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"Find your obsession. Every day, explain it to one person you respect [...] and try not to be a dick." -- Merlin Mann, 43 Folders
More than once in the past, I've tried to figure out ways to combine my various blogs in some way. The heart of the problem is that I'm uncomfortable with importing six years of gaming-related posts into this blog (smothering the stuff that's already here), nor do I want to move THIS site over to Random-Average (which would marginalize anything that wasn't part of the vast Gaming Majority).
What I've hit upon as a semi-solution involves a certain amount of cynicism about how the internet works today.
Assumption 1: Very few people actually read the website.
Which isn't to say that no one reads what I'm saying, just that few people read it on the site. Instead, they get it via a newsreader.
Assumption 2: Newsreaders strip your 'branding'.
It doesn't matter if I have a certain color scheme on my gaming page and another on this page -- the background images, the header images... hell, all the sidebar stuff... none of that is really relevant to most people reading the page, because they're never going to see it.
The only thing that gets to you, the reader, are the words.
Basically, what that means is that I don't have to combine my blogs, I just have to combine the signal.
So what does that mean?
It means that through the wonders of technology, the RSS feed for doycetesterman.com is also going to broadcast any updates I make to random-average, and that any changes to doycetesterman.com will be included in the feed going out from random-average. The result: you only have to listen to one radio station to hear everything I'm saying. As far as the majority of Gentle Readers are concerned, I have combined all my blogging in one place, without me actually having to do so.
"If the work that really matters to you involves understanding a relationship between a handful of seemingly unrelated things and then figuring out the best way to portray, magnify, or resolve those relationships, then you're already doing creative work. Any time you make a connection between two or more axes that hadn't occurred to you 10 minutes ago, yes, you've done something creative. Seriously. This does not require your wearing a beret." -- Merlin Mann
When I titled the last post a grand and majestic mess, I truly had no clue how accurate a summation that would be for the problems that people have been having with leaving comments on the site.
They don't work. They only kind of work. They work just fine, but go into a pending file I never get notified to approve. They work just fine, but go into the spam folder and I never get notified to approve.
The great irony is that all the actual spam was going into the "pending" file and the all the good comments were going into "spam". Grr.
So: rewrote the code a bit. A lot. Actually, I gutted the MT 4.0 'testing for sentience' stuff and replaced it with the code that's been working just fine on Random Average, using this same installation of MT. I was still getting an error stating "the text you entered was wrong" for awhile, but once I determined that it was just an option I needed to shut off in MT, and not an actual judgment on the quality of my writing, everything was fine.
Amanda: you've been the hardest hit by all this, it looks like -- all of your comments from the past MONTH OR MORE are finally showing up, and my apologies.
Any further problems should be brought to my attention via my GMAIL account of firstname(dot)lastname.
Okay, that was a bit more troublesome than expected.
I am now getting notifications when someone asks for a site-specific commenter ID. That wasn't happening before.
I have no idea why Typekey verification isn't working. It certainly should be. I may disable that option entirely if it doesn't straighten itself out.
I'm terribly curious if VOX users (I'm looking at you, Mister Whetsel) can use their Vox ID to comment.
And I've updated the page templates to be moderately more friendly to anyone running their screen at a criminally low resolution. Functionally, the pages are tested in both IE and Firefox, and work well at any resolution over 1024x768. They are 'okay' at 1024x768, and 'only if you have to' at 800x600.
I've been under both the weather and a number of deadlines this week and the site -- as the least-squeaky of any of my wheels -- has suffered neglect.
Most of the Casa household is sick in some fashion or other, regardless of age or elevation on the evolutionary chain; dispensing the various medicine dosages every 12 hours takes a quarter hour assuming everyone's cooperating. Most seems to be on the upswing, though.
Revision deadlines are coming up for Hidden Things: my agent's posed a couple of questions about various characters and happenings in the story and asked that I sneak the answers into the text 'somewhere'. I generally don't enjoy revisions, but the questions are good, the answers are interesting, and the sneaking-in part is fun. I'm enjoying this particular process, and I like the way my agent sets out the task.
"I'd like to know more about what Walker... what he is, I guess."
"The background, how he got that way?"
"Sure, that could be part of it."
"Oh, well I was thinking [insert off-the-cuff exposition that could go on a few minutes, but is mercifully cut short]."
"Hmm. That's interesting. You should see how that works and work it in... you know, somewhere. Or try something else. Whatever you think."
She asks just enough to get my mind gnawing at the problem then releases it into wild and asks, politely, if it couldn't go track it down. (As if by that point I could do anything but go after it.) Challenging and freeing at the same time.
Finally, still working on the new look for the site. I've muddled through about half the templates and pages that need muddling -- with any luck I'll have that wrapped up by the end of the month as well.
So Saturday ran into Sunday, and I crashed headlong into a pillow around 1 am after 14 hours at the con, pretending to be Scottish.
The kilt jokes, oh lord, the kilt jokes.
Highlights included people I don't know wishing me happy birthday, people I do know wishing me the same, and no less than a half-dozen people "coming out" and confessing that they were secretly readers of the blog. Very cool. I'll be talking about the Con a little more over on the games page, later this week.
So Sunday started very slowly, in fact it even false-started once -- I got up around 9, but decided it wasn't worth it by 10 and went back to sleep until 1 in the afternoon. After that, we ran up to the Sears outlet (aka "dent and ding") center to pick up a new dishwasher. I have more to say about this event, but I'll save that for a later entry.
We went over to Dave and Margie's in the evening to have dinner with Margie's Bob Villa-esque parents, and I think the whole family was home and unconscious by about 9pm.
Jack was off to work early this morning, and my project for the day (I have only one week left as an unemployed bum) was putting in the washer.
Again, that's is an event that deserves its own entry.
So, that's what's going on. I itch, I'm dirty, and we (the Boy and I, he had the day off from school) still have to clean up the house a bit before Margie's folks come over -- we're getting input on some funky home improvements we're thinking about.
So how was your weekend?
