world. This is a world that is changing constantly, moving alongside the static internet and the offline world with its own rules, ideas, insights, opinion-makers and landscape. I feel like I’m part of a vast library that is being written as I type this. It’s a library in which the texts are all connected and alive like neurons in a brain. It’s also a library in which the small stories of people’s lives unfold alongside the big ones that make history, connecting and interacting in fascinating ways, either through posts or blogrolls. When I think about this, I feel lucky to be a part of it, though still a newcomer.

I also enjoy reading the daily posts on my favorite blogs. I love discovering the treasures and unknown musings of some fantastic writers and unknown thinkers, publishing their insights in this most perfect DIY medium. That do-it-yourself aspect is my favorite part. Anyone can publish and find an audience, albeit in most cases a small one. Filmmakers and musicians have been putting their work out independently for years, now writers can as well.

I love knowing that sometimes something I’ve written has moved a fellow blogger to comment or respond through email. That’s a great feeling. As is looking at the site stats and seeing regular readers, known only as familiar strings of IP address numbers, emerge in places where I don’t know anyone. For a writer, finding readers is a profound and moving experience. So to you who tune in regularly, thank you. You make my day.

I learn quite a bit by reading things that I wouldn’t have found on the static web. I’m learning about life, about writing, about the internet, about HTML and CSS, about politics, about everything.

And writing everyday, I learn about myself too.

That’s the best part: Writing on a daily basis again, even when it’s just quick posts has been great for me. I generally haven’t done it for years. I tended to set aside large blocks of time – a few hours a week, a summer vacation, a weekend day. But I never maintained that all important constant practice that is so essential. It feels like part of me is waking up again and that’s a nice feeling. I find myself more motivated than ever to either submit or self-publish that second novel that’s sitting on the hard drive, to get past page one of the third one that’s half-written in my head and in notes and outlines in my drawer.

And so, running the risk of laying it on a bit thick, I throw some Thoreau that comes to mind whenever I think about embarking on new adventures such as the beginnings of this blog and the start of new projects: “Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.”

So there it is. This experiment that I started in part as a way to give myself something to think about other than my dog who passed away a few months ago has gone from being just an experiment to being a regular part of my life, somewhere between a hobby and a way to work on my work.

And now, I promise no more blogging about blogging for awhile.

I’ve been playing. Wanting to take my template tinkering to a new level, and because I enjoy fiddling with things, I decided to change the template for my blog, as I’m sure you’ve by now noticed. The three column template came from Thur’s Templates, and was very easy to set up. It took a few hours to insert all the add-ons and hacks I had in my previous template, but now that it’s done, I’m happy.

One cool thing about this is that it’s very easy to change the colors since Thur’s Templates has this in blue, white, and tan in addition to the grey. You just paste in a new CSS section and – Shazam! – a different color.

If things look out of whack with your browser/monitor combination, please leave a comment and let me know. Thanks.

After continuing to experiment with categories for organizing blog posts, I broke down and started a del.icio.us account and began to experiment with tags. It didn’t take long to get hooked. Then I went back to freshblog’s Blogger Hacks and read up on categories using del.icio.us and various other methods. I experimented with this (which was cool but apparently doesn’t get picked up by Technorati) and read several other hacks, but ultimately decided I liked the ease of using this method, which relies on this bookmarklet to generate the del.icio.us and Technorati code for my tags.

I then tagged all my old posts (which only took an hour) and will continue tagging in the future. When I get a chance, I’ll install the del.icio.us tagroll or some other such tool in the sidebar to make it even easier to navigate.

Though I like the fact that the manual method doesn’t rely on an outside service and maintains a consistent feel to using the site, this is so much easier and doesn’t require constant re-publishing of old posts. I still wish Blogger would develop a system for internal categories, but for now I will tag. I’ll keep the categories link up and may continue to use categories for some of my posts.

In the meantime my del.icio.us tags are here.

This post is mainly a shout out (link) to those sites I’ve found useful when tinkering with my blog’s code. Lately, I find myself succumbing to a strange addiction: seeking out Blogger hacks just to read them and try them out for fun, sometimes incorporating them and sometimes not, often fixing what ain’t broke. Overall a great way to learn about HTML and CSS, about which I knew nothing prior to starting this blog.

One thing I wanted to find (because Blogger doesn’t yet offer it) is a categories method for archiving posts. I found Blogger Hacks – The Series on Freshblog, which had many a suggestion, and after experimenting with several methods involving services such as del.icio.us and Technorati, I went with the manual method described on theatre of noise primarily because I like the simplicity of it.

The randomly changing images of greyhounds and a cat that appear beneath my profile come from a small alteration and change in the placement of the javascript code provided by immeria. I also used the code in its intact form for the randomized blog description.

The other Blogger drawback is lack of a trackback system. After some tinkering I figured out how to get Haloscan’s trackback feature without the comments since I like Blogger’s comments. Making the trackback link look like part of Blogger involved playing a bit with the CSS tags and learning how that works. It’s probably not that big a deal, but it made me happy to figure out the logic of it on my own.