The most successful small online publications are not only well written, but also well planned. And no matter how blog-savvy the publisher, all good plans require revision from time to time. I recently visited Ronni Bennett’s “Time Goes By” to steal some ideas, and I discovered that she’s doing a major re-design in order to better serve people with mobile devices. When she started blogging twelve years ago not too many of her visitors arrived via smart phone. Now… well, time goes by. Things change.

I asked Facebook friends what I could write here that they would find interesting. There was general agreement that Taco Tuesday is out. Tuba Tuesday, however, received a couple of up-votes–so fine… we have Tuesdays covered. What about the rest of the week? Basically, I get that alliteration is key. For example, how many readers would be lured by a promise of Postmodern Literary Deconstruction Wednesdays? Not too many is the answer, and I think it’s clear why: NOT ALLITERATIVE! So here’s what’s on the Listics Review menu for the near future:

• Mellow Mondays–who needs to start the week all ranty? Not us!
• Tuba Tuesdays–big, bold, brassy!
• Woeful Wednesdays–want something to accentuate those mid-week blues? Check in here on Woeful Wednesdays to find out what everyone is whining about.
• Thoughtful Thursdays–so many people, so much knowledge, so many opinions and beliefs. You can see why we would wait until Thursday to get all the truthiness sorted out.
• Foody Fridays–not just corn dogs, I promise!
• Wonderful Weekends–here in Southern California each weekend is as wild, wacky, and wonderful as the last. Don’t you just love it?

George Carlin said that Pablo Casals, when asked why at the age of 93 he still practiced for three hours a day, said, “I’m beginning to notice some improvement.” I love that line, whether it’s true or not. And so, after writing for sixty years, I’m hoping to see some improvement myself.

Blogging is perhaps not the best way to practice writing because there’s always some technical detail to distract you. But I have a feeling that we’re approaching a period when the friends and followings we share in the social media can come together to provide readers for well written blog posts. I’ll never know, I suppose, since I’m unlikely to produce one. Still. Here’s the old Listics blog with a few new bells and whistles. This is a test post. Don’t read it.

Things, as they will, have changed. There might still be an SEO advantage in providing links and counting clicks, I imagine there is but it really doesn’t matter unless you want to get rich blogging. The only people who get rich blogging are… hell, NOBODY ever got rich blogging. So forget the SEO thing.

Those bloggers’ circles of mutual linkage still exist, but I think they represent a rather closed-end approach. Take my friend Ronni Bennett. Ronni writes Time Goes By which to me is the definitive online journal addressing the quotidian issues of aging.  I’m aging. Trust me. I’m aging. And a link to Ronni in the blogroll makes sense because I like her writing, I’m engaged by the topicality of Time Goes By, and she’s my friend. Still, I’m faced with the issue of creating a page layout here at Listics that people will find comprehensible, perhaps even appealing. I don’t have room in my sidebar for all the dozens and dozens of links that I find relevant and I would like to share with everyone.

So I’ve embarked on the process of cleaning up my link list, and sharing ten at a time in the sidebar under the heading “10 Random Links.” My link list is amazingly diverse. It contains techies and artists, journalists and foodies, activists and politicians and lions and tigers and bears. Well, okay. Maybe not so many of the zoo animals, but there are some really interesting people who will show up randomly in that sidebar. If a few dozen people find out that I’m blogging again, and if they visit regularly, I can promise an interesting experience if you click on those links! Now, I’m doing my best to tidy up, discard dead links, update addresses for people who may have blogged elsewhere way-back-when. You can help. If you find a dead link or something awful in that sidebar list, please give me shout and let me know. I’ll fix it.

The last few days I was contriving a story about Jonny V. and me, but frankly, I’m bored. I need two authors (or more) to adequately test the blog, but it’s too tedious to continue the role play. Suffice it to say, I am Jonny V. and Jonny V. is me. I should have a stable blog here in a week or so. Maybe Jonny and I can have a blog warming party or something when we’ve ironed out the kinks.

“Meaning” and “knowledge” seem to be an obvious pairing; far more so than the silly old “truth and beauty” schtick. In 1819 Keats was rocking the odes, laying down more quotable lines than Bob Dylan. The one about truth and beauty from Ode on a Grecian Urn sticks in the brain of everyone ever stuck in a sophomore English literature course. The context will be long forgotten but the poetic platitude will remain.

Keats had no knowledge of  iPads, orYouTube, or e-publishing. no Nooks, no Kindles.  Nor were there motion pictures. Electricity was high tech theoretical with no practical applications. Gas lamps and candles provided light after the sun had set. One might retreat to a cozy nook to read a book, a nook all the cozier for the fire recently laid with kindling. Keats’ conceit, the motion pictured on the vase, the images drawn forth and animated by the prosody within his ode, was remarkable and prescient.

Keats wrote five odes in the spring of 1819. One of his favorites was Ode on Indolence. I ran across a reference to the Ode on Indolence this morning in the key logger file I installed on young Mr. Vindaloo’s machine. Is it wrong, I wonder, for an employer secretly to track the work of his employee? I feel a little conflicted about this, but since the moment I returned to the office and found young Mr. V. all a-twitter, following an online conversation about scripting and application program interfaces and what-not, I’ve also felt vindicated. When it comes time for me to settle the bill with the middleman, the contract services company that sent me young Mr. V. in response to my request for someone who could refurbish my old blog and integrate it with social media, that key-log file will be quite useful, a real money saver.

Intention is the core of all conscious life. It is our intentions that create karma, our intentions that help others, our intentions that lead us away from the delusions of individuality toward the immutable verities of enlightened awareness. Conscious intention colors and moves everything.
— Hsing Yun

From 2024 until her death in the spring of 2024, Michelle Goodrich used her blog to teach some of us about design. Recently a visitor came here to Listics from the web archive, where Mandarin Meg’s blog lives on.

Michelle enjoyed serendipity. She was amused by coincidence. She liked it when we shared things we found bubbling up around the web, things that seemed somehow synchronous, or things that tickled our sense of deja vu. Here are a few of those things that happen to be stuck in my browser right now, today.

* * *

Meg Pokrass, a new Facebook friend and a flash fiction writer made this…

* * *
Elsewhere, Ashleigh Burrows, a Tucson “elder blogger,” was seriously wounded in the Arizona massacre this weekend. Here is her daughter’s update.
* * *
I’ve been a fan of Paul Ford since the nineties. Paul’s a techie and a fine writer and editor. He’s metro-textual. His most recent piece, “Why Wasn’t I Consulted,” tickles me eight ways from Sunday. It’s worth reading just to get context for his neologism, “the Gutenbourgeois.” Read it here. Learn and laugh!

Somehow related to Paul Ford’s understanding of the web and the persistence of Mandarin Meg’s work, is this New York Times article about a so-called “digital library race.” Oddly, the information is presented in the Business section. Fortunately, not everyone subscribes to the bizarre American ritualistic competitive model. Though the Times laments a “digital library divide,” most of us can simply be grateful for the work that’s being done, take advantage of the collections at Google books or theeuropeanlibrary.org, browse the Library of Congress 16 million item “American Memory” collection, and bear in mind that while old business models for electronic publishing (see JSTOR) hold us back from full participation in this amazing global sharing of the fruits of our cultures, ever more work is available via open access.

Walt Whitman's Cardboard Butterfly from the Library of Congress

* * *
Meanwhile, back in the kitchen… it remains my good intention to mix up my very first batch of English muffins or crumpets today. There’s a first time for everything, but sometimes inertia is hard to overcome and I find myself reading the cookbook instead of cooking. For example, here are some of interesting food bloggers that I’ve been following (instead of baking): Mango and Tomato, One Bite at a Time, Florida Girl in DC.
* * *
And really, there is a lot of other cool stuff on the Interwebz… take for example:

• How Paul Krugman found Politics (The New Yorker)
• The quantified self (a narcissist’s dream come true!)
• ZOMG Science (I’ll never stop linking unless they stop thinking!)
• Quashie (The approachable negro is in!)
• Everything is falling apart (Confirming your worst nightmares)
• Documents that reference Blackwater from Wikileaks current release (no wonder everyone’s in a tizzie)
• …and more, oh so much more…

But for now, play her off keyboard cat!

Darren Rowse says, “One of the easiest ways to write a post is to make a list.” Rowse is a professional blogger. His Wikipedia entry says that two of his blogs generate $20,000 a month in ad revenue. When Rowse posts, people listen. I guess. OTOH, it seems likely that many if not most of the people who bought “Blogging Your Way to a Six Figure Income” haven’t opened it, being too busy with Facebook, foursquare, and twitter.

1. If you post links to Amazon dot com, you might as well use an Amazon affiliates link in order to collect a few random pence from those who click through and actually buy the book you’ve linked. I know a blogger in Boulder who makes a three figure income using this simple technique!

2. Join the A list!! This is easier than it seems because niche blogging assures plenty of A-list room for everyone! Consider the R-Pod. The A-list of Airstream bloggers is full. Breaking into big-time via the Airstream A-list would be a serious challenge. But how many RPod bloggers could there be? If you build it, will they come?

3. Onibalusi Bamidele puts time management at the top of his list of seven things that will forever keep you off the blogging A-list. He could be right, but I can’t spare a moment to think about it now. I have to go outside and throw the frisbee for the dogs.

4. Don’t go off on tangents. For example, while trying to put together some coherent advice on RPod blogging, I somehow vectored off into “leprosy.” As it happens, POD is not only shorthand for a nifty little recreational camping thingee, it also stands for “Prevention of Disability.”

5. Buy a lottery ticket. Fran Lebowitz is of course correct when she observes that your chances of winning are the same whether or not you buy the ticket, but if you don’t buy then you can’t dream. You have to buy the ticket to take that ride.

6. Know when to quit. If you’re making up a list of crap in order to churn out a blog post because without that constant churning you don’t stand a chance of striking it rich, and if you were looking for seven salient factoids to buttress some obscure point or whatever, and if you’ve only got six, then for gods sake just change the title of the post and fuhgeddaboutit.

7. Use proper punctuation and always wear clean underwear. This should go without saying, but a survey of ambulance attendants revealed that many people, bloggers included, tend to overuse the exclamation point!

Where do we go from here?

We don’t need you to hold a rally to restore America’s sanity. We go to that rally every Monday through Thursday night, when we tune in to your show. We keep watching because you call out the enduring ridiculousness of politics and, for a half hour, you make us laugh about it rather than despair over it. We don’t expect you to end it or fix it; no one can, and your naming it is enough. As you told the “Crossfire” guys, you thrive on the theater of politics: “The absurdity of the system provides us the most material.”

We already have a formerly hilarious satirist turned sober politician. America doesn’t need another Al Franken. We need Jon Stewart.

We don’t expect you to end it or fix it; no one can… I can’t believe Carlos commited that to pixels! It’s that kind of negativity that we must drive out. Can we overcome that kind of pessimistic world view? Why, YES WE CAN! The upbeat, uplifting quality of absurd theater like the Rally to Restore Sanity is a good place to start. I understand the WaPo’s vested interest in dissension and conflict, in keeping the Gordian knot of American politics wound tight enough to sell advertising while maintaining the appearance of impartiality. Fortunately, there are millions of us with clear eyes and these little first amendment machines that moot the nonsensical noise emanating from Carlos and his ilk, representatives of our modern mortgaged press. Carlos had opined that we don’t need another Al Franken. Well, I opined right back at him:

Dear Editor:
I just finished your embarrassingly out of touch screed regarding Jon Stewart and the Rally to Restore Sanity, and I scarcely know where to begin my critique. Let me simply say that I disagree with much of what you wrote. Diving into the middle of things, your assertion that we don’t need another Al Franken is unconvincing at best. Of course we need more people in government of Franken’s caliber, and I daresay fewer Chuck Grassleys and Jim Demints. So if we were to lose another principled comic genius to the public stage, the country would be better off and the quality of our leadership and our governance would be improved. I could go on, but unlike you I’m not being paid for my opinion so let me be brief instead. Jon Stewart recently had Condi Rice on his show flogging her autobiographical children’s book, “Extraordinary, Ordinary People: A Memoir of Family.”

Dr. Rice was, as usual, boring and out of touch, making virtues of pugnacity and prevarication, revealing something about the foundations of the character defects that informed her leadership style. Adding insult to audience injury, someone decided to re-run that show this week.

Jon Stewart owes the country a whale of a show on October 30th, if only to make up for the tedium he visited upon us the last week or two with the Condoleezza Rice appearances.

Frank Paynter

Hi Frank,

For the next 7 days you can purchase a pair of toasty Whooga ugg boots at 50-60% off. This is a further and exclusive discount over our already heavily discounted prices and can only be accessed by clicking the link below.

http://www.whooga.com/pc473OCT2010etk117357XOSBP9GN5

This sale ends in 7 days or sooner if we run out of stock – so if we sell out, you miss out. All purchases are covered by our 100% satisfaction guarantee.

Kind Regards,
Whooga Team

It reminded me that I’d received a free pair of Whooga ugg boots and promised to go all commercial around here until it seemed like a fair trade… my soul for these swell boots. That’s dramatic. Fact is, after I read that email I pulled the boots on and took the dogs for a walk down to the spring. The weird neighbor was out looking for his beagles. He creeps me out with his random presence. I looked him up on the Circuit Court database and he’s one of these guys that knows his way around the courthouse. Somewhat creepy. But he didn’t look at me like my boots were weird or anything.

I waterproofed the boots a week or two ago, and they’ve been impervious to morning dew. I did not go wading in the spring, waterproof or not. That test will come when I least expect it… thin ice, deep puddle, whatever. Anyway, I like the boots. They’re warm but not too hot. They’re tall enough to keep the burrs and the stickers off my socks, if I was wearing socks, which I’m not because I like the feel of fleece on my feet. They seem like they’ll last longer than my commitment to promote them from time to time.

You could buy four or five pairs of these uggs for what your A.Testoni wingtip loafers cost. Of course the uggs don’t look that great with a jacket and slacks.