his article page collects blog entries in which I talk about... this blog itself. Changes in schedule, ideas for new features, format modification speculation, and more.

More recent additions go on top, with the date they were first posted.

February 13, 2004

Here's a mail from Templar-knights.

I thought you dismissed the idea of having forums on your site wiithout having a look at all the pros and cons of having one. true most forums do need moderators to regulate them, but i think the lack of flammage that you get from emails indicates to me that most readers of your website are mature, respectfully and considerate. forums is a good way to get to know some of your more regular site visitors and also lets us express and communicate our thoughts and feelings in a more casual manner. i may only write 6 or 7 letters a years, whereas i may post 2 to 3 hundred times a year. and maybe just maybe you might get a bit of flammage that i know your heart yearns for.

It's comments like his that make me want a comments option.  I don't know if people would be any more likely to register and click several links to post a comment about one of my blogs in a forum, but it seems like if there were a handy little "comments" button right on the page, just like on other blogs, people would use it.  At least some of the time.

I'm now thinking that if I could get a good script with the ability to set up comments easily, and in multiple places on a given update (though I'd likely just do 2 most times, top for news and bottom for other), I might do it.  However if you know anything about how eagerly and often I look into adding technical features to websites I work on, you'll know not to hold your breath waiting for this miraculous addition to come into being.

Also, I love flame mails, and I post 99% of the ones I receive.  They're often my favorite type of mail, especially when they're about something I'm being intentionally controversial and loud-mouthed about.  Flames are my reward for saying something edgy.  Not that I don't like praise, but flames are rarer, and therefore more precious.  In a weird sort of way.

February 7, 2004

Email is making me unhappy lately.  I'm still getting something like 400 virus mails a day, most of them Mydoom, and on top of that the actual email has been very sparse, both on this site and on the D2 site.  No one loves me anymore.  And the lack of real email wouldn't be so annoying if not for the fact that I spend a few minutes, several times a day, sorting through the 200 mails that have come in over the past 4 or 6 hours, only to find that 2 or 1 or none of them were actual mails that I wanted to read.

It's at times like this that I think I should put comments on the site, just to see some feedback from people who liked/loved/hated/were bored by something or other that I wrote about.  And then I think that if I did that, I'd never get any real emails about anything.  And then I remember, "What emails?"

The biggest problem I see with comments, besides the fact that I'd have to arse with a script to get them to work and work in a format and layout and design I wanted them to work in, is that I'd then have to read over them regularly to keep out any flame wars or porn spam or other such shit, bother with banning repeat spammer IP#'s, etc.  But mostly, it's that my site format doesn't lend itself very well to comments.

They work fine on a blog, where each post is a paragraph or three on a single topic.  Here I write a paragraph or 27 on all sorts of things, all in the same post, and if there were a single comment box after all of this, the dialogue would be hopelessly scattered, assuming here was actually any dialogue at all.  One person talking about the quote of the day, another about the curse of the day, another about the news item on how eating beef will probably kill you, another on some personal comment I made, and so on.

The alternative is to have a bunch of different comments threads/boxes on the same post, but that seems even cheesier.  Do I do one for all of the news items or for each one?  Do I move comments around if someone clicks the wrong box and posts on the wrong thread?  Plus my admin and "is anyone here" worries are just multiplied by this style.

The other option is to change this site around in some way to be a regular blog type thing, but I don't much like that since I enjoy the sidebar and QotD stuff how they are, changing every day, and I don't much write in normal blog style.  The news items would work fine, but the longer personal discussion things would be odd, the photos would stretch on and on, and I tend to do this whole blog thing in an hour or three at one time, just before I post it.  And I like that; if I had an actual blog I'd probably spend twice as much time working on it, since I'd want to put in regular comments and updates all the time, to keep return visitors entertained.

I could, in theory, write it just as I do now, put one post a day for the qotd and sidebar stuff, and then parse the other stuff out into individual posts every few hours the next day. But that seems scattered, disjointed, and I know I'd still end up posting more things with less commentary per thing, no matter how I tried not to.

Anyway, if anyone has any comments on comments, pro or con, feel free.

February 10, 2004

In Saturday's blog I talked about doing shorter blog-style updates, and possibly adding site comments. Here's what some readers thought about it. Bryan's up first.

Don't change your format if it works, and it does. I can't tell you how sick of reading 3 paragraph blogs about nothing at all I am. Reading 27 paragraphs of nothing at all is quite entertaining, however. If you want comments, but don't want to change your format, you could add forums. These days forums aren't that hard to enable. Personally I like phpBB, but that's probably because I like php as a scripting language.  There are a few out there that come "out of the box" and are entirely free. InvisionPowerBoard is another that comes to mind. All you need is access to a database system and scripting language.

As for the site style, I wouldn't change my content much if I went to a blog format: I'd just put each news item as a separate post, or maybe all 3 or 4 news items (on a given random day) in the same post, and then put the lower, longer, essay thing in another post.  In theory it would be much the same, I'd just update more frequently, and break it up in format some.

As for the forums, I've thought about forums in the past, and Malaya has mentioned them to me several times, though I think that's mostly because she wants to go mad with forum god power, and I'd have to let her help admin them, especially since our couch is small and not at all comfortable to sleep on.  I don't particularly want to have them on this site, since they would require admining and I don't want to bother checking that and banning people and such.  I also don't think there are anywhere enough regular visitors to this site to support active forums. There's nothing sadder than a forum that's getting like 4 posts a day, or some guy's site where half the forum post are by him, trying to start some conversation.

It reminds me of small, struggling family-owned restaurants where the waiter(s) and cooks and waitresses are all standing around staring out the door, hoping and praying that someone comes in.  It's so depressing that even if you were considering going to eat there, you end up going somewhere else, since you don't need that kind of pressure while you're trying to eat.

In the anticipated future, when I become big Mr. Bestseller Man and there are heaps of rabid fans dying to discuss my work, I think forums would be a great thing, and I'd get people who had good fansites to help moderate and admin them, etc.  But for now, when I'm just Mr. Aspiring Novelist Guy with a few hundred regular blog readers, a forum seems unneccessary.

There might be one anyway though, since Malaya has a new private blog (password protected) that basically serves as a sort of open BCC email to her friends.  Like what my blogs would be if I had any friends I wanted to email about stuff. I mention this not to tease, nor to drive you to suck up to her in an effort to get added to her reading list, but since as part of her blog host she can enable forums, and she might be setting one up which I would link to from here, for potential discussion of things.  And when no one went or discussed, I'd probably remove the links and be very, very sad.

Anyway, more to come on this issue, at some point.

Next up comes this mail, from Derek:

I've been reading your site for little over a year now (only reason I know is that I was featured last year as a sort of "don't be this guy on V-Day" example) and ever since you shacked up with Malaya your blogs have become kitten-oriented and generally boring. I still scan the site daily, but I haven't read an entire daily update for a good two months. Your writing style has changed and your descriptions seem somewhat less sharp and pointy. Maybe readers are just having less to comment on?

faithful (but recently bored) reader,
derek c.

A valid opinion. I don't really agree with it, but that's the problem with a blog that's personal and based in real life; as the blogger's life changes, so will the blog.  I wrote in the past about sites that I used to really like, but then lost interest in, and there were a few blogs on that list as well.  The material didn't necessarily drop in quality; it just started to cover areas that I no longer cared about very much.  A good current example is insanely-popular gaming site Penny Arcade.  I still check it three times a week for their Mon/Wed/Fri updates, but I seldom do more than scan the text and view the cartoon, since the text is 90% about games I've never heard of and don't care about, no matter how hard Tycho tries to make his written descriptions of them iconoclastic and interesting.  A couple/few years ago when I was much more into gaming (Though I only played Diablo II, I still kept up on other games in the news, mostly out of curiosity.) I read it much more religiously.  And it's no reflection on the quality of the site; they're more popular than ever.  Just popular to people who have different interests than I currently do.

As for this site, I'd think the changes Derek doesn't approve of began a lot longer ago than two months.  I mean I moved up here to live with Malaya back in July, and got all lovey dovey then.  And we got Jinxie in late September, and I'll freely admit that I talked about little else for a week or two, and then still spent a lot of time on kitty photos and descriptions for a few weeks more after that.  However I don't think I've posted about the cats, or even the rats or the snakes, more than every other week since November.

Alas, it's a hard truth of life and especially of entertainment.  You can't please all of the people all of the time, and in fact you're doing damn well to keep more than 50% of them happy.

Here's another view on things, from Soultorn.

Heyo.

First found your site whilst reading your old articles on diabloii.net. (Funniest articles I had read in a while!)

It's among my favorites (other favorites: www.cockeyed.com and www.bookofratings.com )

On the matter of Comments. Seems like an awful lot of trouble. I'll keep an eye out for any solutions I might stumble upon.

Okay, so she didn't offer a lot of solutions to the comments issue, but I liked the site plugs she threw out, since those are both sites I view myself. Cockeyed could almost go on the list of sites that I used to visit and seldom do anymore, except that it's not due to a lack of interest by me or quality by them; it's due to me having read all of the archives there and the new updates not coming that quickly.  As for book of ratings, it's the talented guy who used to do the Brunching Shuttlecocks site that's no longer being updated. I recommend that site on my Links page, and Lore's Ratings (now archived on book of ratings dot com) have been among my favorite comedy things on the Internet for years and years.  Literally, they were one of the first things I saw recommended in an offline source (some magazine, EW maybe) back in the late-90's, and I started reading them back when there were new ones every week.  So Soultorn has good taste in websites, IMHO anyway.

August 28, 2003

Having Wednesdays (and Sundays) off from Blogging didn't seem like a big deal when I first thought about it, but I must admit that I've come to like it and even look forward to it. It's odd, since I took pride (of a sort) in keeping my "blog a day, every day" record going for so long (a few tiny hic cups aside).  That long nearly-unbroken string was fun, but died a sudden death when I first visited Malaya and didn't use a computer for a week.  Then I got back home and intended to get back to one a day, but after a week, just a few days before I was due for my second Malaya visit, my granny died, and I was suddenly off to the vacation paradise that is Missouri.  I was there without computer access for four days, and then was back here for one day before leaving on the second Malaya visit. During the second visit I did get my spare computer online from her (now "our") place, and did blog once or twice, but there were several days of nothing.

Those delays, relatively-inadvertent though they were, seemed to break the ice, and from then on I was a lazy son of a bitch, regularly missing a day or two a week, and giving no notice whatsoever in advance.  Once I moved up to live with Malaya it began to really hit me that I had other things to do than blog, and I began to consider taking a day or two off each week.

Taking weekends off would be easy, but oh-so-predictable, and I didn't really want to take off two days in a row. For some reason Wednesday and Sunday seemed like good days to rest, and I said I might do that, before proceeding to blog every day for a couple of weeks, minus a couple of unplanned days off.  I've found that when you've got to incorporate another person's schedule into your own, even when neither of you have time-sinks such as children or full time jobs, things get more complicated. I would plan to blog in the evening, and then find myself running errands with Malaya, followed by dinner and lazing on the couch watching a movie, and by the time I think about blogging we're ready for bed.

Anyway, to wrap up this pointless and over-long historical summation, I did at last decide to take Wed and Sun off from blogging.

The first week I didn't like it, since I happened to have time and opportunity to blog on those days, and not posting felt like failing to strike while the hammer was hot.  Or is it the metal that's hot? Or the anvil?  Anyway, I wrote stuff for the blog but didn't post it, which resulted in the Thursday and Monday blogs being longer than usual, and pretty well written out in advance.  This wasn't a bad thing.

By the second week of 5-day blogging, I was getting to like having a day where I didn't have the usual midnight realization; "Oh shit, I'm supposed to blog today..."

By the third week I remembered my new schedule, and began to look forward to a day where I didn't have to engage my brain, or do any news item surfing.  However I would still think about the blog, and if I happened to surf and saw something that I wanted to write about, I'd do so and just save it for the next day.

When I first speculated about taking days off, I thought that I'd be all blog-lonely and want to write things, and that I could do articles and actually, you know, edit them, before I posted them.  A radical concept, one that I have not often explored in this space.

Of course that concept lasted about 3 days, after which I rationalized that taking the time to edit and improve my writing would just, I don't know, make it more fun to read.  Or something. And clearly we can't have that!  At least not for non-fiction stuff.

I said "rationalize", not "rational", you'll note.

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