I got to work about half an hour ago, and I haven’t had anything to eat yet today. I keep thinking I should duck across Tottenham Court Road to Sainsbury’s. But then again – I was so late into work this morning that it feels a bit cheeky to duck out again. Perhaps I should consider trying some edible insects [via Astounding Websites]. Alternatively…
Friday morning. About bloody time. I’m showered and refreshed, the world seems like a manageable place and I’m off to Oxford this evening with Corny to see the young Kitsch Bitch. Thank god for the weekend.
I’ve taken down Grant Cook’s design for a bit, while it gets fully debugged, and replaced it with ‘old blue’. In the coming days we have a few more redesigns from the general public. Next up to the mark is likely to be matt[at]interconnected.org.
Our first guest designer is Grant Cook from access afr. As ever with a new design, there are a few bugs, but we’ll get them ironed out in the next few hours. Don’t forget, you too can rebuild plasticbag.org.
Some of you may have guessed by now that I am not actually particularly keen on the current design of plasticbag.org, but that I felt I had to change the last one, which was generally not well-liked. Unfortunately the problem is that I don’t have much time to work on the site at the moment, other than to post, of course, so here’s a proposition for you.
You do it. Here are the three blogger templates that make up the current site: [main template: index.shtml] [archive include: archive.shtml] [consumption include: recently.shtml], exactly as they appear on blogger at the moment. What I want you to do is to come up with something better. Make sure all images are in a separate directory from the index page and includes so that I can swap designs around relatively quickly, and make sure to test out your design first in blogger before you send them to me. Also – make sure that you put something on the page which indicates that you designed the “skin” and include a link – as prominent as you like (as long as it fits in with the design). All decent designs will be used.
[E-mail your designs to tom@plasticbag.org] [PS. There is an irritating feature of the way all posts are currently formatted on plasticbag.org which means that there is a paragraph tag between each block of text and at the end of each post. Line breaks are NOT translated. This is not going to change in the short-term since it goes back over a year now and so it is important that any template can deal with this.]
Since the ancient times, the soothsayers of our culture have prophesied that the coming the apocalypse and the return to the light of the One True God would be heralded by the final completion of the redesign at lukelog. And now that time has finally come. Please, my children, let there not be rioting in the streets – for our good grace will see us through these final days…
If I told you that there was a kind of person who wrote on a regular basis, was obsessed by the internet rankings of their writing, commented regularly on the work of other writers and tried to artificially improve their own “position” by writing bad things about other people, what kind of writer would you think of immediately? Webloggers, by any chance?
This position on weblogging has been lurking in the background for a while now, but has been recently brought out into the harsh light of day in an article I commented upon (in a rather uncharitable fashion) a few days ago [Deconstructing ‘You’ve Got Blog’].
But actually I wasn’t talking about webloggers at all. There’s an article in the Guardian today about people who write novels and their relationship with Amazon. The article, under the title of, “Look, I’ve sold one more copy!” describes activities that professional novelists undertake which will be immediately familiar to the owner of any weblog. Here are a couple of examples:
What better than to keep an eye on your children – and at the same time, those of your competitors? Checking your book page on amazon almost feels like working.
Why is it so compulsive? Well, for starters it updates your chart position every hour, on the hour. Not only that, but the “people who bought this book also bought_ xxx” section connects you to your nearest rivals for comparative purposes.
Of course, what one would never do is order lots of copies to influence the chart position because “you can always cancel it later”.
But the chart is only the first half of the story. Next stop is the comments section. Oh my God!
I think the time has come to accept that people who write weblogs are, at the end of the day, just acting as writers. And that writers will always care about how their work is doing, the people they feel in competition with, as well as be in awe of their forebears and heroes. These things are not just going to end because we’re writing in a new form, for a new medium.
But equally each of us, individually, has a responsibility to ourselves and to the medium we work in, to try to submerge the baser parts of our territorial, competitive and aggressive instincts and to get on with the business of writing entertaining, involving and intelligent pieces for our respective audiences – whether they be our fellow webloggers, the readers of the New Yorker or the world at large. Despite its flaws, this vast unformed writing community is something I’m still proud to be a part of.
[Deconstructing “You’ve Got Blog” was a response to an article You’ve Got Blog, as originally published in the New Yorker. Link via linkmachinego. The whole matter is currently being discussed at great length over at metafilter].
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.]
“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!”
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.”