Friday Dust Bin
* I accepted an offer of a beta-account at GMail (thanks, Mark!) Great idea, Fred! Use GMail to store blog comments. Never delete them, group them by "conversation" and search all of them with ease!
Apparently, MT won't send comments as email to online-type accounts. (Does anybody know this for sure?) Meanwhile, all the blogspam emails overnight ended up in a place I couldn't use the blacklist script to delete, so I was back to manually deleting about 20 of them this morning.
If you've sent a comment in the past 18 hours and it has bounced, this is why. I've fixed the problem. And otherwise, cannot think of any reason I need a gigabyte of email storage. Wonder if there is any way to compress some of the junk in the back room into an email attachment and store it with the Google Mail folks?
* Tom M. asks what happened in the "Better, Forgiveness" story. Well, I got both forgiveness for sins already committed, and permission to kick in more rocks because Ann could see her good intentions would result in making a lot more work if we let the stream cut any deeper. So that little tale of disparate domestic points of view had a happy ending.
* For me, the currents of blogging energy and interest seem to be flowing in some other part of the blogoshere just now, and Fragments, even more than usual, is a quiet undisturbed backwater. Having recently passed my two year mark, there is some kind of natural evolution going on, and I won't dissect it here. I'll just say that it seems it might be a good time to change gears while the place is sort of quiet and I don't find many things to say that seem worth saying. I'm thinking maybe I'll not post on weekends, and otherwise not be compelled to post something every day just to fill in the space. So, if you see a change in the frequency of posting here, that's what is behind it.
* Meanwhile, this seems to be the time to push hard to finish that book we talked about some months ago. The body of it will come from roughly 80 more-or-less worthwhile musings from two years of Fragments. But it is on the back-story that I need to be working now-- the memoirist personal story that isn't on the weblog, but puts this unexpected writing life and all these variegated tales and musings into context. This is the hard part--the synthesis and thematic tightening--that hopefully can make a book of what is otherwise just an apparently random collection of jottings.
Comments
It's disappointing when I click through my favorite blogs (almost daily) to see what's new, and some don't have a new post. But I'd rather be disappointed by lack of a post than by half-hearted stuff that wastes my time and yours.
Do whatever it takes to get that book together (not that a book is necessarily the pinnacle, but it seems to be something you need to do). And maybe you'll find that the discipline of daily blogging actually helps rather than hinders. There's no generalizing what will help or hinder a given writer (except that I've never known one who didn't use every imaginable excuse to procrastinate).
Posted by: Lin B | June 25, 2004 9:24 AM
In my experience I've found it difficult to post on a daily basis at the quality that I would like to maintain. It would be wonderful to write soaring vignettes and take breathtaking images and share them daily, but not even the greatest writers and artists of all time produced work on a routine every day basis. Hopefully the site visitors understand that. Sometimes you have to withdraw to the mountaintop and stay there for however long it takes. Either that, or post pictures of chickens like I've done.
Posted by: fletch | June 25, 2004 1:43 PM