Listics

Halley points to Jeneane’s announcement that she’s no longer with "The Content Factor."  For me this is bad news because I always like the sound of Content Factor.  Reminded me of a Barth book or something.  Well, wherever she goes in this wide blog world, Jeneane will certainly continue to be a content factor!

Ernst Mach…

Lying Socialist Weasels…

(and p.s. The Sky is Falling)  (well, the sky is not really falling but if you do an A9 search on The Nature Conservancy you run into this amazing array of lunatic right wing asshats who would rather boil up them frogs than pertect their habitat if yew ketch mah drift… some of it comes from a weird "Farm Ministry" down in southrun Illinois, and some of it comes from the Bolton era wingnuts with an anti-UN ax to grind… weird stuff… upshot is, they should be allowed to run their power lines through the wetlands, across the last stands of virgin redwood, they should be allowed to dine on spotted owl while washing the mountain side with cyanide and acid compounds to leach the last bit of metal out, all else is a socialist conspiracy).

Especially to J. Alva Scruggs, singleminded in his pursuit of fecklessness.

December 24 has long been celebrated as the first day of Frankmas, a festival that doesn’t end until January 2.  And on the first day of Frankmas I was remiss in not wishing a happy birthday to Madame Levy who went to the dentist today, on Frankmas Day of all days.  I hope everything came out all right… ooo, snarf, chortle — I crack myself up!

No, but seriously…  if it was just too painful, I know where you can find a fluffy penguin to hold onto until it feels better.

The mouth, silly… until the MOUTH feels better, not the PENGUIN!

Every good Frankmas celebration requires a Yule log.

Happy Birthday to you too, Yule!

The b!X is back! Noted local blogger Christopher
Frankonis (a.k.a. The One True b!X) killed his heavily reported,
wonkish blog Portland Communique back in September, much to the dismay
of Portland political junkies and lazy reporters. He has now returned,
complete with exclamation point, posting this time at a site called Furious Nads! (www.furiousnads.com). He says the site takes its name from a song by a Portland band
called the New Bad Things. Although initial entries are heavy on the
kind of me-focused navel-gazing that makes many blogs tortured reading,
Murmurs is betting b!X won’t stay above the political fray for long.

Keep b!X and his mom in your thoughts this dark time of the year… his grandmother, her mother, is failing.

When one asks a lot of bloggers how they blog, one must be prepared for the results.  Naturally, I was not.  Prepared for the results, I mean.  Answers to the question came in via email, via comments, via trackbacks, via posts on other sites.  Gathering this material into a few posts won’t be easy.  Acknowledging with kind regards the work of everyone who participates will result in someone being overlooked.  Yet I soldier on, creating content from other people’s work, the consummate editor, hobbled by tools like a spell checker that wants to change "Google" to "Go ogle," facing deadlines, and ultimately responsible for discovering an organizational principle that will make sense of the mountain of information before me.

Thank god for adverbs.  Thank god for Shelley Powers who was unafraid to use a few adverbs in describing just how she blogs.  Shelley says:

Painfully. Sometimes humorously, other times insightfully, here and
there technically or artistically. Too frequently boringly. Lately
though, I blog painfully.

Yet her description, I think, is incomplete because she also blogs "authentically."  Shelley’s voice and purpose are authentic and true.  Here are some other bloggers whose authenticity I find moving:

Read the rest of this entry »

I blog as if there are readers, listeners, viewers… people with whom I am communicating.  I blog as a member of a community. 

I use a few simple tools to create my blog posts.  I have blogged in four different environments, using Blogger, Radio Userland, TypePad, and WordPress.  Inexpertly, I use several packages to prepare post content.  I use

• SnagIt, to grab images from the screen.
• TextPad is a powerful editor that I use to create files that will be placed in the unforgiving window of the blogging tool, the window that has so many times eaten my posts that when I am being careful, when I care about the post I am creating, when that post has more complexity than a simple link to share with others, I create the post offline using TextPad.
• I use Photoshop to optimize and re-size images for inclusion in a post.
• I have a copy of Audacity that I fully intend to use for audio files when I get over my psychological block that has somehow prevented me from using it.  I have a recording of Dervala, and she uses the phrase "posh totty" and that alone should be enough incentive for me to get my ass in gear on this, but alas… something always stands in the way.

For my WordPress blog (hosted on cheap server space I rent from GoDaddy), I also need an FTP client.  WS_FTP Pro is the tool that I use, but any FTP client will do.

Yet I am neither geek, nor nerd.  I am not a hacker, a phreaker, a programmer or any variety of technoid dweeb.  I am a writer.  Weblogging is a medium for capturing my work and for publishing it.  How do I blog?  When I am blogging at my best, the answer is "intentionally."  More often, I blog casually, sharing impressions, trying on ideas to see how they look.

None of this yet speaks to the web services that bubble up and enhance our ability to blog.  Take FlickR, del.icio.us, Bloglines, Google, Wikipedia and the New York Times.  Consider the blogs of dozens of others that every day provide input that sparks creativity, that abrade the consciousness and require response.  Consider the immediate feedback mechanisms that tell us how we’re doing:  the comments and the trackbacks, the feedback provided by Sitemeter or the link data from Technorati.  We blog with all of these providing a context for our work.

During the week to come, I’ll post information from others on these matters.  If anybody wants to tag or follow the tag set that develops, the tag I’m using is howBlog.  I’m organizing this material in a way that makes sense to me.  On Monday, Jeneane Sessum and Rebecca Blood will provide short takes on how they blog.  Jeneane and Rebecca informed my understanding of what blogging was about when I first began "wiggling my fingers on the keyboard."  Throughout the week other voices will be heard, brief comments from Doc Searls and David Weinberger, Shelley Powers and Sheila Lennon.  Dean Landsman will check in, and we’ll hear from literally dozens of others on how they blog. On Friday, Chris Locke closes out the week with a post that takes the top prizes for comprehensiveness, comprehensibility, computronic compo-mentation, and most uses of the word "fuck" in a technical document (2005).  It is simply the gold standard.  It is so good that I couldn’t get the email past the corporate spam filter.   Just as Jeneane and Rebecca informed my understanding of the ethics and community foundation of bloggery, Chris provided an incentive and a model for blogging when I started my first blog with readership greater than one.

I think this will be a fun week, and informational.  I think it will provide tips and tricks and technical insights, and I know it will also provide poetic inspiration.  The posts will run at Sandhill Trek and at Doc Searls IT Garage.  Please join the conversation this week!