Category: Metablogging

90% of the links I send to the team mailing list at work are sourced from Daring Fireball, though

June 15, 2010 /

Standard boilerplate about not necessarily buying everything in the article I’m about to link, but:

“Comments, at least on popular websites, aren’t conversations. They’re cacophonous shouting matches.”

Yes, yes, infinite yes. It’s an iron rule. I know they drive pageviews, but if your business model relies on sacrificing the level of discourse to achieve pageviews, you’re in a bad business.

I, of course, have cleverly routed around this problem by never becoming popular, but this is the reason I’ll never turn on the comments on this blog or Ommatidia. (I honestly can’t remember why they’re on at the CHK, but that website is not a sole proprietorship.) The technology of blog comments is a net negative for the human race. If you want to talk publicly about a blog article, do it in your goddamn blog.

February 27, 2010 /

One of my favorite things of the many, many I’ve stolen from Sumana is the notion that blogs get a “house style.” This, for the record, is the reason long works (novels, movies, etc) get capitalized but not italicized on NFD.

Ersatz blogrolling

July 8, 2008 /

The main side effect of the Penny Arcade bump for Ommatidia has been a notification avalanche–via email or Technorati–of other people who have started (or were already doing) tiny story blogs in a similar vein. I think this is awesome, but honestly I lose track of which site is which, and even I can only read so much blink fiction in a day.

So here’s an offer: if you’re doing tiny stories on some sort of schedule, email me with a link and a little summary and I’ll add you to the directory page I’m putting together now. I am not promising to subscribe to all of them, for the aforementioned reasons, but I will go through once a month to check them all, maybe make a recommendation, and clean out the dead ones. (If you have emailed me about your story blog, and it’s still going, and you want it to be on the list, I would appreciate it if you’d email me again.)

Besides the obvious, I’ll start it off with just such a recommendation: The Two Minutes Project, comprising Two Minutes Less a Third and Chasing Concordia. Very short stories and very short songs! Read The Eternal Question if you need convincing, which you shouldn’t, dammit you have got to start TRUSTING me someday.

May 22, 2008 /

Kara and I are simultanublogging. It is a race to see who can post their entry first, and I am about to win it. Because Kara is not aware that it is a race.

This is ideally the only kind of race I would ever be in.

April 27, 2007 /

All the old blogs have been moved over to WordPress. People who blog or used to blog here: I’ll email you later with instructions and logins and stuff. When I find the strength. The Dispatch is a work in progress, as WP has no provision for importing comments except from other WP blogs, so I’m doing it manually. I didn’t realize it had this much content.

I’ve also uploaded the Idiotcams, all 278 of them, to Flickr. Now I just get to go through and retitle and retag every… one… of them.

I really miss NewsBruiser.

Hbleagh.

April 25, 2007 /

Okay, the highest-volume blogs are up, all content and categories and whatnot included. They also, regrettably, all look like WordPress blogs. I’ll fix that after I spend tomorrow importing the lower-volume ones.

With the exception of the calendar, category and random-entry pages, all the old links to everything SHOULD be working, so please let me know if you find stuff that isn’t. I’m tired. It’s almost 5 am here.

But there will be an Anacrusis later today.

April 25, 2007 /

I’ve fallen prey to the great Dreamhost CPU disaster and what that basically means is I have to change my weblog software. I’m very unhappy about this, but I can’t afford to move to a dedicated server and I don’t believe the situation would improve at another host. At least I won’t have to bug Leonard for help anymore (this is a lie, I’m writing him an email right now).

NewsBruiser did exactly what I needed it to do for almost four years and I’ll miss using it. Those of you whose blogs I host, I’m sorry; I’ll be sending out a guided tour email once I’ve got (sigh) WordPress or whatever up and running. The front page of NFD is static, so it will remain up for the duration, but everything else will go down later today.

April 13, 2007 /

Ride the flavor horns. Dammit! I knew there was a better joke than the “hyperspace” thing in the last entry, I just couldn’t get the bat off my shoulder. Oh well. There’s always next year.

Thanks to all the people who have offered further sandwich suggestions in the comments. More! More! I should clarify that I am quite familiar with the unholy power of bacon, but will generally not eat sharp or nontoasted cheese.

April 11, 2007 /

I’m a twit now. I have an extremely small justification for this, as follows.

Part of the Anacrusis FAQ says “I’ll get to long-form when I’m ready for it,” and I’m ready for it, so I’m writing long-form–specifically, the South book. I hate it when people announce on their blogs that they are Writing A Novel, with slight exception for that one thing in November. But the fact is that my only successful projects are done a) with at least the appearance of rigorous scheduling and b) in the public eye, so I’m going to start microposting my daily page count. With luck this will keep me from going back and polishing the first chapter over and over. Seriously, guys, the first chapter is really good.

The twi–ugh, microblog is now a sidebar on the main NFD page, and it’s got its own feed, of course.