Reply With QuoteI have never seen the point of a journal, online or off. So no.
I'm a bit late to the whole blog party thing, but I finally started one up.
http://gwhitta.blogspot.com/
I was amazed at how easy it was to set up. It'll be interesting to see if I actually maintain it or lose interest after a few weeks as I'm sure so many others do.
Any other QT3 bloggers in attendance?
I have never seen the point of a journal, online or off. So no.
Yes.
Yep.
It kinda sounds fun -- I think I'm quite clever, after all -- but I don't think anybody would actually read it, which puts a damper on the idea.
Don't really have anything very exciting going on in my life right now, anyway.
So...No. But I'm toying with the idea, even as I type this.
If you continue to toy with your ideas as you type, you risk getting the keyboard all sticky.
Ayfirmative.
Ew.
I've toyed with the idea of starting a dream blog. Most the ones around the net are kinda lame lists of 2 sentence descriptions. When I write down a dream I use it kinda as a springboard for an exercise in prose, Still breif, but a lot more developed.
Prospective bloggers might want to check out spaces.msn.com as well. Pretty good blog site for beginners, and those that don't want to do a lot of hacking.
BTW - it works fine with Firefox, but it's one of those sites where you get extra coolness if you use IE. At least when you're setting it up and configuring the way it looks (in IE, or IE based browsers, you can drag-n-drop elements around your blog). There doesn't appear to be a lot of difference when you're reading Spaces blogs, though.
I have started blogs on livejournal and blogspot, and both of them I just kinda let die. I dunno if I'll really start up a new one. I got a MSN Spaces set up, but I haven't actually put anything there yet, and don't know if I will. I was just toying around with it.
My blog: MeisterPlanet, which uses WordPress 1.5 on my own domain.
If I could, I'd love to get more of my friends and family into the habit of using blogs. Your's are probably diferent from mine, but my friends and family tend to be further scattered around the globe, and keeping blogs would make it easier to keep up with people several timezones away.Originally Posted by MattKeil
But even more importantly, it would help make going through my daily email easier. I'd rather they took to using blogs or journals to share their interesting links, humor or general daily personal news for everyone, and use email for when they need to get ahold of me personally.
I like the idea that email is "push content" while a blog is "pull content". With most blogs software making RSS feeds available, you can use many email clients to access both. So if Aunt Sally wants to share her latest news, she could post it on her blog instead of constantly emailing everyone individually. When I feel the desire to find out what's up with her lately, I can click on her blog RSS folder in Mozilla Thunderbird, but otherwise can ignore it, knowing that if she really needs to get in touch with me, she'll send me an email, available through the same program.
I've also come across another use for my blog: If I take the time to do a quick write up about useful bits of information I've come across or figured out on my own and post it, I'm giving something to the community. As a long time Linux user, I've had to really dig for hard to find information on certain uncommon topics, like how to patch games from the long-defunct Loki Games to work under the latest Linux kernels.
When I figure something like that out, or find some neat new web resource, I write it up so it's slightly easier to find and understand for others looking for the same thing. I probably get ten or so hits a day on my sight for those Linux hints and have gotten some positive feedback from people who couldn't find that information otherwise, so for me it's worth the effort.
Is blogging for everyone? Of course not. But it's easy enough that it really can't hurt to try it and simply walk away or ignore it if you don't like it.
Well, what you describe is a useful collation of information and actually something of a service to certain people. I guess most of the people I know (IRL) who have blogs just write down what they did today or how their boyfriend surprised them with roses and wasn't that the sweetest thing OMG! and really I just don't understand why you'd waste the time to write that shit down. Perhaps I equate "blog" too closely with "LiveJournal."
You're right, there are a large number of teenaged-Livejournal-cliche blogs out there. But it's not like this is a new phenomenon that's only come about because of blog software.
Most such software is really just an evolution of content management systems that's allowed people who want to share boring information about themselves to do so on easier basis, but it's still something people have done for a long time.
It's not like we didn't go through nearly a decade of "this is my cat, this is the music I like, this is a page full of animated gifs I copied from someone else" geocities websites with blinking, scrolling text.
Do you mean other than here?
The blog craze just passed me by. I think there are two that I'd bother to go back and read again but for most of them the awkward-ness of actually navigating round the sites puts me off going to them, let alone having one (that and the horror of posting something on it drunk which is sadly inevitable.)
That's what RSS readers are for.
Rules!
Yeah, site syndication feeds, either in RSS or atom form are great for keeping up with sites that support them.
You might want to check out whether the email client you're currently using has the ability to include RSS support. Mozilla Thunderbird has this built in, but you can get plugins for Microsoft Outlook support.
If you're going to use Thunderbird, I do recommend you set it to display the full entry.
There's also this thread from a year ago on opinions of then current RSS newsreaders.
Now, as for Mr. Whitta, consider turning on your atom syndication settings. Blogger.com doesn't have it enabled by default. I believe you can enable RSS support as well through blogstreet.com
[size=2]EDIT: Added Thunderbird configuration suggestion.[/size]
For the record, Mozilla Thunderbird blows as a Newsreader for anything more than a very few blogs. I recently went to Feeddemon and it's the best of any of the ones I tried, including Sharpreader, Thunderbird and RSS Bandit. I especially like the newspaper view to read on one page all unread blog posts, as well as the "Watch" service.
Gary's Atom feed is already on. That said, I've been working with my father on his Blogger blog and, at this point, I'd basically just tell anyone who wants a blog to either open a Typepad account or pay twenty bucks for a domain and some cheap hosting and use Wordpress. Seriously, Blogger is basically crippled - it doesn't support trackbacks, it doesn't automatically ping all the blog collation services, the templates are hard to change and editing links requires manually fugging with the template, there are no plug-ins or spam comment protection features, etc. Wordpress takes like five minutes to install and it is so superior over Blogger I just can't see anyone who wants anything other than an extremely remedial blog using Blogger for very long.
I started blogging late last year and am still tinkering with the format. I try to update at least twice a week, but on a good week I can do content every day.
It's mostly game stuff, though there will likely be some ranting when the Nationals lose their 100th game.
I have about a dozen regular readers - some friends, some colleagues and a couple of strangers - but I hope to increase the traffic. More for vanity than anything else.
Troy
I keep a blog and it's not too bad. The hardest part is updating everyday.
Mine started out as a way to keep friends and family who are scattered across the country up to date on my wife's pregnancy. From there it went to keeping them up to date on my new daughter. I post weekly updates that include photos and (presumably) amusing stories about babyhood and parenthood. I then expanded it a bit to post observations/ideas about my profession (Industrial/Organizational Psychology) and the occasional "gee whiz, look at this" post. I then added a picture of the day that I update almost every day, which has encouraged me to explore photography as a hobby.
I know that my entire family and most of my wife's family read the thing religiously. That would be good enough reason for me to keep doing it, but I also seem to have built up a small base of readers in the form of total strangers. I'll periodically get e-mails or comments from them saying that they like it or that they like the pictures of my daughter or whatever. It's an unintended benefit, but it's nice.
Based on what I've seen, I think the trick to having a "successful" blog (i.e., one that gets lots of traffic, builds a dedicated reader base, and is enjoyable to write) is to focus. Focus on a topic or cluster of related topics that you're interested in so that readers know what they'll find when they come back. Random "slice of life" blogs aren't very interesting unless you're a talented writer, and chances are that you're not. Neither are "link dumps" where you link to another site without comment or commentary. I've got Fark.com and many others for that, thanks.
Blogger seems okay to me so far. It's very easy to post and I like the way you upload pictures via Picasa's embedded IM bot. (Picasa, by the way, is the best picture management/manipulation tool I've ever seen).
Having to get into the guts of the HTML to edit links is a bit of a pain, I can't believe they make you do that. I guess the good thing is that my blog probably will be extremely remedial and so Blogger will be good enough for my purposes.
BTW, what are trackbacks?
An open invitation to spam.
I used to blog weekly back in the ancient days when we called it an "online journal". I guess this was 95-96. I'm happy to say that even the wayback machine did not archive my old website, so all my Koontzian essays have been forever cleansed from the earth. Although, on the other hand, I wish it had, because I had one of the best-designed websites on the planet at the time.
Yeah yeah yeah. Imagine me saying that while rolling my eyes, holding my right hand in the shape of a duck's bill and making it silently quack in conjunction with every sarcastic vowel. They might very well be "open invitations to spam", but that doesn't mean you ever have to fucking deal with it I haven't had a single piece of spam get through that plug-in since I installed it, not even when I was Gizmododed. But this seems to be a fairly popular little war cry for the bizarre anti-blogging community, as if Trackback spam couldn't possibly be guarded against. Spam is the fuzzy white noise in any form of Internet communication and you might need to twirl the dials a few times to filter it out. What else is new?
Gary, a Trackback is basically a functionality blog software has to automatically inform other blogs when you're discussing or linking something they wrote. So if you post about something on my blog, it sends my blog a little message that says "Hey, I'm talking about you". Then an excerpt of your post is posted in the comments section of the article of mine you are discussing. Spam paranoia aside, it's one of the best ways out there to get new readers... if you link a post on a website you enjoy, other people who read that website can now see that you have similar interests and give you a visit. In my opinion, without an RSS feed or the ability to Trackback, a blog isn't a blog... it's just a web page.
No, i don't blog. I don't see any reason to either. Just a question to you bloggers: why? Why do you think people want to read it? Why can't you just write all your stuff in a personal book?
I read blogs of friends, so I guess the answer to your question tmnt, is that people write blogs to let the people they know what their cat is doing, how much moving and/or the government sucks, and to show off their misspelled tattoos. Also to pass along funny links without the faux pas of forwarding email with hundreds of lines of >>>>>>>>>. It's idle chatter without the immediate interactivity. It has its appeal.
Back in the day, online communities would form around pundits, and these pundits' online journals used to be the center pieces for learning and discussion. Examples: David Siegel (website design), Philip Greenspun (photography)
Is that the same way it is now?
Why the hell are you writing crap here then? Why don't you just write it in a personal book and leave us out of it?
Good post captain irony.
:roll:
I posted because i was curious as to why, i'm not ridiculing anyone for doing it.
Ass.
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