/karen/

Tinkering online

Tuesday, 26 May, 2009

Bloggers unite!

Last night, on a whim, I went to the Sydney Christian bloggers thing that Justin organised. I'd heard of Justin, but never met him in person, despite the numerous ways in which we were connected. (Also, I was curious why he wanted to meet me.) It probably would have been more daunting if I hadn't known anyone else who was going, but George said she was going, and Craig, despite double-booking himself, talked about turning up, and there was some talk of Ali being there (unconfirmed by her). In the end, there were seven of us: me, George, Craig, Justin, Michael, Doug and Mark. I knew of Doug and seen him around the traps, but, along with Justin, I'd never met Mark or Mark before, so it was nice to make some new acquaintances. And we ate some very yummy gourmet $10 pizzas at The Nag's Head Hotel in Glebe, and had a very interesting conversation, canvassing everything from the crypt underneath Mark's church to Moore College moving to St Philip's York St (the church where Ben and I got married) to what it's like to grow up in the city.

Several thoughts sprang to my mind after the event:

• This was very different to the Sydney Christian web designers dinner that Ben organised in October 2002. (Hmm, I never blogged about it—probably because Ben did, but he's now taken his blog offline. Pity. There were photos—yes, even photos of the half-eaten chocolate gorilla.) Back then, the people who blogged also knew something about coding and/or were involved in designing websites. Most of those bloggers are no longer blogging (Dave being one of the exceptional few!) These days, Blogger relegates most of the code stuff to behind the scenes, thus making online self-publishing heaps easier. The geek in me would prefer it if everyone learned HTML (mostly for pragmatic reasons: we still don't have the WYSIWYG program that will spit out nice code, which means that if you want to maintain good control over how your text looks in different browsers, RSS feeds and the like, it's just heaps easier to know how to do it, otherwise things tend to get a bit mangled ... mind you, if all you're doing is style stuff [bold, italics] and the occasional link, it probably doesn't matter that much. Still, I wish more bloggers would master blockquotes, ordered and unordered lists). But the writer in me likes that everyone has an outlet and that it's easy.
• Hanging out with guys is heaps different to hanging out with girls—both in the way they talk and what they talk about. It's rather refreshing.

I took pictures to mark the occasion, but forgot to ask permission from each of my subjects, so they won't be going online anywhere.

Anyway, Justin's called another date, so see if you can make it!

Unite my blog!

On a related note, I've been thinking about this blog and the dreaded redesign question (this blog hasn't had a facelift since January 2005). Of course, I've had zero time to do a redesign, and the thoughts are more half-hearted than anything else. But loads of questions have sprung to mind regarding how to organise the content of this site. I realise blog design is changing; reading Rachel C's thoughts on the matter is very interesting (particularly her predictions on how Twitter will change blog design). I'm just not convinced I ought to integrate my Twitter feed with my blog. For that matter, I'm not sure how I ought to integrate or unify any of the elements of this blog. I've had a think about my public online activities and why I engage in any of them, and this is what I've come up with:

• Blog: According to my archives, this blog has been running sporadically since 2002. Reasons why I blog (in no particular order):
  1. To practise writing
  2. To share thoughts on stuff with other people
  3. To give something back to myself and fill my emotional well
  4. To remember. (Did you know that one of the effects of divorce on children is that they have trouble piecing together a timeline of their lives because it's been so disrupted? Many of the children in Judith Wallerstein's study just couldn't remember stuff that had happened to them.) I like that I can look back at 2002 and glean pieces of what it was like, what I was doing, what I was like, etc.
  5. To make myself known to the world (as much as anyone can be known through the written medium ...)
• Current blog: I started the Current blog in December 2002. I have it because I wanted a record of what I've watched and read (the “listened to” aspect is now being covered by Last FM, but I'm less concerned with keeping a record of that because the nature of music is so different to comics, books and movies).
• Blogroll: My blogroll is powered by Bloglines, and it updates automatically when I subscribe/unsubscribe from feeds. It also keeps certain feed private (which means I can view them but you can't). I joined Bloglines in July 2005 because of Guan. What surprises me is the number of people who use my blogroll to find other blogs they want to read ...
• Delicious links: Wow, was it only in September of last year that I joined Delicious? It feels like longer. Anyway, as I blogged back then, I joined because I was finding that I couldn't keep up with the old Blinks posts I used to write (even though they were a lot of fun!), and Delicious was just a helpful tool to do it. Even though I decided against integrating it with the centre column of this blog (however, you can get both posts and links by subscribing to the right feed), I decided it was probably worth making my Delicious activity public because there are people out there who are interested in the things I bookmark. I like to think I act a bit like a filter for them, bringing them odd and esoteric morsels from all over the place that they would otherwise remain ignorant of. And I also like that I can keep certain links private and others public.
• Flickr: I joined Flickr a month after I joined Delicious. Again, it was in the interests of making things faster and easier: before, I used to resize, retouch, upload and code every single photo on this blog. These days, I don't bother retouching, and Flickr does the resizing and coding for me. Flickr's services have been so valuable, I even capitulated and forked out the US $25 for a Pro account. (It's pretty good value for what you get! It also has a privacy function.) I haven't bothered to make a Flickr badge, though. Maybe I would if photography was more my thing, but since it's not, I don't really see how it would add much value to this site.)
• LibraryThing: Ben bought me lifetime membership to LibraryThing for my birthday in 2007. I suppose I could argue the same thing about Flickr badges forLibraryThing, but that search box pretty useful—well, I find it useful; you probably don't.

Then there are all the public online things I do that don't make an appearance on this blog—Facebook, Bookmooch (international book swapping site; you pay for postage), Listal (social networking site built around common interests in stuff—that is, books, movies, music, games, TV shows; I just use it to keep a DVD inventory and wishlist, as well as lists of different random things to do with movies), and, of course, Twitter.

Some things I would prefer to keep private (e.g. Facebook: at one stage, I made myself so hard to find that people had to send me a message asking me to add them as a friend because they couldn't make the request themselves). Some things are public anyway (my Twitter feed is public). Some things I haven't cared enough about to add to this page (Listal's in this category). And some you probably won't care about at all.

It seems to me, however, that this site and my online activities are evolving in a particular way: the blog is becoming more reflections and opinions-based (hence LONG posts that frequently top 1,000 words), whereas “Story of my life” posts have sort of moved to Twitter (I suspect the length of my blog posts offset the enforced brevity of Twitter) and, as I said before, Blinks have moved to Delicious. These three threads are the ones I think I want to preserve and keep public. (It was interesting that Craig asked me on Sunday what I'm up to these days—not that he should have known because I don't expect anyone to keep up with that, and, besides, Craig skims thousands of feeds each day anyway—but it just reminded me how less public that aspect of my blog has become. Some would argue that's a good thing. But I want to remember, and I think I've found the right level of comfort with the amount I choose to disclose about myself.)

But when it comes to sharing content, I keep wondering what to do. I'm aware that people read my blog for different reasons, and certain people enjoy certain things about it. (Some, for example, completely skip over the craft posts, which is totally fine with me!) In addition, not everyone reads this blog through a feed reader, so what I do in terms of redesign is going to affect people in different ways. Regarding feeds, I've tried to give people options (five different feeds!), and certainly one of the lovely things about Expression Engine is that everything is almost infinitely customisable (so I could create a feed that filters out all the craft posts!)

Here is where my reasons for putting stuff out there and your reasons for reading clash. Thoughts?

Current:

Comment:

Blinks:

Feeds

• Full posts
• Full posts and del.icio.us feed
• Excerpts only
• del.icio.us feed only
• All comments

Writing:

• Blogos
• ECU

Friends online:

• Tim & Liz

Blogging apparati:

• MT
• MM MT
• RSD
• RSS 2.0

Email

• Ultraserve
• MM
• Gmail
• Facebook