Day: July 26, 2002

  • Friday Blog Five

    Of course, it’s never exactly five questions.

    • How long have you had a weblog? – On and off for just over a year. During the stretches where I had no dedicated website I used other locations’ “journal” functions to make do.
    • What was your first post about? – What most such postings usually contain: “Hey, I got it working! Yay!” The first greyduck.net posting can be seen here. My very first Zero posting from March 28 2001, “Getting Started,” reads:

      And so far, I’ve only managed to break it a lot. Dear gods, let me get it unbroken, and quick!

      For one thing, the Synopsis portion seems to be well-screwed. The Body is the only thing that shows up. Nevermind that using the “Preview” feature adds the article to the database… every time you click Preview. Time to send polite feedback to the program author? I’ll beat on it for a while first and see what happens.

      I also need to experiment with links, images and what-not.

      I will add that the extremely-modular setup of Monaural Jerk means that I was able to easily remove the “headers” from the journal.php page so I could integrate it neatly into my home page structure. Or “more neatly” anyway… give me time, I’ll get this thing looking good.


      Mind you, it turns out that the Synopsis doesn’t show up by design, and the “Preview” issue has long since been resolved.

    • How many changes (name, location, etc.) of your weblog have there been, if more than one? – Hoo boy. Well, my first dedicated journal-style website was Zero. That was shut down by the Powers That Be. Eventually greyduck.net was born, but then it had to move to a new server.
    • What CMS (content management system) do you use? Do you like it or do you want to try something else?Monaural Jerk. It would take something really fantastic to get me to change. MJ does exactly what I want, exactly the way I want it. It relies on having a server you have a reasonable amount of control over, and in order to customize it you have to tinker with it by hand. In my book, of course, those count as benefits of the system.
    • Do you read people who have both a journal and a weblog? Or do you prefer to read people who have all of their writing in one central place? – “Read people?” What, they have text printed on their bodies? Anyway… I’m aware of the distinction between “journal” and “blog,” I just fail to care about said distinction. If someone writes about and links to interesting things, good. If someone writes crap and links to stupid things, bad. This isn’t brain surgery, folks. Is my site a journal? Is it a blog? Does it matter?

    Friday Five

  • Weekly Recap, the pilot episode

    As I promised (or was that a threat?) recently, I’m going to take a stab at a Weekly Recap based entirely on Argephontes‘ Weekly Round-Up. If nothing else, this will give me something to work on all through the day. I have more sites to cover than she does.

    • Since I stole it from her, let’s start off with Argephontes. Or Tempest Moaner, to use her Porn Name. Her week consisted mostly of headaches, coffee of low quantity or quality, and the pursuit of decent drinks. Ah yes, and probably weaseling out of showing up at a wedding. Can’t say as I blame her.
    • Cruising across the tabs at the top of my Mozilla screen I come to Captain Rooba, who presumably experienced a miscommunication with that new girl in his life, and who’s been too busy to post all that much. Too busy, in fact, to post a Rooba’s Remix this week. (Correction, he did too post one! Sorry ’bout that!)
    • At debris.com, the intrepid homeowner (and the developer of Monaural Jerk) endured odd-hours realtors, BocaBurgers, and mountains of business cards. Last week. This week he reminds us that we should be reading real books, too.
    • Snappy the Clam is just glad to be out of the hospital and feeling somewhat better. To say that he had the worst couple of weeks out of everyone I know would be a gross understatement. Stop by his site and wish him better health, please.
    • Emily took lots of photographs, as is her wont. She also was introduced to something called “1000 Blank White Cards,” or 1KBWC for short. Maybe Matt of debris.com should send her all of those business cards as BWC stock.
    • Meanwhile, Jessy is preparing for her stint in the Blogathon, as well as enduring the final couple of weeks before her move. She’s both anxious to get moved, and anxious to do some things before she leaves her current home.
    • The general mass-migration to Movable Type continues as Q Daily News prepares to leave Manila in favor of the now-ubiquitous MT. He also exhorts us not to send video email, a plea I can agree with wholeheartedly. And lets not forget new species of centipedes. Of course not.
    • Our favorite truck-driving fluttergirl is preparing for another long stint on the road. During some downtime she and her friends concocted some movie abuse along the lines of, “Weekend at Bernie’s 7: The Bernie Witch Project” and “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Bone.” She also names her computer machinery after South Park characters. I don’t feel so bad now for using Tenchi Muyo names. Nyah!
    • Firda, the Weblog Wannabe, got some fansign but is also suffering from design theft. (Anyone who uses a duck motif gets points in my book. As if you couldn’t have guessed.) Her collection of blogged links this week ranges from online games to “100 albums you should remove from your collection immediately.”
    • Madame Sinister of Sinister Tales is in Houston by this point, but the first half of her week provided plenty of journal fodder. The biggest irritations in her life both involved customer service… one on the part of hospital staff, the other on the part of understaffed grocery stores. She may have managed to convince herself to actually spend her vacation in vacation mode, not in “check my office email occasionally” mode. More power to her. Turns out she has three degrees of seperation from J.R.R. Tolkien, who liked not to talk so he talked about the weather.
    • I finally got through to Melpster‘s site, where she continues to suffer the lingering nasty cough that just won’t die. She’s also computering in the dark, when it’s dark. Her life lately is an odd combination of dream interpretation, working at Wherehouse, watching tapes of Vance DeGeneres and trying to keep her spirits up.