Category Archives: Weblogs

Absenteeism & Apologia

It’s never agreed with me to make apologies for infrequent posts to one’s weblog. It’s not that I don’t value the faithfulness of my regular readers (I do, immensely), but rather it’s that, as a matter of housekeeping, those posts age poorly, and as a matter of public record, they’re of extremely limited usefulness to most everyone beyond the momentary assurance that, no, I haven’t contracted Legionnaires’s Disease or renounced blogging for Scientology. Nevertheless, I’ve been absent from this weblog for a while, and I do feel compelled to apologize for it.

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Absenteeism & Apologia

It’s never agreed with me to make apologies for infrequent posts to one’s weblog. It’s not that I don’t value the faithfulness of my regular readers (I do, immensely), but rather it’s that, as a matter of housekeeping, those posts age poorly, and as a matter of public record, they’re of extremely limited usefulness to most everyone beyond the momentary assurance that, no, I haven’t contracted Legionnaires’s Disease or renounced blogging for Scientology. Nevertheless, I’ve been absent from this weblog for a while, and I do feel compelled to apologize for it.

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Musical Batonism

iTunesWeblog posts about music, in my opinion, are a kind of no win situation, because there’s nothing that you can say about a piece of music about which you’re currently very enthusiastic that will really mean anything to anybody unless they’re already familiar with it, or unless they’re so powerfully predisposed to that particular genre or style that a positive reaction is a foregone conclusion. The exception to that, of course, is if you have a weblog that is primarily focused on music and/or has accrued a significant share of musical credibility when it comes to endorsing bands. I don’t have that kind of weblog, clearly, so when I think about writing a post about music that’s exciting to me, I generally resist it.

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The Peacemaker

Some people say that, whether it was truly a case of plagiarism or not, it would have been polite if the propietor of Lethean-Sound.com had emailed me in advance to say he was lifting somewhat heavily from my own Web site, as discussed earlier today. In fact, I did get an email in the middle of the day today (still after the fact, but better late than never) from Lethean-Sound.com that was very polite and apologetic, and afterwards, at my suggestion, a small credit appeared at the bottom of the site’s home page that read, “Some CSS and code courtesy of Khoi Vinh.”

As I said, I was not, in general, made particularly angry by the affair, though neither was I pleased. But the correspondence quickly mollified me and made me realize that, if it was not polite for the site’s proprietor to fail to contact me about the design in advance of launching it, neither was it particularly polite of me to fail to contact him without first posting about it here on my weblog.

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Un Rip-off

An anonymous somebody or other posted this link to one of the comment threads here this weekend. I removed it immediately, partly because it didn’t have anything to do with the topic of the weblog post to which it was appended, and partly because I wasn’t sure how to react. If you click on the link, you’ll understand my situation: it’s a French-language weblog that looks very much like what a weblog would look like if its designer was trying to rip me off.

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Noisy Signals

An Adium instant message window interrupted me at my desk last night. It was Jason Fried of 37signals, and he was like, “Dude, up for guest-posting over at our Signal vs. Noise weblog for, like, the month of May?” I was all like, “Dude, what does that entail?” And he was all like, “Dude, whatever you want!” And I was all like, “Dude, can I start off with something mildly inflammatory about Microsoft?” And he was all like, “Dude, go for it.” And then I was like, “Dude, that’s totally radical, I’ll do it.” And he was like, “Dude, right on!” And now you know.

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How Many Blogs Does One Man Need?

Create a New WeblogIn the grand scheme of things, relatively few people have weblogs, but among them, there is a minority for whom it’s not uncommon to have even more than one: web designers. If freedom of the press is most free to those who own presses, it’s not unreasonable to think of web designers as those kinds of owners. For us, it’s possible to dream up and professionally construct a weblog (or most any kind of site, but especially weblogs) over a fast food-fueled weekend. I know at least one or two who each seem to be operating a Hearst-style empire of regularly updated sites.

I’ve always resisted the urge to create more than one weblog for myself because I know that, given my very small amount of free time, there’s enough labor involved in the upkeep of just this one without compounding the labor with another. Moreover, I’ve been nursing an idea for many years (to which I’ve hinted here a few times) that this weblog is just one early form of what will eventually be a massive database that contains most everything about my life. If it happens between the day I was born and the day that I die, the idea is that it would be recorded here.

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Timing the Hand that Feeds Me

XML BadgeOne thing that I’ve learned is that if I open up NetNewsWire when I get to the office in the morning, my day is shot. I mean, I’ll get my work done, but rather than working for long stretches of uninterrupted productivity, my time is fragmented by countless little diversions to other people’s weblogs. An RSS aggregator is like a Pandora’s box of distractions, and it’s difficult to resist when facing those not-so-fun tasks that populate a work day. Very often though, I have little choice but to hunker down if I want to get out of the office before midnight, so I make a conscious effort to avoid firing up NetNewsWire at all.

Which leaves me feeling perpetually behind on my weblog reading. Not only am I missing out on the latest postings and developments with the many good friends I’ve made online — prompting feelings of guilt over not being a sufficiently faithful reader of their weblogs whenever I chat with them — but I’m missing out on lots of genuinely great content that’s constantly being generated in the blogosphere. Two or three times a week, I’ll find an evening hour to try and catch up with all of my RSS feeds; it’s exhausting and it always leaves me with a nagging feeling that I might have better spent that time doing some actual design work.

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A Commentary on Comments

For those of you who do a lot of weblog surfing, and who frequently participate in discussions at those sites by posting comments, I think there’s a need for a centralized system to manage that content. I’m talking about a method of aggregating those contributions in a single location, ideally on one’s own Web site but perhaps also on a page hosted by a remote application, combined with some pinging intelligence and a facility for management by their original author — you.

Think about it like this; taken altogether, you can look at everything you’ve written on other people’s weblogs as a body of content that you’ve generated for free — it’s only fair that you should be able to maintain a centralized archive of it, and to be able to display the fruits of your labors. Of course, the archive would include abstracts or excerpts from the original weblog post, as well as a URL directly back to it. That way, everybody wins.

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Day Three at SXSW

It’s day three at South by Southwest, and by yesterday at midday, I was already a little weary from all the panels and seminars. Which isn’t to say that I didn’t see some good stuff, because I did. It’s just that there’s only so much sitting still in an overly air-conditioned room for hour after hour that I can do. At lunchtime yesterday, we took off for Threadgills for some down home country cooking, and that helped. The more I see of Austin, the more I like. If it were as walkable a city as New York, I’d almost consider it a place I could feasibly move to one day, maybe.

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