FAQ

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.

Rebecca Blood’s Weblog Handboook

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.

Happiness

In a test of TrackBack, I refer to my brother’s post Dot-coms to hot-dogs? on his site.
He’s talking about how many previously rich dotcommers are now finding jobs in less high tech, more service sector areas like selling food. Matt seemed to think this sounded gloomy.
My response was:
“Well I don’t think it’s so entirely depressing. America is unlike the rest of the world where wealth often takes precedence over personal time.
The rest of the world seems to be having much more fun and taking many more vacations than us.
The real question is are the people happy in their new jobs. If so, then it’s probably a good thing. Life is short. Far too short to waste most of your time focused on a bank balance instead of a balanced life.”
Maybe I just need a vacation…

Funny

Here’s the funniest thing I’ve read on the net in a while:

“I think fanfic writers rank just below Everquest players and people who design webpages about their cats.”

-Squidward, on fark.com

A thin piece of plastic

Readers of this page will probably remember the trouble I am having with my eyes. Since April, I’ve struggling with my eyes due to keratoconus and the fit of my special contact lenses. By wearing the ill-fitting lenses, I got a corneal ulcer on my left eye that took a few weeks to heal.

The company that makes the special lenses I wear stopped production at about the same time. I never got a straight answer why they stopped production. When I finally got a new set of lenses in the first week of July after a three month wait, they didn’t fit. This was a ‘very bad thing’ because it meant I was going to have to order new lenses once again. Now I’m told that they may have them by the end of the month. End of the month? That’s a two month wait and there’s no guarantee that these will fit either.

Since April, I’ve been functioning only seeing out of my right eye. Glasses can’t correct my problems. I can wear glasses for a short one to two hours before I start getting a headache. It’s pretty much impossible for me to wear the glasses for an entire day. I’ve tried, and it just doesn’t work. Driving with my glasses is dangerous at best. I done it a few times to the supermarker a quarter mile away, but I would never try it on the freeway.

Seeing the world out of one eye is a pain, but not impossible. Half of the world is blurry to me. I have to be extra careful driving due to my reduced field of vision and the lack of good depth perception.

The real worry to me is if I lose or damage the contact in my right eye. If I can’t wear that contact, I effectively become blind. I wouldn’t be able to drive. I would barely be able to use a computer for more than an hour. Work would very tough If I couldn’t see for much of the day. While many others in the world have much larger crosses to bear, not being able to see clearly would have a huge impact on my life.

So it’s all down to a thin piece of plastic. As long as I can still put the plastic contact in my eye, I can function in the modern world. If something happens to that contact and I can’t wear it, my life will grind to a complete halt. What would I tell work? I can’t come to work because I’m blind?

Until the new lenses arrive, I simply have to have faith that the lens will last. Faith in a thin piece of plastic.