Tag: blogging

Expanding on yesterday’s post concerning blogging connections, I’ve recently learned that Phoebe seems to have made one on her own. Apparently, Modulator discovered her and added her to the weekly ark of animal pictures. I commented there and they kindly added Morrison and Daphne so as to keep the gang together.

Following links from that page, I discovered that there is a weekly carnival of the cats and a carnival of the dogs, which are hosted at different blogs each week. Phoebe and Morrison are appearing in their respective carnivals, and I’ll enter Daphne the next time her picture appears, though it will probably scare her. Here’s the submission form for the carnivals if you have pictures of animals who want to be seen or are perhaps looking for homes such as this nice pup.

This has been an unusual week for blogging. I’ve discovered several new blogs and surprisingly a few of them have had links to each other or to blogs I already read, and yet I found them by following different paths. I was already marveling at the small town feeling the blogosphere had suddenly taken on when yesterday I sat down to read the paper and drink the morning pot of coffee.

When I reached the editorial page of the Austin American-Statesman, I noticed the column “Land of the Free-for-All” by Connie Shultz. The first sentence was “I hate blogs.” I found this to be quite intriguing. I love reading print columns that disparage blogs. They’re always so defensive. Perhaps, they know their days are numbered. I don’t think blogs will replace regular news sources since bloggers can’t afford to travel the world and do frontline reporting, but anyone can write commentary and many can write it better than syndicated columnists, and so it was with a snarky grin that I began reading.

Shultz doesn’t just hate blogs; she also loves them, and toward the end of her piece, she quoted from a few random blogs, one of which is on my blogroll: Postcards from the Mothership. I commented to let Dani know that her blog was mentioned, and now she has a very nice post up about the small world nature of the internet. Dani is a Canadian blogger whose blog is one of the first non-political blogs I came across while, as she mentions, looking for book reviews (she has a very cool and unique method for this). It’s these random connections and new friends we make with people in faraway places – and close to home – that so fascinates me about blogging. It seems to fulfill part of the promise of the web.

One more connection. Regular readers will notice the weekly link to Greyhound Pets of America’s central Texas chapter that shows the beautiful hounds up for adoption. Today, I saw that reader and occasional commenter Heather of Heather in all Her Strangeness is fostering one of these very dogs. This has nothing to do with me; it’s just one more interesting connection (and a chance to mention greyhounds).

This morning, I went outside to get the paper, which wasn’t there, but I noticed that something amazing had happened. It seems that last night free water fell from the sky. This is exciting since we haven’t had substantial rainfall in over a year. The lack of rain and our non-winter winter have conspired to create a dangerously dry situation here. It’s supposed to rain throughout the day today, but I don’t know if that will be enough to end the arson/burn ban that I mentioned last week. Speaking of that post, it was listed at Austinist as one of the Best of the Austin Blogs: Week of January 16, so thanks to them for that honor.

And since we’re on last week’s posts, I’ll mention the “winner” of my secret contest. I had used Talking Heads titles for my posts last week (This Must Be the Place, Burning Down the House, Don’t Worry About the Government, Drugs, Animals) and decided that I would do so until someone noticed. The honor goes to Austin blogger Kramer Wetzel of Astrofish/Xenon, whose blog is most definitely worth a read. I probably could have gone on for a few more weeks with the ‘Heads titles, but I’m glad I got to stop because I could tell that I was trying to find topics that would fit within the titles. I also think it was kind of a cop-out to use Fear of Music titles such as “Drugs” and “Animals” since they don’t really stand out as TH titles.

So on this rainy day Saturday, I think it’ll have to be a day of Outlaw Golf on the PS2.

Thanks for coming. I’ll be blogging here from now on. There are still some things on this site that may be a bit buggy, but I’m working on those. If you notice anything that looks weird or doesn’t work right, please comment and let me know. Once the various kinks are worked out, I’ll resume regular blogging.

Don’t forget to update your blogrolls!

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.