Posts Tagged: blog posts

The Slow Web Movement

Posted by & filed under tech + web dev, writing + blogs.

Rebecca Blood wrote on “The Slow Web” today:

The Slow Web would be more like a book, retaining many of the elements of the Popular Web, but unhurried, re-considered, additive. Research would no longer be restricted to rapid responders. Conclusions would be intentionally postponed until sufficiently noodled-with. Writers could budget sufficient dream-time before setting pixel to page. Fresh thinking would no longer have to happen in real time.

Go read her article and the cinema post that inspired it.
I am only occasionally interested in blog posts, be it writing them or reading them, that are apart of the hyper-fast web, what has happened right now – usually if it about an earthquake that just happened or a revolution (like Iran last June). I particularly dislike the echo chamber of tech/mobile blog posts that happen within 30 minutes of a press release or a keynote from a company executive.
((yawn))
But blog posts that are written after one has considered the subject, looked at various sides, actually held the device in one’s hand, mused on events & filtered them through experience, thought about the repercussions, and then write an informed opinion piece – now that is good slow web.

Feed Readers, Please Read!

Posted by & filed under writing + blogs.

I know that at least 1/2 if not 2/3rds of my regular readers here use a feed reader to view this blog. Or so says my log files.
Hello folks who read this blog via an RSS, RDF, or Atom feed! Please read the following, click through to the actual post and comment. I have enabled anonymous comments so that I can have your input.
I love you. Thanks for being faithful. I have been trying through the upgrade to Movable Type 4.0 to make sure that y’all have everything you need to read the posts on this blog. Now I would like a vote…
I appreciate how a feed reader makes life easier, but I would like to change my feeds to excerpts only with a link to the full post. Why?
1) Gesault: I love the merging of image / design / text / code of the internet. Black Phoebe :: Ms. Jen is conceived as a loving attempt to combine text, my mobile photography, with my web design. When viewed through a feed reader, unless the css is fully rendered, you are only getting a small portion of the whole.
I look forward to see how folks have combined imagery and design with there content. I generally use a feed reader to let me know when an update has happened then I connect to the actual post so I can see it in its native environment rather than the white and grey of my feed reader.
Do you really like your blog reading in the sterile environment of a feed reader or do you like to see what the blogger has for the whole visual / textual package? Or are many of the blogs on your reading list so poorly designed that the feed reader is a sight for traumatized eyes?
2) Parasites: I have been having a problem lately with unscrupulous humans or bots scraping my full feeds and using my content in their blogs without any proper credit or citation.
I would like to nip this in the bud by only providing an excerpt rather than a full feed. But first I would like to elicit the opinion of my regular readers…
3) Due to image stealing I have put further restrictions on how my images can be used in my feeds via anti-hotlinking .htaccess scripts. I am sorry to my readers who view this in Google Reader, as the images are not coming through at all. On those posts, please click through to see the image.
Vote with your comments and let me know… Do you want a full feed or an excerpt that you click through to is ok?
I would like to weigh your votes with my own desire to have this blog viewed in its native format as well as discourage lazy shits who steal. Let me know… ;o)
Thanks!

The Final Stretch

Posted by & filed under writing + blogs.

Eden sent an email to NaBloPoMo 2007 participants today encouraging us to keep blogging strong to the finish line at the end of the week. I appreciate the encouragement, but I have utterly failed to post daily here at Black Phoebe :: Ms. Jen, due to traveling and a lack of wifi and/or mobile connection. I wanted to, the spirit was willing but the connections and flesh were weak.
Yes, I could have used my US sim chip to blog short notes to this space every night from my phone’s Lifeblog (my UK sim chip does not have the needed email/ISP data plan that Lifeblog requires), but either tiredness or cheapness got the better of me most nights.
My biggest problem with blogging is that I always compose whole posts in my head when I am miles away from my computer and then when I get back and have the time to write it all out, edit, rewrite, and then publish the post, I am too tired or have lost the train of thought or…
Having a Nokia mobile camera phone with internet connection the last three years has greatly helped me to keep my computer from being the black hole of digital photos, as now I can post my photos to this blog or flickr when I take them, but my brain is still a black hole of writing / text / opinion posts. Either I need voice recognition software that will translate recorded ideas into text that then can be posted or I need a direct brain to blog link.
I even have a folder on my desktop with posts that are started but not finished, idea rough drafts, and whole written pieces that need revision before posting. I had hopped to use the November NaBloPoMo challenge to move those posts and ideas out of the folder and on to this space. Sigh.
Well, there is always December and I still owe y’all a bunch of photos from the last 11 days of traveling around Ireland and England. Yeah, that is what I will do on the 10 hour plane ride on Wednesday back to LA, I will edit photos and write posts, if I can wrangle a seat with a power port…