2005-6-16
A year as a blogger
Well, I'm delinquent in writing this by a few months, but I've thought several times about the fact that I've been blogging for over a year now. Since then bloggers have been through the entire cycle with the press:
Denial. Blogs don't matter.
Sadness. Why won't blogs go away?
Anger. Blogs aren't legitimate publishers and so on.
Depression. People still keep reading and writing blogs. People are publishing without going through any of the usual channels, and stories we want to kill won't die.
Acceptance. Content that people respond to on blogs are picked up by traditional media.
Who would have known?
I still have trouble really identifying myself as a blogger personally. I really don't understand why it's so revolutionary. Personal Web pages have been around for ten years now; what's so different about blogs? I honestly don't know. I also am barely aware that there are lots of ways to have your blog content picked up by aggregator services and such. The whole trackback thing makes me shrug. I don't mind having a blogroll for my favorite writers and internet friends. That's mainly what blogs are about for me: publishing myself, and finding people who I think are interesting. Of course you then communicate with them via comments or email, which makes blogs just personal publication. It is empowering to just beam your thoughts into the void, and it's nice to find others who think similarly.
The tools are simple enough, or can be. There are plenty of ways to publish yourself armed with a browser. A 12 year old Mac or Windows computer can do it. You can install RSS aggregators into modern browsers, so you can funnel your favorite writers and commercial Web publishers into a pane in your browser and read away. Then there are the client side blog applications.
Radio Userland is a popular client tool, or was a year ago. I installed the trial version on Mac OS 9 on my iBook and found a free server to host it (right here). When the trial ran out I found myself wanting to write again, so I found a free client tool that worked with Radio Userland-compatible servers. See the bzero link on the side of the page. It's a command line tool that needs Notepad or vi or emacs to work. And it is written in Python, so you need a pretty basic Python environment installed. Linuxes and BSDs and OSX can use it as is, haven't tried Windows, but the author Phil Pearson uses it on Windows. I has options to post a picture with title and caption, and allows going back to edit previous posts. You can also just go into your .bzero folder on your computer and edit it manually. Your whole blog lives there, so don't blow it away! I should back mine up soon. I ended up just blogging from my Debian Web server so I don't have to worry about reloading my laptop and losing my blog.
I don't know that I'm part of the blogging 'community' so much. The idea of Web based communities was hot in the '90s, and there are little civilizations all over the place. But they are just fancy implementations of the newsgroup really. You have a theme or title or topic, and people have threads of conversation. Like any civilization or community, it is very human from the big picture. All the humanity is leaking out all over the place. 'Trolls' and 'flamers' and 'lurkers'. The benevolent helpfuls and the grouches, the ones with a constant chip on their shoulder, ready to knock anybody down on a whim. And the foul mouths, and the opinionated who start rhetorically tearing down any idea with a scalpel, even though they have only a molecule of knowledge or experience with the most basic concepts of the statement. The people who are pinned down in real life, but rule when the interface is packets on a wire. And the ones who really want communicate, really have new ideas, really want to do something great, really have the big picture. That have friends and careers and lives, but want to go out into the pool of internet humanity and find like minds. Collaborate. They are the redeemers, the ones that make it worthwhile. The ones that can keep the testosterone and the four letter words within reasonable lines.
That James Bond, he always gets the girl...
I have been on newsgroups since about 2001 probably. Started out on alt.comp.os.slackware and I think alt.autos.porsche or something. Slackware was a good community then, may still be. But as I learned I ended up using OpenBSD, frankly for the cutting edge network technology. If you need evolutionary badass secure redundant network solutions with things like transparent bridging, filtering and logging, things happen there first quite a bit. And at the time I needed things for my work, and OpenBSD had them. The community leaves some to be desired in some ways. Bunch of tin-foil-hat alpha-geeks. Led by somebody who has never ever been able to control his mouth, even when it hits him right in the pocket book. Their idea of helping newbies is "Read The F!@#ing Manual. If you're too dumb to figure it out yourself, go away and use somebody else's stuff." If somebody gets frustrated because something doesn't work well, the answer is "That is broken. Shut up and write a patch to fix it." But maybe that is what technical forums should evolve to, and do. We have documentation, we have source code. Here is a link to the documentation. We have all read it, you will have to as well. Then you will know. If the documentation doesn't help, read the source code. Put print statements in it and build it yourself. Figure out how it works. You don't get the teenagers who whine and cuss because they didn't intuitively figure it out. They are not coddled. They are ignored.
There are some interesting people doing interesting things out in this world. If you look you can find out about some of them on the internet. And some of them blog. Maybe you can learn something. You certainly won't learn much about such things from traditional media. Only the mainstream survives there.
Enough. I would like to talk about how I grew up rurally WAY pre-internet, and how I don't know how I managed to even squeeze what drops of knowledge I got from my surroundings out. And how if I had been in a more enlightened environment Linux would be named after me, and I would have written a C compiler for the Commodore VIC 20, and vi, and an assembler/linker/loader, and a RAM file system, and reinvented music, and...
But kids have the internet now. I hope they find some of the interesting people doing interesting things. In spite of their computer always pointing them to http://msn.com.
... more like this: [foo]
Denial. Blogs don't matter.
Sadness. Why won't blogs go away?
Anger. Blogs aren't legitimate publishers and so on.
Depression. People still keep reading and writing blogs. People are publishing without going through any of the usual channels, and stories we want to kill won't die.
Acceptance. Content that people respond to on blogs are picked up by traditional media.
Who would have known?
I still have trouble really identifying myself as a blogger personally. I really don't understand why it's so revolutionary. Personal Web pages have been around for ten years now; what's so different about blogs? I honestly don't know. I also am barely aware that there are lots of ways to have your blog content picked up by aggregator services and such. The whole trackback thing makes me shrug. I don't mind having a blogroll for my favorite writers and internet friends. That's mainly what blogs are about for me: publishing myself, and finding people who I think are interesting. Of course you then communicate with them via comments or email, which makes blogs just personal publication. It is empowering to just beam your thoughts into the void, and it's nice to find others who think similarly.
The tools are simple enough, or can be. There are plenty of ways to publish yourself armed with a browser. A 12 year old Mac or Windows computer can do it. You can install RSS aggregators into modern browsers, so you can funnel your favorite writers and commercial Web publishers into a pane in your browser and read away. Then there are the client side blog applications.
Radio Userland is a popular client tool, or was a year ago. I installed the trial version on Mac OS 9 on my iBook and found a free server to host it (right here). When the trial ran out I found myself wanting to write again, so I found a free client tool that worked with Radio Userland-compatible servers. See the bzero link on the side of the page. It's a command line tool that needs Notepad or vi or emacs to work. And it is written in Python, so you need a pretty basic Python environment installed. Linuxes and BSDs and OSX can use it as is, haven't tried Windows, but the author Phil Pearson uses it on Windows. I has options to post a picture with title and caption, and allows going back to edit previous posts. You can also just go into your .bzero folder on your computer and edit it manually. Your whole blog lives there, so don't blow it away! I should back mine up soon. I ended up just blogging from my Debian Web server so I don't have to worry about reloading my laptop and losing my blog.
I don't know that I'm part of the blogging 'community' so much. The idea of Web based communities was hot in the '90s, and there are little civilizations all over the place. But they are just fancy implementations of the newsgroup really. You have a theme or title or topic, and people have threads of conversation. Like any civilization or community, it is very human from the big picture. All the humanity is leaking out all over the place. 'Trolls' and 'flamers' and 'lurkers'. The benevolent helpfuls and the grouches, the ones with a constant chip on their shoulder, ready to knock anybody down on a whim. And the foul mouths, and the opinionated who start rhetorically tearing down any idea with a scalpel, even though they have only a molecule of knowledge or experience with the most basic concepts of the statement. The people who are pinned down in real life, but rule when the interface is packets on a wire. And the ones who really want communicate, really have new ideas, really want to do something great, really have the big picture. That have friends and careers and lives, but want to go out into the pool of internet humanity and find like minds. Collaborate. They are the redeemers, the ones that make it worthwhile. The ones that can keep the testosterone and the four letter words within reasonable lines.
That James Bond, he always gets the girl...
I have been on newsgroups since about 2001 probably. Started out on alt.comp.os.slackware and I think alt.autos.porsche or something. Slackware was a good community then, may still be. But as I learned I ended up using OpenBSD, frankly for the cutting edge network technology. If you need evolutionary badass secure redundant network solutions with things like transparent bridging, filtering and logging, things happen there first quite a bit. And at the time I needed things for my work, and OpenBSD had them. The community leaves some to be desired in some ways. Bunch of tin-foil-hat alpha-geeks. Led by somebody who has never ever been able to control his mouth, even when it hits him right in the pocket book. Their idea of helping newbies is "Read The F!@#ing Manual. If you're too dumb to figure it out yourself, go away and use somebody else's stuff." If somebody gets frustrated because something doesn't work well, the answer is "That is broken. Shut up and write a patch to fix it." But maybe that is what technical forums should evolve to, and do. We have documentation, we have source code. Here is a link to the documentation. We have all read it, you will have to as well. Then you will know. If the documentation doesn't help, read the source code. Put print statements in it and build it yourself. Figure out how it works. You don't get the teenagers who whine and cuss because they didn't intuitively figure it out. They are not coddled. They are ignored.
There are some interesting people doing interesting things out in this world. If you look you can find out about some of them on the internet. And some of them blog. Maybe you can learn something. You certainly won't learn much about such things from traditional media. Only the mainstream survives there.
Enough. I would like to talk about how I grew up rurally WAY pre-internet, and how I don't know how I managed to even squeeze what drops of knowledge I got from my surroundings out. And how if I had been in a more enlightened environment Linux would be named after me, and I would have written a C compiler for the Commodore VIC 20, and vi, and an assembler/linker/loader, and a RAM file system, and reinvented music, and...
But kids have the internet now. I hope they find some of the interesting people doing interesting things. In spite of their computer always pointing them to http://msn.com.