After only around a year in operation, Much Madness is Divinest Sense is in syndication already. Woo! Let’s roll out the reruns!
Seriously, Mandie of MouseTrout.org has created a Livejournal syndicate to keep up with this blog. Maybe you want to use it, too?
Thanks, Mandie. That was nice of you! A permanent link to the syndicate appears in the sidebar, near the Bloglines subscription image-link.
I can’t help but comment upon the popularity of “specialty” blogs. Steve noted that the stats for his true crime blog have been through the roof. People are interested in that type of thing, or Ann Rule wouldn’t have a career, right? And I’m not knocking that, either. There are blogs that specialize in technology, namely Slashdot and Kuro5hin. There are political blogs, like Daily Kos, InstaPundit, and Little Green Footballs. There are homeschooling blogs, knitting blogs, and whatever you name it, there’s a blog for it. I myself keep a blog with an admittedly narrow focus — Harry Potter. I’m not alone there, either. MuggleNet, The Leaky Cauldron, The Dark Mark, Veritaserum, HPANA, and many more are also available in that narrow niche.
There are a plethora of so-called personal blogs, which, in my opinion, resemble nothing so much as journals. Not many of them reach the upper echelon of blog popularity. There are a few, I’m sure, but I’m stuck trying to think of a personal blog that doesn’t have some other agenda or focus tied to it, whether that be technology or politics or whatever else. Just a flat out, “this was my day” or “this is what I’m thinking” type of blog. Some people dismiss these types of blogs as “not real blogs.” So what defines a blog? Some definitions I’ve found, with a quick Google search are:
I’m sure you could add to that list, but that will do for starters. Then there is the problem of nefarious sites masquerading as blogs. This has become a big problem, prompting lots of comment spam designed to improve Google rankings and increase traffic. Read more:
So what makes a blog good? And why, inexplicably, is this an extrememly popular blog? Go figure.
I guess people read specialty blogs because people are interested in fitting themselves into niches and reading news about that niche moreso than they are interesting in reading the ramblings of, say, your average high school English teacher with three kids, two stepkids, a minivan, and a small house in the suburbs of Alanta (for example). Not that I’m complaining about a lack of traffic. Actually, believe this or don’t, I don’t really care about traffic. Not here, anyway. But it does bug me that I get one or two visitors a day at the Pensieve. I realize part of the fault is mine. I don’t update it often enough. But it is hard to update it without turning it into another Harry Potter news aggregator. I never wanted it to be that, and anything else requires more time than I have. It takes time, for instance, to research the characters’ name origins or to speculate about rumors and make predictions based on logic and clues in the books. I want to do it justice, which means I don’t update much. Still, I think there is some good stuff there.
So… is there such as thing as being too narrow in focus? *Scratches chin thoughtfully* Maybe. But I’m not going to change the focus of the blog just to generate traffic. People can get Harry Potter news in a variety of places. I don’t have the time or inclination to add my site to that pile.
Awards go to the popular. There are a great many excellent blogs that will never be nominated for a Best of Blogs Award. That said, go check out the nominated blogs. Sometimes people are popular for a reason.
Big English department presentation at the faculty meeting tomorrow. I am a little nervous, but I also feel we have a good presentation lined up.
Well, I finally quit Blogcritics today. I’m not going to to pick on any one individual here (which is very different from the way they do things over there), but frankly, as the old saw goes, today I read a comment that was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I decided I didn’t want to be associated with a group of people who allow such meanness in their midst. I figure when it gets the point that I wonder before I open an article if I should take a Tums or not, it’s time to leave. I really think the idea behind Blogcritics is a good one, but the execution is poor because it would seem that anyone can write for them, despite the fact that they make it seem otherwise, and also that people are allowed free rein to write nasty, personal attacks in comments. Nothing is done about that. Cursing, poorly written English, and other forms of unprofessional writing run rampant there, too. The editor sees this difference between Blogcritics and other similar publications as a strength.
I have had one hell of an aggravating time dealing with my website host. Couldn’t find their ass with both hands, a map, and a dumbass-to-English dictionary. That said, I’M BAAAACK! It feels great to be up and running again. I am sorry I haven’t kept up with you all very well in dealing with the mess that has been PlanetHuff.
Basically, my host decided to upgrade servers. The email they sent informing me of this wonderful event went into my junk folder, which I only check every few days. They dumped my old server literally two days after they sent the email. For cripe’s sake, I could have been on vacation! What was I supposed to do? I have been emailing back and forth trying to get them to help me out, but I don’t think they know how.
Here’s a short list of problems I encountered:
There were some days when the thought of working on this blog made me want to bang my head in frustration. But I did it.
I have lots to say about school…
Continue reading “Nobody Knows the Trouble I Seen” →
My wonderful host decided to upgrade servers. Only thing is, they didn’t tell us. I have been working very hard to try to reconstruct my blog. It wasn’t easy. In fact, I was ready to ditch the whole thing and start over — except it isn’t like owning your own domain is free. So. That’s where I’ve been.
School is starting soon, and when I am more awake and less frustrated, I will share some things.
My site looks like hell in Firefox right now. It’s a CSS problem, but I haven’t identified it yet, so hang tight with me until I do. It looks normal in Internet Explorer. It would seem I lost a few entries, but considering I thought I was going to lose my whole blog and my mind, I consider myself lucky.
I am so pissed at my host. You don’t even wanna know.
Back in February, someone posted a well-publicized rant on a pretty big geek web site designed to be a “collaborative site about technology and culture, both separately and in their interactions.” Think something along the lines of Slashdot (or, if I was true geek instead of a poser, /.), only not as good.
The subject of the rant was how Movable Type is ruining Google. I’m not linking the rant here, because the author later published a comment along the lines of how many hundreds of blogs were now linking his story, thus he had the victory. And in making that gloating little comment, he’s right. He got his message out by exploiting the very features of Movable Type that were at the center of his rant. So I’m not adding my blog to his list.
However, I did have a response that I’ve been rolling in my head for about a week now. I haven’t written it, because I kept telling myself that the debate is long over — February is ancient history in terms of the WWW. I also kept telling myself it wasn’t worth it to bother, since the ranter was clearly just trying to rankle some readers into linking him. I also kept telling myself it was a waste of time since the author plagiarized much of his rant from another rant, which is now four years old. A lot has changed on the web in four years.
But at the bottom of it all, the rant attacked one of the things I love about the web: blogging. Actually, to be more precise, the rant attacked Movable Type, but the implication was that blogging in general is a bad thing.
The first argument made by the author is that most bloggers are pretentious and have nothing to contribute. I have run across some blogs that I would say don’t contribute much, at least not to me, but who is to say it doesn’t contribute something to somebody? For crying out loud, I wrote a post in which I mentioned something as banal as cooking a pot roast, and several people wrote comments, emails, or even mentioned their own pot roast and gave me credit for the idea. The pot roast recipe, taken from the instructions that came with my West Bend crock pot, will appear at the end of this entry, in case you’re interested by the way.
Anyway, getting back to the subject at hand, even if it is only influencing other people to cook pot roast, we all have something to contribute to someone. As for bloggers being pretentious, I think that some are, and some aren’t, in direct correlation with the number of total people in the world who are pretentious and who are not. In fact, the story written by this person, in my opinion, smacks of the worst kind of pretention: those who feel that their opinion and what they have to say is so important and so true that we are extremely stupid if we disagree with them. He poked fun at Creative Commons licenses, insinuating that the majority of people who bother with them don’t have much to say worth protecting. Maybe. And Movable Type makes it very easy to get one as soon as you set up your weblog. Are they worth anything? I don’t know. No one’s ever asked permission to use my work, and I doubt anyone ever will. Still, I kind of like the idea that there is a license out that requests permission. Dumber folks than I have probably made book deals through their blogs.
Next, the author attacks the advent of “irritating” jargon. What make me laugh about that attack is that the author himself uses irritating jargon in comments he makes in response to other commentators. Actually, I found his use of language in total to be quite unimaginative, resorting as it frequently did to expletives and insults. It was not a thought-provoking criticism of blogging. To my way of thinking, and having taught Journalism, I passed this opinion on to my students: if you can’t back up what you say with solid facts, no one will be swayed by your opinion. Attacking blogging for having irritating jargon is a rather weak argument against blogging. Everything people do for work or fun (just about) has jargon. That’s just the way language works.
The author moves on to the lack of diversity of subject matter for most blogs, indicating without statistics to back up his claim that the vast majority of Movable Type blogs, which originate from America (he’s a Brit, and the fact that so many Americans blog really bothers him, so it seems) are limited to the following topics:
I haven’t found this to be so. Most of the blogs I read (though that is a limited number) are about the lives of the people who write them. I myself eschew topics like the election and politics, because those are personal topics to me. You want to rail against Bush in your blog? Fine with me. It’s your blog. I’m in my 30s and I have kids. I’m probably much more conservative than most people who stop by here. But it’s not an issue for me. It’s not something that I’m passionate about. I have been guilty of writing about blogging. Right now as a matter of fact. I have mentioned open source software, too. But I don’t recall talking about the economy at all. I doubt that his claim about the number of blogs with similar subject matter is true. I can’t say that’s been my experience.
The author targets Movable Type’s “poor design” and links to a script kiddie’s site (now defunct) offering a script designed to crapflood someone’s comments. I’ve not had comment spam, so I can’t say, but since the story was written, Movable Type has issued two updates — the one I use, Version 2.661 — patches up the vulnerability exposed by the script kiddie. Even if it didn’t, there are patches available, the MT Blacklist plugin, and Junkeater.com, which all deal with comment spam; Blacklist also deals with trackback spam. I think most of us know that no software program is perfect, and there will be bugs. In an ironic twist, it would appear the script kiddie’s server couldn’t take the number of hits from bloggers like this. I haven’t really even scratched the surface. There are many ways to protect yourself from comment and trackback spam. The rant’s author has a point when he mentioned the drain on your server that crapflooding can cause, but as I said, now there are ways to protect yourself. I don’t know whether it did anything or not, but I put a robots “noindex,nofollow” meta-tag in my comments template. It has been my experience that it works pretty well.
The next argument made by the writer is probably the worst for making his point. He picks on one individual blogger whom he apparently despises. I find it odd that he links her so many times and insults her so vociferously throughout his story. I think he’s in love. Don’t most little boys like to smack the girls they think are cute? Seems like most people grow out of that, though.
The writer next accuses bloggers of being “sheep” and insists that we all throw out “random and completely false opinions.” Opinions cannot be either true or false. They are beliefs. People base their opinions on facts, but they are opinions because there is room for dispute. He goes on to say that we whittle each other down until we all hold the same opinion. I wonder if he’s surfing the same web I am. If anything, I see a large variety of opinions. If he wanted to poke fun at bloggers for being sheep, I wonder that he didn’t mention memes.
Finally the writer makes what is probably his most legitimate point — that the results from Google are meaningless because of linking and trackbacks. A search engine is a powerful device created to help us find what we’re looking for on the web; however, it is not a substitute for one’s brain. Yes, we do get lots of results that we’re not interested in or are not worth looking at, but I think that is an issue the search engines themselves need to address. It’s hardly the blogger’s fault that Google thinks a link to a blog holds more authority than another link. For a long time, I kept search engines from indexing my site at all, because I was tired of getting hits in my stats that had nothing to do with what I had to say. I honestly didn’t want to know that human beings could be as disturbed as they appear to be. I think if Google was so great, it could figure out that I’m not the authority on deviant sexual practices and wouldn’t trick Google users into coming here looking for that sort of rot.
In conclusion, the author recommends limiting our drivel to LiveJournal, where, in his opinion, it would be easier to ignore. Why? Does Google ignore LiveJournal? I know it sure doesn’t ignore similar services like Diaryland. In fact, the Googlebot has crawled Diaryland so heavily that it has overloaded Diaryland’s server. Funny enough, I get relatively few hits from search engines now that I’m using Movable Type on my own domain compared to when I was writing on a hosted journaling site. Anyway, I find it funny that he talks about how trackbacks are ruining Google when he linked to a crapflooder’s script.
I have to say that I think blogging has been great for the world. Mainstream media is finally beginning to catch on that blogs are important tools for journalists. I quote from WikiPedia’s entry on weblog:
In early 2002, blogs began to spring up to support the invasion of Iraq, these “war bloggers” were primarily from the right end of the spectrum, and included Instapundit and Little Green Footballs. The first “blog” driven controversy is probably associated with the fall of Trent Lott, where bloggers found quotes from his previous speeches which were taken to be racist, and “kept the story alive” in the press.
Through 2003, weblogs gained increasing notice and coverage for their role in breaking, shaping or spinning news stories. The triggering event was the sudden emergence of an opposition to the Iraq war which was not rooted in the traditional anti-war left. The blogs which gathered news on Iraq, both left and right, exploded in popularity, and Forbes magazine covered the phenomenon. The use of blogs by political candidates, particularly Howard Dean and Wesley Clark cemented their role as a news source, while the increasing number of experts who blogged, including Daniel Drezner and J. Bradford Delong gave the blog world a cachet among regular journalists.
In 2004, the role of blogs became increasingly mainstream, as political consultants, news services and candidates began using theme as tools for outreach and opinion formation. Minnesota Public Radio broad cast a program by Christopher Lydon and Matt Stoller called “The Blogging of the President”, which covered the transformation in politics that blogging seemed to presage. The Columbia Journalism Review began regular coverage of blogs and blogging.
Blogging has enabled millions of people to have a voice and be published. I am willing to wade through the bloggers that don’t have much of anything interesting to say to find the gems. The friendships I’ve made through blogging have in some ways been more honest and true than friendships I’ve made in real life. Those people that read what I write here know me better than anyone who knows me in real life does. Maybe Jenni and Smackey can attest to that, since they know me in real life and read my blog.
If you want to find the article, I’m sure I’ve made it easy enough through my numerous references to do so. I didn’t leave a comment there, and I don’t plan to. I probably shouldn’t have responded in any way, even through an entry like this.
Now, here’s my contribution to the world. My recipe for pot roast, only slightly adapted from the instruction booklet that came with my crock pot:
2 to 2 1/2 pound beef roast
1 small Vidalia onion, sliced
baby carrots
2 medium-large potatoes cut in one-inch pieces
1/2 cup water
Brown roast in skillet over medium-medium high heat on range. Season with fresh ground pepper and seasoned salt. Put sliced onion in crock pot. Place roast in crock pot on top of onion slices. Place vegetables around roast. The booklet recommended four pototatoes, but four would not have fit in my crock pot along with the roast. The booklet also recommended 4 carrots, cut into one-inch pieces, but why bother when baby carrots are already cut and peeled. Use the amount you desire. I put in two or three handfuls. I seasoned the vegetables with seaoned salt, too. Add 1/2 cup water. It seems like you should add more, but as the juices from the meat and vegetables start flowing, you’ll have enough liquid in there. You can cook on LO on LO for 9 to 10 hours or HI for 5 to 6 hours. I cooked on HI, and it was good. The booklet says a meat thermometer should read at least 170 degrees for well done. I didn’t bother. The timing they provided was accurate enough to ensure the roast was done.
My blog. It’s a good thing.
Okay, so even though the content isn’t really finished, I am announcing that I have a new blog called The Pensieve, where I will confine my Harry Potter obsession.
I while back, I asked the folks at Mugglenet if I could do a regular column about the many allusions and references, both literary and historical, in the Harry Potter books. They agreed. I wrote my first column about Sybill Trelawney. We got stuck trying to come up with a name for the column (The Pensieve is perfect, but already taken over there). So I was eventually forgotten, and my column never appeared. I decided I still wanted to do it, though, so I decided I would create a forum for it. I know that not everyone who reads this blog would necessarily be interested, so I decided to keep my Harry Potter-iana in another place.
I’m fairly happy with the look of it. I made a collage for the title masthead in Photoshop. I scoped out my favorite links to share. I created several pages of content, but the columns, or whatever else I choose to share, will be in blog format on the main index page.
Now that I have taken a little break, I need to get back to unpacking and laundry.
I have been extraordinarily happy at Upsaid; however, last night, I purchased a domain name. As soon as it is all registered, my husband and I will be moving both of our journals there. I may go ahead and stay with Upsaid and use it to manage my content. Then again, I may go and get Moveable Type. I haven’t decided yet. But having our own domain will allow us to do some more things, as my friends who have one know.
Now. My job interview yesterday. I think it went well. First of all, I have known the woman who interviewed me since I was student teacher. I worked with one of her peers. Second, I showed her a couple of papers I’ve graded. She seemed to approve. I showed her a power point show I worked up to introduce Romeo and Juliet. If you want to access it, I think you’ll have to have a Yahoo ID. She told me that what she is doing is screening candidates for the principal, who will then interview the top few. It is frustrating not to know. It’s also frustrating to think I may have to take still more time off work to complete interviews when I’m not positive I will reap any benefit from doing so. But the school is beautiful. I hope it goes my way. The big metro-Atlanta school district (the one that held the job fair I went to last Saturday) still hasn’t called for an interview. I hate looking for a job.
How lame am I? I am actually performing active searches, looking for more diaries to read. I am officially addicted, just like Matt (laughed out loud as he described thumping his veins). I’m having trouble, though, because reading the diaries of people more than five years younger than I am makes me feel, well, icky. Especially when they discuss sex. Especially when they are teenagers discussing sex. Especially when they are teenagers discussing kinky sex. I am such an innocent. Such things would not have occurred to me ten years ago when I was last a teen. I don’t find I have much in common with the college students or the other mommies. Oddly enough, most of the mommies I’ve run across are a good 7-10 years younger than I am, too. Sigh. So I look for odd little things to latch onto in the diaries I read — commonalities, mostly. Funny, interesting writing. And (oh, the shame) basic good grammar. Drives me bonkers when I see too many errors. I’m such an English teacher… still. Does that make me bad? It isn’t like I get out my red pen when I read Diaryland, but honestly, some of the diaries are rife with bad grammar, and I just get too distracted by that to read what they’re saying.
Still like me? *Sigh*
So what am I reading now? Glad you asked. It is called Dance Upon the Air, by Nora Roberts. Shut up. In her genre, she is an outstanding writer. Anyway, what is bugging me is the plot is totally lifted from the Julia Roberts movie Sleeping with the Enemy. I mean, the woman fakes her death to escape an abusive, wealthy husband. She settles in a small town. In both stories, the husband was anal-retentive about how the wife kept house, so in both instances, the women sort of “let go” of that “everything must be perfect” mentality. Both women also fall for a local good guy and push him away at first. The stories are too close. Which makes me wonder… is it close enough to be considered plagiarism? Hmmm… The difference is that in this book, the character becomes a witch. A real witch with spells and stuff. That’s why I bought the book. I have a long-standing fascination with the Salem Witch Trials that began when I was about 11. I loved getting to teach The Crucible every year. The movie with Daniel Day-Lewis is excellent. He made me cry at the end. I read somewhere that he married Arthur Miller’s daughter. Anyone able to verify that? Joan Allen was nominated for an Oscar for her role in that movie. Of course Winona Ryder is deliciously wicked. Hell, all the characters are played well. Anyway, the premise is that this island where the book takes place — Three Sisters Island — was created when three witch sisters who lived in 1692 Salem began to fear for their lives and cast a spell to separate the little island from the mainland (and thus be safe). Anyone know any other good witch books (besides The Mists of Avalon, and don’t lecture me about them being pagans, or whatever the PC term is today — you know what I mean — or Anne Rice’s books)?
I don’t like Anne Rice’s witch books. Admittedly, I’ve only read two — The Witching Hour and Merrick. I liked parts of TWH — the parts that took place in the past. I became enamored of the 1920s flapper witch Stella. But maybe it was her name. Stella was the name of an ancestor of mine, and I find myself drawn to learning more about her for some reason. Anyway, the parts that took place in the present sucked. I couldn’t put my finger on it until I discussed it with a student. What was it that was bugging me about that book? Then I noticed J. was reading it, so I asked her what she thought of it. She said it was okay but she thought Anne Rice wrote better when she was writing about the past. And a light bulb went on. That was it EXACTLY. I loved her first two vampire books. The third, Queen of the Damned, I HATED, and I think because it mostly took place in the present. I felt like she got off track when she told the stories of the vampires Akasha destroyed — Baby Jenks and the Fang Gang? And her husband’s awful poetry all throughout the book. Ugh. I really liked The Tale of the Body Thief, though. I didn’t like the other vampire books – Vittorio I’ve already written about. Armand focused too much on a narrow span of Armand’s “life.” Again, she has a vampire that’s been around hundreds of years, but she only discusses a short span of time. She said it was because she didn’t want to write about things that had been covered in other books. Wait! Ever heard of looking at it from the other character’s point of view? Hello? I’d have been interested in seeing what Armand thought of Lestat and Louis, hearing from him why he felt attracted to Louis. How did the Théâtre des Vampires get started? Come on… Same with Pandora. Here she has a vampire who has been around for millennia and she can’t discuss anything past Roman times? She could have made a series out of the stuff that Pandora has seen. And don’t get me started on Memnoch. I nearly threw the book in disgust when Lestat drank blood from the neck of Jesus. I’m not a religious tightass, but that was too much. She just keeps disappointing me (sniff). Why do I keep reading? Good question. There is something fun about wallowing in the badness of the books and just flat out bitching about them to everyone. If there weren’t, I wouldn’t have just fluently typed this bitch session in my diary!
Well, I gotta go put some food in my kid’s belly. She wants Captain D’s fish.
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