Category: Weblog

I wrote up a review for Rebecca Blood’s book on weblogs, The Weblog Handbook. Rebecca linked to my review, but people seemed more interested in my theory that weblogs started with .plan files.
Virulent Memezilla discussed the idea a bit. Graham of VM brings up the good point that signatures also were a form of personal expression that changed regularly. He also linked to a post by Anthony Hicks that discusses the role of .plan files as the precursor to weblogs.
Plep thought it was a good enough insight to rate linkage.
Radio Free Blogistan wasn’t so much interested in .plan files, but seems to have gotten quite enthused about tracking the term ‘navel gazing’ I used in the review.
I was also surprised to see links from two places I had never heard of before, Weblog Bookwatch and All Consuming. Both sites appears to scan weblogs looking for links about specific books. In this case, I think it was the fact that I linked to both Rebecca Blood’s book, The Weblog Handbook and Matt Haughey’s book, We Blog: Publishing Online with Weblogs, that I popped up on those site.
It’s an interesting concept to have meta-blogs that automatically scan for various bits of data and synthesize an analysis of what people are posting. After many false starts, perhaps the age of intelligent agents is upon us.

I had to take the day off from work today due to my eyes. I’m still just wearing the contact in my right eye. Yesterday it was hurting all day. I had to give it a rest. Unfortunately without my contacts I can’t see. Even if I tried to wear my glasses at work, I wouldn’t be able to drive the freeway with my glasses on. Overall suckage…
Right now I’m squinting at the screen from about 8 inches away.
Michele asked me to help put up the border wallpaper in the kids room with her. She had also shanghaied her cousin James into the wallpaper effort earlier and decided to add me to her crew since I was home. I put on my glasses and we spent a couple hours spashing the walls with wallpaper glue. It’s done now and the border looks good. Pictures to come when I get the chance. Michele was so please with the outcome she went out and got In ‘n Out burgers for lunch.
More later…

We got back a few minutes ago from a small party at our friends house. They recently moved into a new house. They moved only a block, but the new house is bigger and has more land. It’s the first time we’ve visited since they moved and they really put a lot of work into fixing it up. The kids all had a great time and it was good to hang out and talk with friends.
Last night, I went and saw XXX with Martin and Len. We debated on whether to see Goldmember or Pluto Nash, but we ended up seeing XXX since it’s the kind of movie to see on the big screen. It’s not a bad movie. I enjoyed it and had some good laughs. A couple night ago I finally watched Pitch Black on DirecTV and understood why people thought Vin Diesel was going to be a big action star. I had seen him in Fast & Furious and Boiler Room and was unimpressed. He was good in Pitch Black and I look forward to those sequels.
XXX is just a modern version of James Bond, right down to the specific characters. Samuel Jackson plays the M role and a geeky dude plays the Q role. Everything was typical Bond hyperbole and over the top stunt action. I was hoping for a new twist on the spy thriller, but there wasn’t much out of the ordinary. Nevertheless, it was fun.
Lastly, I recently finished the book on Salt I had been reading. The book was long and took me about two months to get through. Everyone around me at work and home has had to endure my stroies about salt while I’ve been reading the book. The writer, Mark Kurlansky, definitely did his research and it shows. There is nothing left for me to learn about salt, I now know it all. If you like reading history, you’ll probably enjoy this book. If you are looking for action and adventure, this ain’t your book.
The funny thing is that as long as it took to read this book and the chore that it was to finish it, I find myself interested in his book on cod. Evidently, the cod fish drove much of the economic development of North America and the eventually collapse of the fishing banks. Someone stop me before I buy another 300 page history book…

If you look to the right —>
You’ll see a search box. You can now search through the annals of Cruft history easily. I’ll pretty it up when I get time. So if you are getting here via an external search engine, you can try finding what you are looking for via my search box.

In my last post I mentioned how great my wife was for squeezing in painting when the girls weren’t home. This morning I walked out back and caught a glipse of a familiar blue color. Yep, it was a blue Makita tool case. Hrrm, I own a few Makita tools, but I don’t have a case like that.
I walked over and noticed my Black & Decker sander next to the blue case. It’s the sander I used to redo the spa a while ago. I opened the case to find a new Makita sander just like the one we already had.
I asked Michele if she bought the new sander. I knew she had, but I wanted to hear her reasoning. She said that Len and I had ‘runined and broke’ the old sander and that she needed a new one. I asked her how she could have bought a new power tool without me. I mean c’mon of all the shopping we do about the only thing I like to shop for is electronics and power tools. She gets to make all the other choices. She told me to shut up and go to work.
Now I’m at work and I don’t know which sander she bought. I bet she didn’t even know how many choices she had…

Michele’s been busting her ass in the house. The kids are going off to camp during the days, leaving time for Michele to do what she wants. What she wants to do redo the girls room.

I updated several info type pages this evening.
I updated What’s Cruftbox? Where’s pusateri.org? , What is Cruft? , Cruft FAQ , and About Me.
Enjoy.

So a while ago I was walking in beautiful downtown South Pasadena on my way to the school board meeting when I saw this…

So, I’m going to rewrite the FAQ. But I need to know what questions are frequently asked. I know there is concern over such monumentous issues as how I order the links to the left. But I feel there are other questions just waiting to be asked out there, hovering in cyberspace.
Please let me know what other questions you have. The comments thingie should work just fine for this.

I was pondering a few things about weblogs and wrote a couple emails off to Rebecca Blood and Matt Haughey. They are fairly well known experts about weblogs.
After exchanging a few emails, I decided to buy their books on weblogs. Rebecca’s book, The Weblog Handbook, came quickly from Amazon. Matt’s book, We Blog: Publishing Online with Weblogs, comes out this week and has not arrived
I took Thursday off for my aborted geocaching trip, so I was happy when The Weblog Handbook arrived in the mail. I grabbed a soda pop and began to read. The book is only 160 pages so I was able to read it during the day. I’m a fast reader and I was familiar with the material, so it went quickly. Here’s my book review
Rebecca’s book has some really good information in it. At first, I thought, is there enough info about weblogs to write an entire book about? After reading it, it can definitely say there is.
The book goes over the origins of weblogs and identifies the different types. I’ve been on the web a long time and thought I knew everything there was to know about weblogs. I wrote my first weblog type post back in 1997. The first couple chapters go into good detail about exactly what happened.
I disagree a little about the origins of weblogs though. I’ve been wasting time on the internet since 1991. Back in the day, everything was text based. To learn about someone else on the net, one of the first things you could do was to ‘finger‘ them. When you fingered someone, you’d get a basic set of info they had written to identify themselves. One of the files that could be used was known as the .plan file. The plan file was a relic of the time when the net was primarily an academic place. A .plan would be used to describe the plan of study. As the scope of the net became larger, the plan files became something that people could change a bit more regularly to reflect what was going on. Before there were webcams, you could finger devices on the net, like a coke machine, and the .plan would describe their status.
In my mind, these .plan files were the true origin of weblogs. It’s a bit of a stretch to see it if you have never lived in the pre-browser internet. But trust me, it’s true.
Enough of my navel gazing, back to the book. Rebecca has some sound advice for someone wanting to start a weblog or make their existing weblog better. I thought the chapter on Finding an Audience is great. She is absolutely correct that regular visitors are the currency of weblogs. Whether people like to admit it or not, what people are craving with weblogs is attention. Everyone checks their referrer logs. If someone doesn’t check their referrer logs, it’s because they don’t know how.  She lists several good and practical methods to get people to visit your site and what to expect when they eventually do come.
The chapter on Weblog Community and Etiquette should be required reading before you can join blogger.com or start any other form of weblog.  I think the idea of having an ethical code for your weblog is a good one.  Since my weblog is kinda fluffy, I don’t really run into these issues much.  But there are many people who write about serious issues and they should at least attempt to have a code that they try to adhere to on an ongoing basis. I have read many sites that post anything without the least attempt to verify it’s truthfulness.

On a more practical note, the book is full of helpful tips and how-tos for someone learning the basics of weblogging and online community.  It’s long enough to be worth the money, but it’s short enough to finish the whole thing in a couple sittings.  The three appendix sections do a good job of explaining the basics of creating a weblog, creating hyperlinks, and using third party weblog software.

I wholeheartedly recommend the book to anyone that finds weblogging interesting.