Blogging Like Nobody's Watching

While I do blog under the title “indolence log” for a reason, I’ve been a bit unhappy with how little I’ve managed to blog since April – barely managing one post a month. That drop-off coincided pretty sharply with getting elected DPL, and my best guess at the reasoning is that I’ve associated blogging with getting aggregated by Planet Debian, and the implication that I need to be careful about anything I might say. And that’s pretty much in conflict with how I prefer to blog, so I’ve been thinking over the last few days about whether I should deaggregate myself from Planet Debian to help avoid that tendency. So far it seems like just remembering what my blog’s about is enough, but we’ll see.

Of course, it’s hard to blog like no one’s watching when you do a quick post about todo lists, and get half a dozen replies in your inbox and elsewhere. Anyway, I stumbled upon gtodo (a simple gtk based todo app) after posting, probably not for the first time, and found it actually had all the field I wanted, and nothing else. I’ve tweaked the source a little (to include the weekday name in the date field, and only include the comments in the tooltips), and so far it looks like exactly what I specced out. We’ll see if that works for me over the next few weeks…

Some Tweaks

I tried making some minor tweaks. Tables have been replaced with CSS; ugh, what an absolutely horrible control language. Tables are more elegant. Oh well.

Also added some Google ads down the side – they’ve already made more than the single 1c donation the PayPal button managed to elicit. Interestingly, the Google Ads terms of service are very explicit about not drawing attention to your Google Ads. So whatever you do, don’t look at them! Please! Or something like that.

Two Years!

Well, that’s the second year of blogging down. Over a hundred thousand words, across a couple of hundred posts!

(In the Advantage: Inchoate column, though, David’s blog’s had one hundred and fifty thousand words or so, across almost a thousand posts and updates. Wow!)

UPDATE 2005/05/27:

David points out that it's actually over a thousand posts and updates now. Ooops. But on the other hand, I've posted lots of pictures: counting them using the standard conversion factor, I'm up to something like 280,000 words! Phwoar!

Trackbacks

Wow; I thought David getting a hit from the Troppo Armadillo was cool (not to mention the rest of his growing fan club), but now the other David gets slapped in the face with the velvet glove of the Mistress of Hollywood Babylon herself?

Laxness

I haven’t been blogging much lately; and for some reason I feel obliged to note that for a change that this is neither a forthright demonstration of languid apathy, nor even an expected consequence of a surfeit of other things to do. Oh well, what we can’t manage in frequency or regularity, will presumably be made up for in quantity sooner or later.

First Birthday!

I made my first post to this blog a year ago yesterday. I think it’s pretty appropriate to have commemorated such a momentous anniversary by not blogging at all yesterday.

See More

I’ve been using the SeeMore plugin mostly for moving my travelblog pictures to separate pages, because even on broadband they’re a nuisance to download and scroll through all the time. But now that my blog’s “syndicated” I feel kind-of obliged not to fill up the planet with long essays, which means splitting longish techy essays after the first paragraph; but that isn’t really what I want my blog to look like.

I could make RSS feeds always be short, but that doesn’t really seem like the right solution either; in fact for the non-aggregated case it might be better for RSS feeds to always be long, even for the travelblog case. Which gives me four scenarios: RSS feeds which should show everything; normal web viewing which should show essays, but not photoessays; seemore web viewing which should show everything; and aggregator feeds which should only show the first paragraph or two.

I think MovableType automatically only includes the first paragraph (or few sentences even) in RSS feeds. I wonder if there’s a good way of doing something similar in blosxom.

SmartyPants and Titles

Hrm, the Planet aggregators don’t seem to like smartquotes in titles. So I’ve disabled them. Lame.

Fake Categories

The Planet Debian aggregator has confused me a bit – it’s meant to be a “community” thing, and be about things that aren’t directly Debian related, but on the other hand, I ramble on about boring Australian political stuff that can be pretty boring. Up until now Planet Debian has just snarfed my Debian section, but that means it misses out on the not-Debian-specific but still relevant/interesting posts I put up. So I got fed up tonight, and made up a new fake categories plugin so I can say exactly what categories should be included. It’s pretty cool, I think. It works by having a planetdebian.cat file in your blosxom datadir that looks like:

copyright
debian
links
meta
travelblog

that just specifies the relevant categories. You access it by asking for the planetdebian category, a la http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/blog/planetdebian. Flavours and such Just Work. Sweet.

Keeping Up with the Joneses

Good lord. Challenged with this massive redesign, incorporating a near 100% decrease in oh-so-lameness, all I can come up with are a few minor tweaks (mostly: titles are permalinks and you can hover over the title to see the section. woo. excitement). Oh well, there was a reason I chose to name my blog as I have.

Advantage: Inchoate.

Musing about Musing

One of the things I like about blogging is that there’s no requirement to do a good job – it’s just my ramblings, on my website, covering whatever my fancies might run to. That’s particularly nice in that it gives me somewhere to just whine or ponder about whatever I might like – I’m not obliged to censor myself because my friends or colleagues mightn’t be interested, or because I don’t have any clue what I’m talking about. Blogs are meant to be the ignorant rambling of the proletariat.

On the other hand, various folks do read my blog now. Which means there are people to potentially annoy or offend if I say something stupid, and things I express poorly might end up having an effect instead of disappearing into the ether.

I’ve not been using my debian section very consistently for much this reason, I think: it isn’t a really natural fit with the rest of my blog. Blogging does seem a good fit to hacking, though. Maybe I should try some “changelog blogging” as I hack on debootstrap; though perhaps it’d be a good idea to get a public arch repository for that setup first to avoid being too much of a tease. Might be a good idea to get my “working copy” to actually work again too.

Validation

Wow. It’s good to be number one!

Interestingly, there are 3370 hits (almost six times as many!) when you do that search for equivalent “liberal” blogs. Yet another example of the disgusting strangle-hold through which the irresponsible liberal media attempts to mould the minds of mankind. (Hat tip: Rhys Arkins)

I Want

One feature I’d really like for my blog is a micro web.archive.org that just caches the pages I link to (along with any graphics, frames, embedded junk, stylesheets and whatever else they might contain that affects how they display), so that I can have blosxom automagically redirect the link to my cached copy if and when the link goes stale.

Only problem is there doesn’t seem to be any software around that can just spider a single page and all the gumph that’s on it, but not anything it links to. Worse, that’s a Hard Problem, requiring a real HTML parser. Oh well.

UPDATE 2003/11/14:

So Clinton pointed me at wget's -p option, which does what I want. How cool! A modicum of futzing around is required but this is actually doable. Sweet.

Objective Curley

White Glenn linked to a Veteran’s Day story about the leadership shown by Captain Harry (Zan) Hornbuckle. It’s an impressive story: a group of soldiers are thrown together, given very little time to coalesce as a team, told to secure an area, come under heave attack (300 against 80), and end up saving the day. There’s even a point where hope seems lost, but is suddenly recovered by the arrival of reinforcements.

But hey, you don’t need me to tell you that, you can go read it. What I wanted to say was in response to the first sentence of that article:

Reader and Rocket Man colleague John Beukema directs our attention to a page-one story by Jonathan Eig in today’s Wall Street Journal, “Why you’ve heard of Jessica Lynch, not Zan Hornbukckle.”

But reading that story, I started getting a sense of deja vu – that I had actually heard it before. Turns out I was right, the story had already circulated around the Internet; eg Sgt Stryker linked to the StrategyPage description on June 10th. Advantage: blogosphere.

UPDATE 2003/11/15:

Here's a better rendition of the WSJ story.

Footnote URLs

So, one thing which annoys me a bit about writing blog entries is the way the horrible markup for links screws up the formatting of the entries as I see it in the editor. It makes a couple of words take up a whole line, and screws up the word-wrapping, and makes things unreadable. Which sucks. So I wrote a cool new plugin that lets me instead write things like:

... So I wrote a <#1>cool new plugin</#1> that lets me instead write things like: ...

<!-- links:
#1: http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/blosxom/plugins/footnoteurl/
--!>

Which seems much more pleasant. I had actually thought there was already a plugin that did this, but apparently not. I certainly can’t see anything like it now.

Blosxom Updates Plugin

So, since it still seems like a cool idea, I decided to write a plugin for blosxom to let me do after-the-fact updates to blog entries in the instapundit style.

You can download the code if you like. It supports most of the features thought up in the molelog comments: you can call the updates blah-1.txt so that if the plugin isn’t present they’ll still show up, and if the plugin is present, have them optionally show up as blog entries of their own as well as updates. Or you can set it up to call them blah-1.upd and have them never appear as blog entries of their own (which is how I’m setup now).

Sweet.

Ben on Blogging

Ben Fowler recently opined on blogging. Unfortunately he did a pretty poor job of it, and doesn’t seem inclined to provide corrections on his own; and given it was probably in response to something I wrote, I’m inclined to offer some rebuttals.

Ben’s first mistake, is that he neglected to offer any external links in his entire discussion. While that’s common in professional journalism, it’s very poor form in blogging. It’s also one of the wins of blogging: it makes it very easy for the reader to refer to sources and form his or her own opinion. So let’s provide the context Ben didn’t: here are some of the posts that Ben’s presumably refering to.

Ben is attempting to refute the promise of blogging for bypassing conventional media and giving the unwashed masses a hope of getting news unfiltered by an elite agenda. His first tack is this:

It is the job of the professional journalist to gather news, interpret it and present it. They operate in a highly-evolved (but nonetheless imperfect) environment of standards of fairness, even-handedness and integrity. […]

It does not appear to me that bloggers feel the need to do as much fact-checking or be as honest or fair as conventional media, nor would they expect to be, since blogs tend to be, by their very nature, highly subjective.

This is an exceedingly odd time to be proclaiming the fairness, even-handedness and integrity of professional journalism. We have the Jason Blair scandal at the New York Times, the News We Kept to Ourselves scandal at CNN, the sexed up reporting scandal currently unfolding at the BBC, and biassed coverage by the ABC. Or, without quite the same currency, perhaps the review of Walter Duranty’s Pulitzer Prize for covering up the death of millions for access to a dictator might raise an eyebrow. On the other hand, if you’re looking for bias in big media that’s paraded proudly instead of cowering in shame, surely you don’t need to look any further than Fox News?

It’s probably impossible to reliably get an unbiassed newsfeed: at the very least as soon as you get an audience, you have to strongly resist random folks trying to use your influence to spread their personal views, whether they be reporters, anchors, or management. And on the other hand, most people tend to prefer getting news that matches their own prejudices, so that news reporters have an incentive to add at least some bias; whether that be to always mentions the costs of activities in Iraq (“this boy lost his arm in today’s targetted bombing”), or to evaluate events primarily in their larger-scale impact (“today’s targetted bombing is aimed at reducing the effectiveness of Saddam’s command and control capabilities in Southern Iraq”). (Both example quotes are purely hypothetical)

Ben continues:

To attempt to assimilate and understand the news in an objective way, a reader would have to read a vast amount of material and then draw his own conclusions. This is unlikely, because most of us have lives and jobs, we tend to read material that we agree with, and bloggers tend to move in packs (the war-bloggers being a decent example).

I was watching The West Wing when the first plane struck the World Trade Centre on 2001-9-11, and flicked to the news on another channel during an ad break when no one yet had any good idea what was happening. I spent the next few hours switching between various news channels (CNN, Fox, BBC, Sky and rebroadcasts of the same on the free-to-air stations) and swearing and speculating on IRC. Over the next week or so I started watching TV news a little more regularly, and got addicted to reading the ABC website and the CNN website. I maintained at least the ABC habit up until discovering the wonders of blogs; and at this point I tend to get my news from Tim Blair’s blog and InstaPundit. I’m also inclined to believe I’m much better informed, and I’m definitely able to form much more coherent opinions about current events than before, probably because both those sites have a much broader range of news sources than I did, and appear to be much better at selecting interesting news and opinion than both ABC and CNN.

Naturally, your mileage may vary.

This leads into Ben’s next claim:

Of course, a typical example would be Tim Blair, a washed up journalist reject who was once hired by the Australian ABC, laughably, as a ‘right-wing Phillip Adams’. It turned out that Tim Blair didn’t make the cut and had his contract not renewed. The poor sod now runs a very popular blog (where he gets to bash Aunty and sneer at Arabs and little-L liberals), which of course suits everybody right down to the ground, because he is no longer restricted by journalistic rules of fair play, fact-checking, intellectual honesty and the like, and most normal people can safely ignore him.

Failing to link to Tim Blair’s site here is a pretty egregious sin – surely we want to encourage our readers to be able to check our facts, to ensure we’re not going to get away with just making shit up, right?

Anyway, way back in the day (June 2002), Tim wrote the following entry:

RUN FOR your lives! Genetically-modified seeds are coming! They’ll destroy us all!

That was the tone of The 7.30 Report’s piece last week on GM seeds and their unholy menace. Reporter Sarah Clarke located a GM victim:

PERCY SCHEMEISER, CANADIAN CANOLA FARMER: It has destroyed our market of canola in many countries of the world.

All of the European common market will not buy one bushel of canola from us. That means 30 per cent of our exports have been lost just to Europe alone.

SARAH CLARKE: Canadian farmer, Percy Schmeiser became a GM canola producer by accident.

His crop was contaminated by pollen from a neighbouring genetically modified crop.

Any complaints he may have had were steamrolled by Monsanto, which successfully sued to seize his crop.

PERCY SCHEMEISER: I lost it all to a contamination because a judge ruled in my case it doesn’t matter how Monsanto’s genetically modified canola gets on my land or any farmers land.

SARAH CLARKE: Australian farmers are now being warned by Percy Schmeiser that they too could become victims of genetic contamination.

Did The 7.30 Report research Mr. Schmeister’s claims? Far from being a tragic target of the genetically-modified seed bullies, a court in Canada found that he’d used GM seed without payment. The claim that his crop had been accidentally contaminated was convincingly refuted. Schmeister is a common seed fraud.

Fair play? Intellectual honesty? Fact checking? It’s a common saying in the computer security industry that the illusion of security is worse than no security. Is the illusion of integrity so much better in news reporting?

For reference, the court’s determinations on the facts contradict Schmeiser’s claims. This particular example is of interest to me since I’d read about it a number of times from a number of sources (slashdot and The Register particularly) and was reasonably incensed about it, which I would not have been had my sources not been either incompetent or dishonest.

Ben continues, rather incoherently:

[…] Any dickhead with an agenda can set up a blog, and they often do.

This probably explains the very large right-wing pundit and blogger community: it’s an extension of Alan Jones or John Laws (Rush Limbaugh for the Americans).

Ben seems to have completely missed the large left-wing pundit and blogger community he participates in, advogato. Most techy blogs out there are pretty left-wing as far as I can see: slandering Howard or Bush, or decrying the “overarching greed” of corporations, hoping for government funding, or getting arrested at protests. Outside of Advogato there’re plenty of other lefty techy blogs, but I’m not in the mood to look for links.

And hey, there’s nothing wrong with any of that – one of the benefits of blogging is that it’s easy to find people writing about things you’re interested in from many perspectives, which is completely impossible in twenty second news clips, and far from usual in papers. The only thing that is wrong, is that Ben seems a touch blinded by his prejudices, which is always a mistake.

The Internet now gives any old joe too lazy to think for himself or consider the perspectives, feelings or rights of others the opportunity to sound off (and gullible people to believe their self-serving rhetoric) without being criticised by the hated shiny-arsed ‘elite’ academic types for being stupid, insensitive, wilfully ignorant and lazy.

Ben might be comfortable with being too lazy to think for himself, or consider the perspectives, but most people aren’t. Whether they do or not, and whether they’re successful when they do are other matters, but they generally seem to apply equally whether you’ve got a press pass or not.

Or, for that matter, whether you’re a member of the academy, who’re also quite capable of being ignorant, irrational or biassed. Towards the latter, from the book Australian Politics by Owen E. Hughes:

In Australia, the parties of the Right have received less academic attention than has the ALP. This may be because the majority of poltiical scientists and historians have been sympathetic to the ALP. As Henderson argues “what few books there are on the Liberal Party and its leaders tend to be written by those whose political sympathies are on the Left.” (37) He argues: (38)

The intellectual weakness of Australian conservatism is reflected in the Liberal Party. The consequences of the Liberal Party’s traditional indifference to ideas can be seen in the fact that is has had so few public supporters among the intelligentsia or chattering classes – except on the narrow matters of economics.

[…]

(37) Henderson, Menzies Child, p322.
(38) Henderson, p323.

This is, of course, assuming we’re going for “fairness, even-handedness and integrity”, rather than views filtered through an “elite agenda”. In any event, the opposition of the academy isn’t particularly interesting on any level. It’s certainly not able to impact any blogs, but whatever impact it already has on newspapers isn’t particularly effective either, given the ALP’s long years in the wilderness both before and after the Hawke government.

Like it or hate it, the conventional media, despite it’s flaws is probably here to stay, and like pet rocks and hula-hoops, the blog will die a quiet and lonely (if not slightly overdue) death, at least in it’s vain, hyped, hypertropied-ego form.

Ooo, look: a prediction. Ben thinks blogs will die. Presumably because regular news sources are better. But that’s not enough for blogs to die: for that, people not only have to not read them, but have to stop writing them. Ben’s already demonstrated that not being wildly popular isn’t enough reason for a blog to disappear: he’s maintained his own for three years, and well over two hundred entries already without any expectation of a high level of interest.

Anyway, Ben’s just reiterating Rush Limbaugh’s take on blogging.

Wow

This is sure a nice thing to say:

Ok, before I get blown out of the water too comprehensively, I must note that aj’s blog is a bit of a special case. There is just no way that I could write so fluently and fluidly as many words as he does each day. Well, maybe I could, if I found a dark, quiet room with running coffee and alcohol and made a rule that I couldn’t leave unless I’d written five thousand words. I’d have to quit my job, stop playing sport…

I’m also surprised by aj’s relatively strong command of political analysis. Anil, should you read this, would you do me a favour and read what he writes? I’d like to know if it’s complete waffle or whatever.

When I write about neo-con stuff, I should note that I’m (ab)using the term to mean “newly conservative”, since I’ve only been inclined in the small-government, capitalist, minimal state-assistance, etc viewpoint for a few months now. Almost everything I know about politics comes from the sources linked on the sidebar, and my own critical thought, neither of which are things you ought to be relying on too heavily, let alone exclusively.

Oh, I should also note that there’s no way I’m going to be updating this on a daily basis with any regularity.

Aggregation

What would be really cool, is an aggregator that can collect your various favourite RSS feeds, categorise them (by author, and by subtopic), your various favourite webcomics, and random other information (weather at least) and present it in a “newspapery” format. That’s “really cool” in the “not necessarily effective, pleasant or useful” sense, of course.

Pictures and such

Is it just me, or is there something really unpleasant about seeing huge blocks of text in a blog, that aren’t broken up by pictures, or new headings or quotes from elsewhere? I suppose a “…read more” link would work, but I tend to find that a real nuisance. I wonder why I don’t mind Steven den Beste’s site, since it’s mostly long essays. Actually, Steven’s site is broken up – by updates in different font sizes, and cites and links to source material, and the occassional picture. And there are bits of gray on both sides of his page, and a pretty picture at the top. Maybe that’s the trick: have a picture at the top to catch your eye, then once they get into the reading, they don’t care that it’s not pretty.