I found out about this from Rachel Lucas, so of course I had to try it.
What can I say? I was raised Southern Baptist, and you don't overcome that sort of upbringing easily. Anyhow, Rachel swears enough for two bloggers, so it all balances out, I suppose.
Metablogging (writing about your blog in your blog) is usually boring. But the name of this blog has changed, and I probably should explain why -- even if that means I have to metablog a bit.
I've retired the Logopolis title. It didn't really mean anything, and it wasn't memorable or easy to spell. In addition, I want to make the blog less anonymous. The domain name is my name, and so is the address used in the "E-mail me" link. Why should the blog title be different? Consequently, as of May 12, the title is Pat Berry dot net. It's just simpler that way.
Ben has started a new blog. He says its purpose is "to have a place to write stuff". Despite the title (But Seriously . . .), it's actually rather amusing. Well, it makes me laugh, anyway. Check it out for yourself and let him know what you think.
I notice that he's using WordPress, as Bob and Virgil do for their blogs. Perhaps I should find out what advantages WordPress has in comparison to Movable Type (which is what I'm using here). A lot of people seem to like it.
According to CNet, the phenomenon of blogging is ten years old this year -- but we don't really know who invented the blog. It depends on exactly how you define the term. You can read the CNet article and decide for yourself who deserves to be called "father of the blog".
I don't agree that blogs originated in 1997. If you ask me, The Daily Illuminator qualifies as a blog, and its archives go all the way back to 1994.
Source: Buzz Out Loud podcast
If you use WordPress to run your blog, you should check to make sure you're not running version 2.1.1, which was compromised by a cracker who gained access to a WordPress server and tampered with the download file. The WordPress folks have released a newer version (2.1.2) that is safe to use. If you are running 2.1.1., you should upgrade to 2.1.2 immediately.
Source: CNET.com's Security Bites! podcast
On the morning of June 23 (a week after the steroid injection), my trigger thumb symptoms were so mild that I decided to skip using the heating pad and see what happened. Half an hour later, the symptoms had cleared up on their own. The following morning, I awoke symptom-free. So the steroid seems to have worked. My trigger thumb is cured -- or perhaps I should say "in remission", since my father's experience shows that the symptoms can return eventually.
Today I visited my ophthalmologist for a routine semiannual examination, and my glaucoma is also still in remission. The medication (Xalatan at first, and now Travatan) has kept my intraocular pressure under control for two and a half years.
Modern medicine is miraculous. No other word adequately describes it. A disease that could have blinded me is neutralized by putting drops in my eyes once a day. Another ailment that threatened to cripple my hand is banished by a simple injection. I'm also grateful for the dental restoration techniques (crowns and onlays) that have made my brittle middle-aged teeth better than new. And the orthopedic treatment that, twenty-six years ago, restored my ability to walk. Miracles, all of them.
Historical note: Movable Type tells me that this is my 300th blog post. That's not a terribly impressive number for a blog that has been in operation for 57 months. Some bloggers post multiple times per day, while I've only averaged a little more that five posts per month. But at least I'm still blogging after almost five years.
I'm going to tell you a story. It's long and meandering, goes into unnecessary detail to an absurd degree, and ultimately turns out to be pointless. You should skip it if you could spend the time doing something useful. Don't say I didn't warn you.
A blog is born
When I first started this blog in October 2001, I used Blogger because it was simple, user-friendly, and free. At the time, Blogger was a financially-strapped one-man operation, and I wanted to contribute some money to help keep it operating. But, as I wrote in January 2002, there was no simple way to do so. Shortly after I posted those remarks, Blogger introduced a paid version of its service called Blogger Pro, which provided several extra features. (The ordinary version of Blogger didn't change, and remained free). I signed up at once and paid the annual subscription fee.
Enter Google
In February 2003, Google acquired Blogger. The resulting infusion of funding and support staff not only ended my concerns about Blogger's survival, but also produced numerous improvements in the service. Blogger's servers were upgraded and a new and improved user interface was unveiled. Finally, in September 2003, Blogger announced that the Blogger Pro service was being discontinued -- all of the extra Pro features were being rolled into the free version of Blogger! Every Blogger user was now effectively a Blogger Pro user whether they had paid or not.
To compensate them for having paid for features that were now free, Blogger offered to send each Pro subscriber a free hooded sweatshirt. You just had to go to a particular page on the Blogger site, log in with your Pro username and password, and fill out a form with your shirt size and mailing address. But when I tried to do this, I found that my login was not recognized. On September 11, 2003, I went to the Blogger customer support page, where you can report problems by filling out a form and clicking a Submit button. I used the form to describe what had happened when I tried to log in and claim my free shirt.
Dude, where's my shirt?
The next day, I received an e-mail response from a support tech named Steve, who informed me that Blogger had no record of my Blogger Pro upgrade purchase. He asked me for the purchase date and the last four digits of the credit card I had used. I replied with that information on the 13th. I received no further response. A month went by.
On October 16, I went to the support page again and used the form to complain about the lack of response, attaching a copy of my correspondence with Steve up to that point. Steve replied that same day, saying that he never received my 9/13 note. I responded immediately, sending him another copy of the information he had asked for. I received no response. Another month went by.
At this point, I started to see a pattern. When I used the Web form to contact Blogger customer service, my messages were received. But when I tried to e-mail Steve directly, my messages did not reach him.
On November 13, I decided to try again. Thinking that perhaps the e-mails I had sent Steve from my home e-mail address were not reaching him, I tried sending a note from my work address. I received no response. Having run out of ideas, I gave up.
The free shirt wasn't really all that important to me. (I don't even like hooded sweatshirts.) What I wanted was to understand -- and perhaps to solve -- the strange problems I had encountered. Why was there no record of my Blogger Pro purchase? What was preventing my e-mail messages from reaching Steve? It didn't make sense. But I had exhausted the available methods of pursuing the matter.
Cold case
Sixteen months passed. During this time, I converted my blog from Blogger to Movable Type, so I wasn't even a Blogger user anymore. I completely forgot about the Blogger sweatshirt business.
On March 31, 2005, while filing and deleting old e-mail messages, I stumbled across my log of the correspondence with Steve. I decided to have another go at the problem. I sent a note to Steve's address at Blogger, recapping everything that had happened in the fall of 2003, and asking for an update. My message was returned as undeliverable; Steve was no longer working for Blogger. I went to the Blogger customer support page and used the problem reporting form to describe the whole bizarre story, attaching a copy of my correspondence with Steve, and submitted it. I received no response.
On April 11, 2005, I went to the Blogger site and saw an announcement that the problem-report form was broken. Specifically, there was a field on the form where you were supposed to specify which of your blogs (you can have more than one) was affected by the problem you were reporting. My problem had nothing to do with any of my blogs, so I had been selecting "No blog in particular". Blogger had now discovered that if you did that, your problem report didn't go anywhere; it just disappeared. This explained why I had received no response to my March 31 report.
One last try
At this point it occurred to me that in the months since my last attempt to report the problem by e-mail, I had switched e-mail addresses. Instead of using my old Road Runner address, I was now using Gmail. Gmail is Google's Web-based e-mail system, and Google owns Blogger. Surely, if I sent an e-mail query from my Gmail address, it would get through to Blogger customer support! I would be sending the message from one part of Google to another.
It seemed worth trying, so I composed an e-mail note that began with the words "Hi -- I'm following up on a technical support issue that's a couple of years old. No, really! I promise I'm not insane." I went on to relate the entire story from September 2003 to the present. I included a copy of all of the previous correspondence. My message ended with the following summary:
At this point, we seem to have several unanswered questions:If you get this note, please drop me a line and let me know what your thoughts are. Thanks!
- Were my e-mails to Steve from [my home address] and [my work address] blocked for some reason?
- If not, why didn't they reach him?
- Why doesn't the Blogger Pro database contain any record that I paid for a subscription?
- Am I still eligible for a free sweatshirt, or have I missed that particular boat? :-)
I sent the note to support@blogger.com.
A response, but not an answer
To my utter astonishment, I received a reply on April 15. It read:
Hello Patrick,Based on our records, all of your previous emails as noted in your email attachment (besides your most recent ones) had been received via your [home] email address. I also do notice that there was never any email correspondence received on our end from you back to Steve's questions. Unfortunately, I would not know why emails you sent to us in reply were not received.
In addition, we're unfortunately not sending hoodies out to our previously upgraded Pro folks anymore.
I apologize for the inconvenience.
Sincerely,
Christine
Blogger Support
And that's how the story ended. It wasn't a very satisfactory resolution; it didn't answer any of the questions except the last one (no, I wasn't going to get my free sweatshirt). But at least I could finally let the matter drop.
What have we learned?
If there are any lessons to be learned from this, I suppose they are:
The tagline of this blog, as I'm sure you've noticed, is "Putting words in a row since 2001." It occurred to me recently that I've never explained where that phrase came from.
It's from a Robert A. Heinlein novel. But not, as you might expect, from his science fiction. Heinlein wrote one fantasy novel, Glory Road, that deserves a lot more attention than it gets. It's the story of an American soldier, just discharged after a tour of duty in Vietnam, who finds the following ad in the classified section of a French newspaper:
ARE YOU A COWARD? This is not for you. We badly need a brave man. He must be 23 to 25 years old, in perfect health, at least six feet tall, weigh about 190 pounds, fluent English with some French, proficient with all weapons, some knowledge of engineering and mathematics essential, willing to travel, no family or emotional ties, indomitably courageous and handsome of face and figure. Permanent employment, very high pay, glorious adventure, great danger. You must apply in person, 17, rue Dante, Nice, 2me etage, appt. D.Intrigued, he answers the ad and is hired to escort and protect a beautiful woman (and her manservant) on a perilous journey through a fantasy world populated by ogres, minotaurs, Rodents of Unusual Size, and dragons -- at the end of which they must enter an evil stronghold and recover a priceless artifact.
At one point during the journey, the travelers stop for the night and camp under the stars. The protagonist finds himself afflicted with insomnia and appeals to the manservant for help:
But I didn't go to sleep. The truth is, I've got a monkey on my back, a habit worse than marijuana though not as expensive as heroin. I can stiff it out and get to sleep anyway -- but it wasn't helping that I could see light in Star's tent and a silhouette that was no longer troubled by a dress.When I first read Glory Road, that scene stuck in my mind because I have the same problem. I always read for a few minutes before going to bed, and if there's no reading material available, I have trouble composing myself for sleep. So when I was casting about for a way to describe the process of writing, the phrase "words in a row" popped into my head. Now you know; it's all Heinlein's fault.The fact is I am a compulsive reader. Thirty-five cents' worth of Gold Medal Original will put me right to sleep. Or Perry Mason. But I'll read the ads in an old Paris-Match that has been used to wrap herring before I'll do without.
I got up and went around the tent. "Psst! Rufo."
"Yes, milord." He was up fast, a dagger in his hand.
"Look, is there anything to read around this dump?"
"What sort of thing?"
"Anything, just anything. Words in a row."
"Just a moment." He was gone a while, using a flashlight around that beachhead dump of plunder. He came back and offered me a book and a small camp lamp. I thanked him, went back, and lay down.
This blog was pretty much dormant during the summer months, but I've been trying to blow the dust off and bring it back to life during the last week or two. The most visible part of this process was that I started posting again, but I've also made some minor improvements that I thought I should point out.
First of all, I moved the blog to a new URL. That happened not because I thought it would be an improvement, but because my ownership of the old URL (logopolis.info) was about to expire and I decided not to renew it. I had obtained it for free a year ago as part of a promotion, but after the first year I would have to pay to renew my registration. And in the meantime, I had became aware that some services (such as WHOIS privacy) are not available for .info domains. I resolved to switch to a .net domain when my free year ran out. Nobody had registered patberry.net, so I reserved that domain for later use. At the beginning of September, as the expiration of the logopolis.info registration loomed, I moved this blog to patberry.net.
Movable Type 3.2 was released on August 25, and I upgraded a few days later. This wasn't directly responsible for any changes that are noticeable to the readers of this blog (except for the "Powered by Movable Type 3.2" icon that's currently visible in the sidebar), but it included a number of improvements to the behind-the-scenes user interface that make it easier to maintain this blog. One of these was an improved power-editing mode that allowed me to assign categories to many entries at once. Using this new feature, I was able to complete a task that had been on the back burner for months: I assigned categories to every entry in the Logopolis archives, all the way back to my first blog post in October 2001.
After I had categorized all the entries, it became obvious that an awful lot of them are about blogging. (As of today, only "Employment" and "Pop culture" have more entries.) In other words, a substantial portion of my blogging is actually metablogging, or blogging about blogging. And here I am doing it again right now. I'd better change the subject before I trigger some kind of feedback loop.
While I was at it, I installed this alternative logo for Movable Type. It only appears on the pages that I see when I'm posting to (or otherwise maintaining) this blog, so no one but me will ever see it. But the standard logo is boring, and I figure anything that makes my blog-posting experience more interesting might encourage me to post more often. I admit that installing an upgrade that only I can see is an unbelievably geeky thing to do. But I did also make some improvements that are visible to readers: I changed the body text font to one that I think is easier to read, and updated the page icon to match the current color scheme and title font.
I know what you're thinking -- these are incredibly tiny changes, so why am I blathering about them? And you're right, but I did warn you that I was going to tell you about minor improvements to my blog. And besides, if these changes were obvious, I wouldn't need to point them out, now would I?
The point of all this, I guess, is to answer the question I asked several months ago. My blog isn't dead, and that's why I've been buffing the chrome and touching up the paint. Now I just need to drive it more often.
Is my blog dead? I don't know. My blogging activities ground to a halt about a month ago because of two events that diverted my attention for a while, but neither of them is a valid excuse any longer.
The first event was opening night for Carousel on June 3. That play ran throughout the month of June and occupied most of my evenings and weekends. The second event was the unexpected loss of my job. I was informed on June 7 that June 10 would be my last day of work.
Losing my job actually freed up a lot of my time, of course, but this didn't help as much as you might think. First of all, I had to spend some of that time trying to find a new job. Second, not having to go to work made it possible for me to sleep late, and since I was getting home from the theatre at midnight or later, that was quite easy to do. My sleep cycle still hasn't stabilized.
But the play ended its run over a week ago, on June 26. And I've had time to get a grip on my job search. So why am I still not blogging? The truth is that I just haven't felt like it. I don't seem to have anything worthwhile to say. That may be a result of my altered circumstances, or it may mean something else. I haven't yet figured it out.
When I do, I'll let you know.
This blog now has its own domain name: logopolis.info. It's also now maintained using Movable Type, which will enable me to add some features to the site that Blogger did not support. You may notice a few minor glitches at first -- embedded images in the archives don't work yet, and I haven't figured out how to transfer comments from the old site. I'll fix these things as soon as I can.
Historical note: The logopolis.info domain only lasted one year, for reasons that I explained elsewhere.
A lack of new content isn't the only thing wrong with this blog. In recent weeks, it has also been brought to my attention that the template I'm using is flawed. It looks fine in Internet Explorer (IE), but lousy in any other browser. Users of both Mozilla Firefox and the Mac-based Safari have reported seeing exactly the same formatting glitches. The problem seems to be with the Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) used by the template; IE interprets the CSS code incorrectly, but the person who created the template evidently was using IE to view the result, and concluded that it worked properly.
I'm not proficient with CSS, but my son Ben is, thanks to the HTML classes he took at school. He did some tinkering with the CSS code, but was unable to find a way to make it look right in both IE and non-IE browsers. My friend Virgil came up with a compromise that he says looks OK in both sorts of browsers, and I may end up using it. But there's one other thing I want to try first. In the course of researching the problem, I stumbled across this trick for putting two versions of the CSS code in external files -- one of which is used only by IE, and the other only by other browsers. If it works, this solution will be the best of both worlds. I hope to have it implemented in the next day or two.
UPDATE: The trick I mentioned above did not solve the problem -- it doesn't work with newer non-IE browsers like Firefox. But Ben wasn't willing to give up. The problem is now fixed, thanks to his supreme excellence as a Javascript hacker. (I was going to say "his l33t h4x0r sk1llz," but I thought that might be confusing to readers who aren't fluent in Leetspeak.)
I'm back. It was never my intention to abandon blogging for such a prolonged period, but other things got in the way. During May, my spare time pretty much vanished for reasons related to my sprained ankle (a story I started to tell here, but never finished). In June, my involvement in the play Smokey Joe's Cafe had a similar effect. During the first part of July, it was my job: the Project from Hell, which I had been working on since last fall, suddenly demanded a lot of extra hours.
But that's finally over. My ankle is mostly healed, Smokey Joe's Cafe is over, and I'm finished with the Project from Hell. If anyone is still reading this, I thank you for your patience. Actual posting of new material will resume shortly.
At least I'm in good company. It appears that none of the GNO blogs have been updated more than once or twice in the past month, except for those of my teenage offspring. Ben, of course, has been consistently putting us all to shame for a long time with his frequent and thought-provoking posts. He even had a moment in the spotlight recently when he wrote an essay that reduced Kim du Toit to tears. And Ruth, whose blog has been silent for months, has suddenly become talkative again. I hope it lasts this time.
It's been weeks since my last substantial blog post, so I'm sure that speculation is rampant, out there in the blogosphere, about exactly what has curtailed my output so drastically. Has a rat stepped on my own personal Power button and shut me off? Did the Valar notice that I was writing about them and express their displeasure with a few well-placed lightning bolts? Was I silenced by the global oil cartel for knowing too much about why gasoline prices are high?
Those are all good guesses, but none of these theories are correct. Actually, my lack of blogging over the past few weeks was caused by Nazis. I've been working on a post that explains exactly how this happened, but the story is rather long and complicated. It may be a while before I finish it, and it doesn't make sense to keep my blog on hold while that process continues.
This is a chronic problem that I have with blogging. It's been noted by numerous observers that bloggers tend to fall into two broad types. One type posts brief, pithy items, typically consisting of a link to something elsewhere on the web and a paragraph or two of commentary. (Classic example: Glenn Reynolds.) The other type of blogger posts long, thoughtful essays that explore topics in detail. (Classic example: Steven Den Beste.)
My natural tendency is to emulate Den Beste, but those long essays take a lot of time to write. Den Beste has the time because he's retired and has no children. I have two teenagers and a full-time job, so emulating Den Beste is not very realistic. As Bob has pointed out, the result ends up looking less like Den Beste's blog and more like that of Bill Whittle, who writes 10,000-word essays at the rate of one every two or three months. (Whittle isn't really a blogger at all; he's an author who's posting his book on the Web in pieces.)
So perhaps the person I should really try to emulate is Rachel Lucas, who recently returned to blogging after a hiatus of several months. Rachel also is an essayist by nature, but her blog faltered after she graduated from college, bought a house, and started working full-time. She now has, at most, an hour a day for blogging. So she's had to adjust her blogging style to fit her new limitations. She's making a conscious effort to write shorter articles and spend less time trying to make each one perfect. And it's working; her output isn't what it was a year ago, but she's posting something every day or two.
Well, if Rachel can do that, maybe I can too. It won't easy to combat my natural tendencies to be a longwinded perfectionist, but I'll try. With luck, I should be able to get this blog back on track. As long as I can avoid the Nazis.
Blogging has developed its own specialized vocabulary, and I sometimes forget that not everyone is familiar with the lingo. For example, at one of our weekly Guys' Lunches, someone asked what a moblog was, and I attempted to explain (not very coherently, I'm afraid). More recently, I used the term "blogrolled" here, and received an e-mail from my mother asking what that meant.
So I'm relieved to discover that the folks at Samizdata.net maintain a blogging glossary. I should probably add a permanent link to it on this site, so that people can look there for enlightenment if I use a jargon term and forget to define it.
I only meant to sabotage Jen's NaNoWriMo project, but apparently I underestimated my own powers. After posting nothing for almost a month, she has finally reappeared with the revelation that she has lost the ability to blog. This is terrible -- and it's all my fault! I am now working to repair the damage, but I may need some help with this. Everyone, please focus all the positive psychic energy you can spare in Jen's direction so that she'll recover quickly from this case of Blogger's Block and start posting again. Do it for Jen -- and for me, because I don't want to go down in history as the evil mastermind who killed Jen's blog!
I have a confession to make. All through November, I have been secretly hoping for Jen's NaNoWriMo effort to fail.
Wait, let me explain! I like to read Jen's writing. And when she posts to her blog, I get to read it. But she doesn't publish her fiction, so when she works on that, I don't get to read it. And it's a zero-sum game; every hour she spends writing fiction is an hour she doesn't spend posting to her blog. So really, from my point of view, for her to write fiction is a bad thing. Can you blame me for hoping that she would give up early in the month and go back to blogging?
Well, it didn't work. We're nearly to the end of November, and Jen is still striving to meet the NaNoWriMo deadline. (As far as I know, that is.) But if she doesn't make it, my rooting against her will serve another purpose. Instead of indulging in self-recrimination, she can blame me for sabotaging her effort with all of the negative psychic energy I've been sending in her direction. See, I've actually made a noble sacrifice on her behalf! I sure hope she appreciates this.
Bob may have no comment on CNN's article about abandoned sites, but I can think of a couple of things to say about it. First of all, the journalist who wrote the article seems to think that this is a new phenomenon, but it's not. A blog or other personal Web site is the online equivalent of a newsletter, and a lot of newsletters peter out after the first few issues.
Unless you are receiving a newsletter in the first place, you don't notice when it stops coming. But defunct Web sites are more conspicuous, thanks to search engines like Google. As long as a dead site remains on the Web, search engines keep dredging it up and showing it to us. So we tend to be more aware of abandoned sites, because they're in our faces more often than abandoned newsletters.
Why have newsletters always had such a high infant mortality rate? I think it's because most of them were started for the wrong reason, or no obvious reason at all. It just seemed like a good idea. Well, the existence of a newsletter about your favorite topic is a wonderful thing, but somebody has to create it. And not just once, but over and over, every time an issue is due. It requires an ongoing commitment of time, money, and creative energy -- and when the initial enthusiasm fades away, you need a reason to continue doing it. Otherwise you'll realize that you're wasting your time and energy on something you don't really care about, and you'll quit.
Maintaining a Web site is no different. Because of tools like Blogger, creating and updating a Web site seems easier than publishing a newsletter, but that's an illusion. Sure, you don't have to make a stack of photocopies, collate and address them by hand, and then drive to the Post Office to mail them. You just open a browser window and start typing. As a result, some people conclude that maintaining a Web site is effortless. But they're walking into a trap, because the requirement for creative energy hasn't changed. You still have to think of something worth saying, and then painstakingly craft sentences and paragraphs to communicate it. Fancy tools like Blogger don't help you with that. When you have to face the Dreadful Blank Page and fill it with words, the fact that it's a computer screen instead of a sheet of paper does not make the prospect any less daunting.
Most of those abandoned Web sites were doomed before they ever appeared on the Internet, because the site creators forgot to ask themselves: Why am I doing this? The commitment of time and energy to maintain a Web site is nontrivial. If you don't get anything out of it, you'll end up like Ajay Powell, viewing your site as a burden rather than a joy.
Checking the GNO blogs this morning, I was astonished to see that Miles has begun posting to his blog again. This spurred me to do a little maintenance work on the Smooth Report site, something I haven't done for months. I've improved the format of the archive list and added permalinks to individual posts. Unfortunately, archive links are still not working properly. I'm not sure why.
UPDATE: Archive links are fixed. The solution was to stop trying to keep the archive files in a subdirectory, and let Blogger put them in the same directory as the main page. Keeping them in a subdirectory is supported, if you believe the instructions on the Archiving tab of the Settings page -- but I have never been able to make it work.
In case you haven't heard, Blogger has discontinued the subscription-only Blogger Pro service and rolled the Pro functions into the free version of Blogger. They've effectively made every Blogger user a Pro subscriber. This was cause for much rejoicing in my household, because it means Ruth and Ben now can spell-check their blog posts and give them titles. (I just finished helping them turn on the title field in the Blogger posting form, and add the BlogItemTitle tags to their templates so the titles will show up.)
As someone who paid cash for the Pro functionality, I suppose I could be annoyed that people who never paid anything are getting it all for free. But I'm delighted at this news. As longtime readers of this blog may recall, there was a time when I was worried about Blogger's long-term survival and actually wanted to give them some money, but couldn't figure out how to do it. When Blogger announced a premium version of its service that you could pay for, I subscribed immediately.
I got my money's worth and then some. The official price for Blogger Pro was $50, but by signing up early, I got the introductory rate of $35. It was never clearly stated whether this was a lifetime subscription or would have to be renewed periodically, but I assumed it was annual. And at one point, Blogger was actually sending out renewal notices, because they mentioned them in a news item on their login page. But I never got one. (I subscribed in January of 2002, so a one-year subscription would have expired long ago.)
To mollify any Pro subscribers who are irritated at having paid for something that's now free, Blogger is offering us all free sweatshirts. When I tried to fill out the form to have the shirt mailed to me, I found that the Pro database doesn't recognize my login. I notified Blogger Customer Service of this, and they replied that they couldn't find any record that I subscribed in the first place! That may explain why I never got a renewal notice -- my subscription fell through the cracks somehow, and would presumably have continued forever if they hadn't eliminated the Pro service. (It remains to be seen whether I'll get a sweatshirt or not. Customer Service asked me for the last four digits of the credit card I paid with so that they could investigate further, and I haven't heard back from them yet.)
In recent months, I had actually thought about upgrading Ruth and Ben to Pro status, but $100 seemed like a lot of money to pay for titles and a spell-checker. So I'm very pleased that they're getting those things free of charge. We have Google to thank for this. Since they acquired Blogger last February, the servers have been upgraded, the new Dano interface has been unveiled, and now everyone's a Pro! I don't know what Google hopes to gain from all of this, but if they're trying to generate goodwill, it's certainly working on me.
But what if I want to show my appreciation? There's no way to give Google any money! Oh, wait, there is. I can go to the Google Store and buy stuff. Should I get a beach towel? A golf umbrella? A lava lamp? I'm going to have to think about this. (The store has Blogger items, too. So if I don't get a free sweatshirt, I can always buy one . . .)
UPDATE: I never did get my free sweatshirt.
It's been over a month since my last post here, and I'm not sure when I'll be able to return to regular blogging. This is not from lack of interest, but lack of time and energy. I've recently had five weekends in a row when I was either out of town, involved in all-day activities, or sick. I've found that this sort of thing does more than just screw up your weekends; it also pushes all of the usual weekend tasks like laundry and yard work into the weekday evenings, ensuring that you have no spare time at all. And to make life even more exciting, several of my projects at work have become quite demanding, causing me to stay late on weekday evenings.
Yeah, yeah. Nobody wants to read a litany of excuses. But I thought I should post something here to let my readers (assuming I still have any) know that I haven't given up, and I will be back.
In the meantime, here's a link to a bunny with pancakes on his head. His name is Oolong, and you can see him balancing lots of other things on his head at this site.
I've mentioned before that this site serves a dual purpose. It's my blog, but it's also my home page. By that I mean that in addition to posting my writings here, I also use this site to house the links to the other sites that I visit most often. That list of links over on the left side (what some bloggers refer to as their "blogroll") is there not just because I recommend those sites to you (although I certainly do), but also because I read them regularly myself.
And as my blog-reading habits change, my blogroll evolves. Since redesigning this site a few weeks ago, I have reorganized those links twice, dropped a few because my interest in them had waned, and added new ones that I've discovered. For example, about two weeks ago I removed links to James Hudnall and Reason Hit & Run because I wasn't reading them as much as I used to, and not enjoying them as much when I did. (This isn't an expression of disapproval; they just have dropped out of my lineup of favorites. My blog-reading time is finite, and the less compelling blogs tend to get crowded out.) I added links to Charles Johnson, Russell Wardlow, and Tim Blair because I kept sneaking over to Stephen Green's blog and using his blogroll to get to their blogs. And after reading Orson Scott Card's lucid analysis of the North Korea situation, I decided I wanted to keep an eye on his writings and added him to my blogroll too.
In the last few days, I've been doing more tweaking. I dropped Samizdata and added Susanna Cornett. I also added two sites devoted to news about the military action in Iraq -- Breaking News: War in Iraq and The Command Post. I point this out not because anyone necessarily cares, but because these changes weren't obvious, and those last two sites may prove useful if you're following developments in the war.
My blogroll will continue to mutate whenever it thinks you're not looking. I just thought I should warn you.
UPDATE: For example, since posting this entry earlier today, I've decided that the Breaking News site doesn't measure up, and replaced it with CNN War Tracker.
As you can see, this blog has a new look. There are two reasons for the change. First, I was tired of the old template (especially the three-column layout, which wasted space and didn't really make the blog easier to read). Second, I wanted to expand and reorganize the list of links. Those links aren't here just to encourage you to check out the sites they point to -- they're also there because I use the blog as my own home page, and these are the sites that I go to most often. The new template is much better suited for a long list that breaks down into many categories. I'll continue to tinker with the list as time passes; the new template makes it easy to add or subtract boxes as needed.
Whenever I'm thinking of renovating a blog, I go directly to BlogSkins and browse through the hundreds of excellent blog templates there. Today's makeover consisted mainly of replacing one BlogSkin (Block Head) with another (Floating boxes). My recent makeover of the Smooth Report was made possible by a BlogSkin called Par Avion. I don't have the graphic design talent or the HTML/CSS coding skill to create blog templates like these, but thanks to BlogSkins, I don't have to.
I reported here on January 31 that Blogger was no longer able to publish any of my blogs that were hosted on Road Runner. Now I know why. The following was posted to the Blogger status page on February 3:
Unfortunately, it appears that RoadRunner is now blocking FTP from any non-RoadRunner IPs (including Blogger) to its home.nc.rr.com server where many RoadRunner users host their blogs. If this is affecting you, we encourage you to write to customercare@va.rr.com. We'll keep up the pressure from our end and work on a solution.So my ability to host my blogs on Road Runner was broken because Road Runner deliberately broke it. Wonderful. It's a good thing that, thanks to Virgil, I had somewhere else that I could move those blogs. If Road Runner wanted to reduce my loyalty as a customer and make me more amenable to the idea of switching to another broadband ISP in the future, this was exactly the right way to do that.
At the very least, Road Runner should have warned its subscribers that it planned to start blocking FTP connections from external IPs, instead of just doing so and leaving subscribers to figure out why things like Blogger didn't work any more. Some explanation of why it was doing this also be appreciated -- assuming Road Runner cares at all about how its customers feel.
After two months without any updates to this blog, I finally decided to post something here . . . only to discover that I couldn't. I don't know exactly what has happened, but suddenly I can't publish any of the blogs I maintain that are hosted on Road Runner. (Blogs that reside elsewhere, such as GNO Central, continue to work just fine.) As far as I can tell, Blogger can't establish an FTP connection to Road Runner. But I can use an FTP client to connect to Road Runner manually, just like always. So this is some bizarre problem that only crops up when both Blogger and Road Runner are involved.
I will continue to look into this, but in the meantime, I have moved my blog from Road Runner to the GNO Central server so that it can be updated again. Normal posting (whatever that means) will resume shortly.
UPDATE: The mystery is solved.
I write this blog with no audience in mind beyond my family and friends, but apparently I do have other readers. This became clear today when I received an e-mail from Bruce Loebrich, a Durham blogger who had discovered my blog (he doesn't recall how) and noticed that I live nearby. He informed me that there's a monthly RTP Bloggers' Lunch and invited me to the next one in early September. Other bloggers living in the area are likewise invited, so if you're interested, send Bruce an e-mail. I'm definitely planning to attend.
Bruce's note has me wondering: how many people I've never met are reading this blog? I can't imagine that it's very many, but (since I've never bothered to install a counter) I have no way to know unless I hear from you. Send me an e-mail and tell me how you discovered this blog -- and what on earth possesses you to read it.
This blog's original name, Scribings, was inspired by the Scribe Scroll feat in D&D. The word literally means "writings," but it also suggests writing in a deliberate and careful fashion, as you would do if you were creating a scroll. (In 3rd Edition, one cannot create a scroll in less than a day, so it's definitely a painstaking and time-consuming task.)
That's what the name was supposed to communicate, but it has failed. When people mention this site to me in conversation, they almost always pronounce it "Scribblings." I wince when I hear that, because it means rushed, sloppy writing -- the exact opposite of what I had in mind. I've been thinking of changing the layout of the site anyway, so I may as well rename it at the same time.
"Logopolis" means "city of words." I borrowed it from a classic Doctor Who episode that first aired in 1981 (it's the last one in which Tom Baker, the fourth Doctor, appeared). The new look of this page is the result of applying a template called Block Head, courtesy of BlogSkins.com.
Historical note: Block Head only lasted until February 2003, when I changed the template again. I ditched the name "Logopolis" in May 2007.
Yikes! Thanks to InstaPundit, my name and the URL of this blog are now posted on a site that gets tens of thousands of hits per day. This probably means that some InstaPundit readers will come here looking for distinguished commentary on a par with Dropscan Digest, Inappropriate Response, or Libertarian Samizdata. Boy, are they going to be disappointed. In my defense, I can only say that I never expected to find my name listed in such august company. Glenn Reynolds asked for e-mail from people who were inspired by him to start blogs of their own, and I responded just because I wanted him to know, not necessarily the whole world.
I started this blog as an outlet for random musings, and perhaps to amuse the few friends and family members who knew about it. Unlike most of the other blogs in Reynolds's list, Scribings has been almost completely devoid of political commentary. This is not because I have no political opinions, but because I'm not sure anyone really cares what they are, and also because Reynolds and many other political bloggers (such as Virginia Postrel and Steven den Beste) are much better commentators than I could ever hope to be, and I despair of having anything worthwhile to add to their wisdom.
There are political issues I feel strongly about, though, and perhaps it's time I started letting a little of that bleed into what I post here. I don't have to make this blog a full-time political rant, but neither do I have to hide my politics as if they're something to be ashamed of. I need to think about this.
Update: Now there's a version of the list with hypertext links, including one that points straight here.
Blogger has been experiencing problems lately. For a couple of days this week, publishing (the step in which new content you've posted is actually copied from Blogger's database to your Web site) was only intermittently available. Blogger's servers were overloaded, and as a temporary measure, rolling blackouts were implemented: only half of the users could post at any one time, with the ability rotating every five minutes. This situation was resolved by the installation of new servers, but it was unnerving for those of us who depend on Blogger to maintain our sites.
Today publishing seems to be unavailable again -- trying to do so generates an inscrutable error message. The online help page says that this can be fixed by logging off and back on, but I've tried that and it doesn't work. There is some kind of software problem that will have to be fixed at Blogger's end.
Such problems are always corrected, but it sometimes takes a day or so, because Blogger is currently a one-man operation. Evan Williams does an excellent job of keeping the service running, if you ask me, but he can't be on duty 24 hours a day. This is why I wish Blogger were not operated as a free service. Evan may be able to pay the operating expenses with the money he gets by selling ads, but how long can he continue to run Blogger by himself? Eventually he's going to have to hire some help, and that will require more money. Personally, I think he should charge for blogs that don't have ads, even if they're not hosted at blogspot.com. But perhaps he believes that will drive away his users, which would reduce the amount of interesting content, which would reduce traffic, which would devalue the ads and cost him revenue. And he might be right.
But at the very least he should make it easier for his users to give him money if they want to help support Blogger. Why not implement a "tip jar" like the ones Glenn Reynolds and Virginia Postrel have? Right now, the only way to give Blogger money is to pay $12 a year to have the banner ads removed from your blog, but those ads only appear in the first place if your blog is hosted at blogspot.com. If your provide your own server space (as I'm doing by hosting my blogs at Road Runner), the ads never appear, so you can't pay to get rid of them.
I've been grumbling about this to myself for weeks: I want to give this guy some money, but there's no way to do it! But there turns out to be a loophole. You can get rid of the banner ad on any blog; it doesn't have to be your own. So I paid to remove the ad from Jen's blog. Victory at last! Now let that be a lesson to you, Blogger. The next time I want to give you some money, don't try to stop me!
Oops. I just realized I was so intent on beating the system that I never bothered to tell Jen what I was doing. Maybe she liked those banner ads. I hope she doesn't get mad at me.
Welcome to Scribings, my Web journal. I won't bore you with a long-winded explanation of this page's mission, because it really doesn't have one. Apart from letting me write about whatever I want to -- and letting you read the results, if you're so inclined.
Historical note: "Scribings" was this blog's original title. It was renamed in May 2002, and again in May 2007.
