Dear John^H^H^H^H Livejournal

By kate on May 16th, 2007

Dear Livejournal,

I’m sorry, but I think it’s time to call it quits between us…. (more)

Filed under: meta | Comment now »

Putting it all together

By kate on May 9th, 2007

A colleague of mine, upon reading something I wrote on my website several years ago, referred to it as a “blog post”. Suddenly, something clicked in my mind and I realized that most of what was on my website could be considered blog posts. This may seem obvious, but it never occurred to me because they were written before “blogging” became the popular word for it.

I had been feeling guilty lately about the fossil that my personal website had become, with no updates at all since 2004, and no regular updates since around 2000. When blogger Kate Trgovac of mynameiskate.ca offered to buy my domain a few months ago, I couldn’t blame her for offering because it looked abandoned. I’d been actively using the domain for things like email and private web pages, but you couldn’t tell from the public site.

In the interim, I’d been keeping a LiveJournal or two in order to target my posts to friends. Immediately, I realized that I could combine the (old but good) content of my personal website with the entries from LiveJournal into one cohesive, living whole!

A large part of the effort I spent on this consolidation was mental. For a long time, I had a mindset borne out of being a young woman on the internet when the internet was a lot less crowded. I never posted my full name or any clear pictures of my face. I obscured details about my life to deter potential stalkers and people I knew from discovering me. This new site is a sloppy amalgam of personal information, and I’m trying to stop worrying about that. These are some of the things I worried about:

Stalkers. This was more of a concern several years ago when I was younger and single, and there weren’t as many women online. Now, the odds of a creepy internet stalker choosing me (a married mother in my 30s) is low, I think.

Family. I kept my LiveJournal separate so I could target certain thoughts to my friends, and others who share my social and political views. It’s a tough transition to let it all hang out here (hi, Mom!). I’ve decided it’s just part of being an adult and it’s not my job anymore to protect my family from my ideas.

Colleagues. The LiveJournal was also separate so I could present my personal website as a professional face (albeit with a personal bent). I never lost track of the possibility of a potential boss or co-workers reading my site. However, after over two years of working in the social networking space, I’ve found that my colleagues and I have become connected through our personal journals and blogs (and even LiveJournals), and that the line between personal and professional is becoming blurred.

At the same time, I’ve matured into someone who worries less about acting how others want me to act, and more about developing my own actual personality. All these old blog posts reveal a three-dimensional image of who I am, and I’m ready to stand behind that, instead of hiding behind multiple, somewhat anonymous, online masks.

Filed under: about, meta | 1 Comment »

Wrestling with WordPress

By kate on May 7th, 2007

As I move my content from various places (LiveJournal, static HTML) into WordPress, I’ve had my share of tussles with WordPress over how everything looks. I made a number of modifications to my theme (Green Lush 2 Column). The CSS can be complicated but at least it can be mastered eventually. I accept the complexity in exchange for the control I get over the layout and design.

My biggest struggle, though, has been over line breaks, of all things. I don’t know if it’s something with this theme in particular or WordPress in general, but I’m having a hard time getting WordPress to always skip a line between paragraphs. The problem is not the style of the paragraph… that’s set correctly. The problem is that WordPress will sometimes swallow up a line break and smoosh two paragraphs together. This tends to happen at least once in every entry with more than two paragraphs.

I tried many things to impose my will. I re-entered all the line breaks in the WYSIWYG editor. I manually added break and/or paragraph tags in the HTML editor. Nothing worked consistently!

I finally came to a compromise solution, which is stupid but always works. After writing or importing an entry, I switch to the HTML editor and put a   (blank space) on the empty line between each paragraph.

If you’ve encountered this issue yourself, I’d love to hear about it.

Filed under: meta, technology | Comment now »

Grandmom was a Blogger

By kate on May 3rd, 2007

Before she died several years ago, my father’s mother, Grandmom, kept in touch with my parents by sending them cut-out newspaper articles she thought they’d find interesting. I remember my parents rolling their eyes good-naturedly as her cut-outs became more and more prolific.

Then, lately, I’ve noticed my parents doing the same thing, particularly my dad. He often cuts out articles from newspapers and magazines and saves them for me. I was reading the latest one, an interesting article from IEEE about the structure of consciousness, when something occurred to me.*

He and Grandmom clipping out articles to share is no different than my impulse to tell my friends about the clever website I just discovered. It is, essentially, blogging. Just because Grandmom didn’t own a computer doesn’t mean that our generation invented the need to share interesting stories. We’ve just improved the method, allowing for that same newspaper article to be shared with a large group rather than mailed to a single person.

This new way of looking at it gives me more respect for my dad and his cut-out articles. After all, he tends to choose really interesting articles. I bet he would have a good blog.

* This epiphany is actually related to the theory of strange loops in the linked article, which posits that a “strange loop” (system) can work with the same larger symbols, regardless of the underlying mechanism.

Filed under: family, Links, meta | Comment now »

Screensavr

By kate on March 27th, 2007

Finding a cool screensaver is hard. Just try googling it and a myriad of crappy sites fills the results, many of which give you some malware along with your free screensaver, not to mention all the blinking ads. Eventually, I had the brilliant idea to look through the archives of Life Hacker and found Slickr.

It’s a screensaver that pulls pictures from Flickr and displays them. It’s smart enough to notice when you have two monitors, and displays different pictures on each. It even tends to display similar types of pictures (two sunsets, two flowers) on each screen.

If you want, you can input tags, users, or groups to use for selecting pictures. I prefer to use “interestingness” to select pictures, which is an option. Here’s Flickr’s description of interestingness, if you care.

It’s fascinating, and always fresh. I love it.

Filed under: media, technology | Comment now »

Cool advice site

By kate on March 1st, 2007

The Elder Wisdom Circle:

It’s a network of elders who you can anonymously ask for advice on most topics (except medical, legal, and financial). You can get a personal reply from one or two elders in about a day. It helps those seeking advice, and also helps the elders by giving them a way to contribute.

I’m trying to think of a good question to ask!