Posts tagged as "blogging" - Chris Hardie

The eminent and celebrated E. Thomas Kemp points us to a wonderful and clever use of news aggregation and weblog technologies, Plogress. Using Perl and Wordpress, the apparently anonymous administrator has created a site that sucks data out of the Library of Congress and displays a blog of the doings of individual Senators and Representatives. Now I can keep an eye on Mike, Richard, and Evan through my RSS newsreader! I'm sure they all read my blog, right?

Jason Godesky has an interesting post up about why blogs are in a category all their own when it comes to publishing content online. It's a question I've thought about on occasion, given that I've had a personal website in some form or another since, um, 1994, and that I get indignant once in a while when people jump and scream that the blogging phenomenon is the shiny new thing that levels the playing field. It was the whole frickin Internet thing that was supposed to do that in the first place,...

You may or may not notice that I've incorporated some Google Ads into my weblog. It's my unabashed attempt to make whatever moo-lah I can off of this exercise in public writing (which does not, for what it's worth, have moo-lah generation as a primary goal). I'm not sure if I'll keep the ads: the concept in general already grates against my sense that there's too much advertising on your average website, and because of my affiliation with a certain company that does webhosting, it's not like I'm trying...

It's been a while since I've posted. Lately, meaningless bits of miscellaneous commentary have been occurring to me at random moments, and I haven't had an outlet for them. So, what was once considered criteria for admission into a mental institution, is now the heart of the blogging phenomenon. Let's see what happens. (Look, I'm already back into successful blogging: a self-referential blog post about nothing at all!)

I've resisted the weblogging phenomenon as long as I could, mostly because I knew I would obsess over doing it right once I started. You're now reading the initial stages of that obsession: announcing that I'm blogging within a blog. Okay. Anyway, it's not my intention or desire to spew random and intimate facts about my personal life that might make both of us uncomfortable next time we see each other. Rather, I'm looking forward to using one of the most casual mediums available to publish...

Why have a personal website? Isn't it just an excuse to show off pictures of your cat, your significant other, a great poem about cheese that you wrote last week? Well, some of them are just that, and I strongly oppose the use of internet bandwidth for the sole purpose of showing off household pets. However, there is a largely underutilized potential for the personal website that I'd like to comment on. As I see it, a great deal of the world's problems are derived from a severe lack of communication,...