Friday, 21. March 2008, 22:43:00
Blogging, private-eye novels
Please turn off your cell phones before
viewing this trailer.
In case you've been wondering where I've been the past couple of days in
terms of posts, I've been working on a new novella. In fact, I'm almost
finished with it. It's about time I got some new fiction up here. And I
have to admit that as much as I like doing the regular posts, it's the
fiction that really interests me. Incidently, this isn't the short story
that I mentioned last month. After working on the short story for a while,
I decided that in terms of something I could feel positive about that I
would rather work from the 3500 words or so of the novella from last year.
Taking a break from the novella today I started looking into Wordpress.
It's just something I'm thinking about. It certainly would be a lot of
work tweaking the CSS for a new template.
Anyway, above you can find a "trailer" (or maybe it's more like a "teaser")
for the new novella, Those Songs We Sing to Ourselves. I hope you don't
get too excited looking at it -- I would hate for you to spill your popcorn.
Wednesday, 2. January 2008, 22:37:16
Blogging, Culture
Today I decided to go back to an old post of mine called "A Bob and
Scarlett Christmas," which I wrote just prior to Christmas 2006. I wanted
to watch the video of Dylan doing the song "Man of Constant Sorrow" on
an early 60s television performance, and I had a link to it there. As I
mention in the post, Bob's rendition of the song on that show was perfection.
In fact it is one of the best performances of a song by any artist I have
ever seen.
But when I clicked on the pic to go to the video, which was hosted on
youTube, I found the link was dead. I had run into this problem before
in dealing with youTube. But I also knew that occasionally a particular
video gets pulled, but often shows up a few days later posted by the
same person or another person. So I spent about a half hour looking for
that particular video. No luck. The closest I was able to find was a clip
from the recent Time documentary on Dylan, which only features about half
of the performance before it goes into the documentary narration. Which
isn't the same thing, of course. I also used a couple other strings to
search for the video on youTube, but wasn't able to find it posted. What
I ended up doing is re-doing my link to another video of Dylan singing the
song in a recorded version with a photo montage in the background. The
recorded performance of "Man of Constant Sorrow" isn't nearly as good as
the televised one. It is jerkier and pushes the harmonica passages a bit
too hard. The televised version is homogeneous and the harmonica has a
more subtle and even kind of power.
As I mentioned, this has happened to me before on youTube. I guess you
could very well say "those are the chances you take" if you post from
youTube.
But I think what really concerns me is how many other outside links I
have posted here. I also have links to other kinds of web sites such as
on-line news agencies like MSNBC. Now, I think that at least the major
news outfits will probably keep their news items up on their site. The
question is -- for how long? You have to wonder how long even such
organizations as The Washington Post or The New York Times will ultimately
decide to keep their stories on-line. Everything put up on these sites
takes memory and server time. You wonder if, at some time in the future,
they may just decide to say "five years is enough" or something like that.
On-line news may be more and more common, but unless those newspapers
decide just to go entirely electronic and get rid of newsprint, they
might very well say that thier physical archives are enough.
Now I don't know if this blog is still going to be here in five years. I
know I sure won't. Hell, I don't even know for sure if this planet or at
least the human race will be here in five or ten years -- no one has a
crystal ball of that sort, and we all know what a world of shit we humans
can get ourselves into.
But it does bother me that many of my posts may, in the future, contain
dead links. Blogging is great for doing things quickly; but it remains
to be seen how it may do in terms of longevity of individual posts. And
at over 500 posts here to date, I simply don't have the time to go through
all my posts on an intermittent basis to check whether links have gone bad.
Unless someone leaves a Comment and informs me, I might not know or at
least not know for a long while if a link goes dead. And even if I do find
dead links, that's a lot of time spent going back in and re-doing links.
I really don't think there even is a term yet for posts that have aged
and, in the aging process, have developed dead links. My suggestion
would be to call them "archaic posts." I think that would be a pretty
good term based upon one definition of the word "archaic" as something
old and no longer quite as relevant as it once was.
Consider if you will (I kind of sound like Rod Serling in The Twilight
Zone in that one) two cases on opposite sides of the spectrum. In
the first, the post is dependent on nothing but the text and/or images
and any knowledge it is assumed that the reader will bring to the post for
its meaning. In the second, the post's only real purpose is to point to
some outside link. Neither of these cases bother me. In the first, there
are no outside links to worry about. And in the second, a dead link would
result in what you might call an "epistemological deletion" -- the same
as if you had deleted the post from the blog, as if it had never been.
What does bother me are posts that are somewhere in the middle, posts
that depend in part on the text/images but also on the link for a
good part of the post's substance. That is the difficult one. That's the
one that may not wear well over time.
Sometimes I have the feeling that it's all just written into eternity
anyway. So I tell myself to pay such things no mind. But boy, I do miss
having that wonderful Dylan link here on the blog. So I'm going to keep
searching the internet, in places other than youTube. And maybe I will
find it. And maybe it will be a more stable link.
But who knows. Hopefully, five or ten years from now, this blog will
still exist and most of the posts on it will still make sense. I would
hope that at least the fiction is safe, for a while.
By the way, you will notice that the only link I have used on this post
is to another one of my blog posts. I assume that if that link no longer
exists, then this post won't exist either. In which case, of course, you
won't even be reading this...
Friday, 23. November 2007, 07:27:10
Holly Madison, Blogging
It was only a few short posts ago that I did my 500th post on this blog.
And now, it seems that according to the stats that I have reached a
cumulative mark of over 50,000 visitors as well.
That's not great by internet standards at large. But as Gary Denness was
kind enough to tell me a few months ago, what really matters is not the
count but how many people stick around and actually read the stuff.
Which made me feel better, and I really thank Gary for being such a good
sport and picking up my spirits.
Talk about a kind of watershed. The numbers "5-0" seem to have hit me in
several respects over just a short period. 500 posts, 50K visitors, and,
as it happens, coming up on 50 percent of my usable disk space here at
Opera, which hosts the blog. It almost has the ring of Fate to it, all
those 5-0s at once.
The bad news lately is that my overall daily visitor count has been
declining. A month ago, and for the few months prior to that, I was
getting an average of 120 visitors per day. But since about the
beginning of November that has slipped. First it went down to a 100
visitor average, and then over the past few days has gone down to about
80.
Panic sets in. I guess my feeling all along is that the more people I
can get here with the regular blog posts, the more people there are who
might possibly stick around and read the fiction. I never really
expected at this point in my life to be writing private-eye fiction and
doing a blog. But that's what I do now, and I take it as seriously as I
would have had I been writing my dissertation in anthropology. So it
matters to me.
More and more here I think of this as a blog, but also a kind of
magazine. I try to put a wide variety of stuff up to attract people --
and there's no doubt too that my mind just kind of tends toward that
kind of diversity anyway. Nevertheless there have been a few types of
posts that I avoid here.
And a short while back I decided to quit doing the celebrity babe lists.
I felt those had run their course here. But there's no doubt that they
were very popular. And my own analysis is that the declining visitor
count is due to that.
Everybody might not be interested in that kind of thing, it is true. But
it seems clear that some are interested, and I want to keep those people
happy, too. I have to think of the benefits to the blog as a whole. And
I simply cannot afford nor do I wish to ignore a whopping one-third of
my readership.
So I think there's only one option at this point. Yeah, you probably
guessed it...
Holly Madison to the rescue!
WIDGETIZE