Posts tagged as "meta" - Chris Hardie

One of the weird things about blogs is that, as much time as people put into creating interesting and useful content for them, it's rare that anyone goes to the trouble to read back through older entries unless they're really looking for something specific, or are otherwise very committed to the content. I don't expect that most of my readers here will bother with browsing through archives just for the fun of it, so I already make available a couple of topic-related mechanisms to find what you're...

Those of you who follow my blog may not always bother to check in on the other parts of my personal website, which is understandable since they're much more static than the weblog. I do try to use the actual home page of the site as a fairly current jumping off point for various other projects, events, and adventures I'm involved in, and today I launched a redesigned version that organizes all of that a little bit better. It also has a photo that reflects the facial hair experiment I'm currently...

I've upgraded the Wordpress software powering this blog to a more recent version, and added a few more ways to interact with my posts at the same time: I'm now using Gravatars - "globally recognized avatars" - to display user-uploaded images next to the comments that people post. This creates a little bit better sense that you're interacting with real humans, and even adds a dash of color. If you want to try it out, just visit gravatar.com to upload your avatar today. You can now choose to be e-mailed...

There is a strange and unique destination out there in the political blogosphere called The Daily Kos. You may have heard of it - it's been called everything from one of the most defining websites of the modern political debate, to an analog of the Klu Klux Klan. I suspect it's actually somewhere in between (but for those who don't like encountering ideas they don't agree with, be careful about clicking through, you may find yourself uncomfortable). I recently tried an experiment, where I took...

I'm a nut about organizing stuff just so, and making sure bits of information are connected, interrelated, categorized, and labeled just right. The "categories" I've heretofore been using for this blog were ample for my initial purposes, but as I creep up on 200 posts, have become a less useful way to organize and access the information. So I'm turning to tagging and tags, a fairly widespread component of many blogs these days. Basically, each post will be assigned a series of tags that help...

Hopefully this is a change for the better. Let me know what you think. The image at the top is a stylized version of a photo of me. I'm standing in a fast-moving river, creating a disturbance and sloshing around me, as I look up at a beautiful sky in a moment of peace.

I've been reflecting recently on the different ways that my weblog sucks. And by "sucks," I mean "doesn't live up to the standards of what a popular, regularly-read weblog looks like." Popularity isn't necessarily my primary goal or even a goal at all, but it is nice to be recognized for the time and energy I put into some of the posts I write here. And therein lies the rub, I think: Whereas a lot of my weblog is full of fairly serious thoughts about fairly serious matters, there's not a single...

Some bits and pieces from life right now: I'm really proud of the RNR podcast episode from last night, even though I was tired enough that my production quality wasn't what it usually is and I mispronounced some names. But it's been an emotionally charged week and it was an emotionally charged evening, so I think the episode reflects that. Thanks to the folks at PhilQuinnForCouncil.com for linking here so prominently on the site. Of course, as much as I like and admire Phil, please know that...

I remember back in the day (i.e. a few years ago), when you wanted to put video on your website, you needed to think about disk space, bandwidth, media format compatibility and a host of other issues before you could even hope to have people looking at the actual video content. Today, sites like YouTube and Google Video (soon to be one) make it as easy as uploading your video to their site and then linking to it. And as Jean Harper sort of noted (lamented, really), it's quite the craze with the kids. So...

During the Third U.S. Conference on Peak Oil and Community Solutions that I attended last month, I found myself surrounded by an amazing group of hundreds of people who were trying to make changes in the world to move us (the human species) toward sustainability. While I do not limit my thinking on sustainability to the slogan "be the change you want to see in the world" (article on that is forthcoming), I thought it might be useful to take an inventory of the things I'm doing in my own life to reduce...