Damn ... it's been a week since I posted? How the hell did that happen?
Just a quick note to apologize for my inconsistency, and to say there'll be more up soon. In the meantime, I'm trying to spruce up the neighborhood a bit, and would be open to some advice:
Features : I thought this would be a good spill-over site for all those side conversations that either spill over into the land of WAYofftopic, or whose lives are tragically cut short by the closing of a letters thread or the intrusion of daily life.
But Blogger's comments section sucks. Any suggestions? I'm looking at HaloScan, and there are a bazillion templates and I don't know how to choose. Any particularly useful features you've come across, or desirable layouts, of whatever, that I really ought to include here?
Off-topic topics: I thought it would be good to summarize (*cough* mock *cough*) some of the tangents I run across; to extend thoughts about interesting ideas we start to pursue (the better to prompt their continuation here), and the like. All well and good.
But what the hell do I do when everyone behaves and stays within the lines? One idea: Some of you are quite interesting. I think it would be fun to interview you so that others could see just how fascinating you really are. Plus, you get to see your name up in lights (if I can find a way to install that feature ...) . What think you?
Anyway, I'm open to suggestions ... and I'll be back with something new shortly.
7 comments:
My $0.02 for what it's worth (ie; 2-cents) ...
Blogger's comments section isn't great, but Haloscan brings its own host of problems. Sites who use Haloscan often struggle to keep their comments afloat, and sometimes it's days before things get sorted out. Eg; comments at Digby's site for the past three days.
I can be frustrated by Blogger's limted array of available html tags, but it's manageable. Blogger doesn't invite the long, discursive rants which can sometimes show up at Glenn's place, which can be worthy of their own blog post. But, comments aren't supposed to be columns.
That is all ... ;-)
Blogging takes work, doesn't it?
I was blogging for a few years at a friend's blog. I grew tired of it. Eventually you even grow tired of commenting on blogs. When I grow tired of reading blogs, I'll begin to worry but eventually you get tired of that too - worrying.
Bystander,
Ernst Nolte was a German academic and nutbar who wrote a controversial work on fascism. He proposes the novel idea that fascism was a result of the Boshelvik Revolution and not German antisemitism. Historian Benjamin B. Weber, wrote a criticism of Nolte in an article entitled "Shades of Revisionism: Holocaust Denial and the Conservative Call to Reinterpret German History". Some on the right desire to convince themselves and others that the left is responsible for fascism and will contort any fact or logic, jump through any hoop, to shift the source of fascism from the right to the left.
Nolte would be one of the sources for Jonah Goldberg's bowdlerization of this school of revisionist junk history.
One of bucky's last pronouncements was something to the effect that Nolte's writings on fascism were the first book anyone should read if they wanted to understand fascism. It was a seminal work in the field. That is preposterous and only a website like Lew Rockwell.com (or antiwar.com) would make such a claim. NRO knows better. They just have hacks like Jonah writing crap with no footnotes.
And my advice is stay with blogger and their comments for awhile but you really should blog and find a platform you like.
More and more platforms are offering free blogging. You just have to google.
I have a friend who blogs on blog city.
http://www.centerface.blog-city.com/
Ron is Army.
Say hi.
He says I helped turn him from the dark side. If that's all I've managed to do, that's something. If each one of us can do that, just save one soul, we've managed something. He was here before:
http://www.nicedoggie.net/2008/
So that's quite an accomplishment but I think he deserves th credit.
And Wordpress is the Ferrari of blogging platforms.
http://wordpress.org/
Contact this fellow. He'll be glad to give you advice:
http://djallyn.org/about
Tell him JT sent you.
Ah, Señor Pauliac, I see I was too oblique in my reference. I wasn't referring to Nolte as that shade from the netherworld. I had my eye towards a current, though sporadically prolific, commenter at Glenn's who also earned the moniker of ultramaroon. With Bucky gone, it no longer matters. They made for an interesting tag team when Bucky was there.
Thank you both for the suggestions. I liked Haloscan on paper, but after getting bystander's tip, I went to their forum --- Yikes. More issues than I have time or inclination to deal with. One commenter there proclaimed that they would happily switch, but everything else out there sucks even more.
I believe in leveraging others' due diligence, so I'll leave off the features search for now, and focus on content.
RP, your suggestion --- if I read you correctly --- to just do it for a while and get comfortable with it before making big plans makes sense, and reinforces the little voice inside that usually reserves this advice for other people. So, I'll just work on making this thing whatever it can be, and see where it goes and what I can learn from doing it.
Hope y'all will stick around, continue to make it worthwhile through your ideas and comments, and zing me with more advice when you see something that needs fixing. I'm new at this, as you know, and will take all the (intelligent) help I can get ...
Blogging takes work, doesn't it?
It does indeed. I've sort of backed into it, which doesn't help. But I'm intent on sticking with it, improving, learning what I can and hopefully getting some ideas out there that others find useful.
My main problem, to be totally honest, has been scope control. I don't want blogging to swallow my life; I spend a lot of time outdoors, which was the whole purpose of moving here when we came back to the states. The other stated reason was to take time off to finish a book I started almost five years ago, and am struggling with in its third draft. Blogging takes time away from that, most directly. But it's important, if only for mental health reasons.
I wanted to start with HOTT because I genuinely like the people I've met and had exchanges with the past few weeks & months, and it seems logical to start by creating a hangout for those people (meaning, you know, y'all). But I have other things to say, not all of which would fit here without weakening that purpose.
But I want to walk before I run, and have only xx hours a day to practice the walking ... so I'm trying to flow these things without overcommitting, adding to the senseless noise (more than I was destined to anyway, I mean), and then adding on when I can manage it.
(If you're curious about what else that might be, then check out my profile around Monday, when the stubs of other blogs will be fleshed out a little ... still won;t be anything much there, but you'll know what it's intended to be, anyway. Again, each thing in its own time ...)
The writing volume is actually the least of my worries. But I can see how one would get sick of it, like everything else, eventually.
I heartily recommend my writing-blog reading-detox method. Ripped off 30 miles on a road bike this afternoon. Running is my love, but the neck of one femur doesn't favor that activity. So running has become dessert, and cycling the main meal. I'm pretty sure this dissertation is either gonna kill me (I need lots of detox), or I'm going to be in the best physical shape of my life when it's done.
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