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Newsblogger help required…

Could someone please explain this to me. Newsblogger says at the top of the page: “New feature: Customization! Now you can select which categories you’d like to appear in the drop-down on the left.” Well… how?

[After much further discussion with Jason and Meg (completely independant of one another), I now understand how to get this working on a Mac. If anyone wants to know, drop me a line.]

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Fable-dealing…

Hey kids! Come over here! No really – I’m not disturbing at all! My overcoat? Yes I know it could do with a wash, but I wouldn’t say it’s a ‘dirty mac’ as such. Oh, all right then, ‘mucky’ perhaps, but certainly not dirty… Anyway – have you heard the word on the street? Oh, you’re in for a treat, my little petals. Have I got something for you. Forget smack, skag and crack – this is the future. The current thing is ‘fables’. All the cool kids are doing it. No, I don’t need counselling. Hey! Where are you going? Come back! I’ve got some ecstacy as well… Darn it!”

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Matt Haughey wants me dead…

Damn it. I’ve done it again. This time Matt Haughey wants me dead [On Regional Metafilters]. All I can say is that I’m really sorry, Matt.

“I think that we should be thankful that people care enough about Metafilter to suggest these ideas as ways of enhancing something they respect rather than wandering off and setting up something in opposition. I think that speaks buckets about the sense of community, integrity and the amount of respect that we all feel for what Matt has accomplished.”

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Tiny design project…

Another Tom design project: Time Out / FT Shopping Homepage.

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Popular Compilations Appeal…

Meg starts an appeal for someone to do a site:

“… devoted to the tracklistings of popular compliation albums (I’m thinking specifically here of 80’s faves Now That’s What I Call Music… and Superchart.”

I completely second this – I’ve been looking for something like this for ages, with absolutely no luck whatsoever… Tell you what – if any of you have any of these albums at all (80s only please for the moment), mail me and I’ll compile a list.

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Seeking music from my youth…

Does anyone have Now That’s What I Call Music 9 or an album called something like Hits 6 from the same year? Or alternatively an album released which was called The Greatest Hits of 1986. They all came out around in the UK around 1987/8 and I’m trying to replicate them in MP3 form so that I can relive a strange bit of my adolescence which I’d forgotten all about. If you have a tracklisting somewhere, mail me.

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Please excuse the redesign…

Please excuse the redesign. I’m really just mucking around, trying to find a calm centre to build stuff around. I’ve had such a weird weekend – had a couple of arguments, a couple of “calm discussions” (ie. arguments where you’re not allowed to shout), travelled to Oundle to visit my younger brother, got delayed on the trains, got rained on for a bit. I’m spending more money than American presidential candidates. Weekend over. Now I need a break…

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The post beneath this one…

The post beneath this one is extremely badly written. This is due to me writing it while frustrated and at nearly two in the morning. Apologies to anyone who was expecting my normal degree of coherence.

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Personal Publishing

On "Deconstructing You've Got Blog"

What a steaming pile of crap. Right it’s time we set a few matters straight around here. It’s time we got the weblogging house in order. The matter under discussion today is: Deconstructing “You’ve Got Blog”.

  • The form of the weblog does not generate an appropriate type of content, only a format for that content. “Nominal” purpose be damned. People write about what they want to write about. If that happens to be their lives, and if their lives involve reading about other people’s sites then they will write about it. If it is dull, other people won’t read it. If it is not, people will read it.
  • There are of course popular webloggers. There are also 60,000 weblogs or so to choose from if you don’t like them. The fact that individuals get excited when they are spotted by someone who they admire the work of, is nothing new. The fact that people who do good work now sometimes have weblogs is new. Jason gets respect from people because of 0sil8; Powazek gets respect because of Fray; Meg, Ev and Haughey get their share because they work at Blogger. All these people also write well for well put together sites. The other webloggers who have made a name for themselves do so because they write well or relatively well, design well or relatively well and have been around long enough to get known. It is, admittedly, getting harder for people to become well known, just because of the sheer number of the damn things. And who do these A-list people consist of anyway? Is it the beebo.org lot? Because that’s not working any more, and 9/10s of the people in the blogging world had never heard of it anyway.
  • Publicity Stunts? Oh please. Intention counts for nothing? Brief piece of pointless history. I was the person who brought up the whole conversation about whether Jason and Meg were seeing each other initially. I got a lot of shit for it, which I regretted. The whole little girl thing was a piece of play, which I decided to expand upon, and which then a hundred other people decided to play with too. This was something fun and interesting in a bizarre way – worth exploring rather than slamming in my opinion. Regarding insularity: Everything that anyone has ever written was designed for a readership. A weblog’s readership might be the world, or it might be the community that has grown up around weblogs.
  • Becoming a popular weblog really is as simple as anything else on the internet. If you do something different, If you have a different voice and you update regularly, people will read you. Losing your popularity is just as easy. There’s nothing more to it than that.
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On local languages in Metafilter…

Perfect solution to the whole metafilter language debacle has been provided by Phil over at gyford.com with this perfect quote:

“Love the filtered language/location idea, but I’d hate to program it myself 🙂 One simpler solution would be for all the English-speakers TO TYPE VERY LOUDLY, CLEARLY AND S.L.O.W.L.Y. That should help. (It’s a *joke* dammit.)