Posts tagged as "meta" - Chris Hardie

I've moved this weblog to use WordPress, instead of Movable Type. While I found Movable Type generally agreeable, WordPress has become a favorite as I've used it with the Summersault Weblog, especially in its handling of comment and trackback spam which, other than writing posts themselves, had become the most time-consuming part of having a weblog - not good. So, I'm still ironing out a few glitches from the transition, but otherwise it should be business as usual with a more consistent look...

I recently wrote in the Summersault weblog about how website content syndication is changing the way we use the web. Of course, if the sites you care about aren't syndicating their content, the phenomenon is a little less exciting. For me, the only ones I cared about that were in this category were local news sources. For a few years I'd been running hacked up Perl scripts that tried to retrieve headlines from the sites of local papers, but it tended to be hit and miss and I never really took...

I've been doing more and more public speaking over the last few years, and find that it's something I enjoy immensely. There was a time when I was younger when I considered a "career" in it (as a minister, even), despite my introverted nature and the nervous shakes I'd always get right before beginning a talk. I'm still introverted and I still get the shakes once in a while, but I really appreciate opportunities to be a part of group learning and educational sessions, especially when I have something...

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,...

I thought I'd start a list of people in Richmond and Wayne County with active weblogs. If you have anyone to add, please let me know. The list will probably tend to exclude sites primarily dedicated to for-profit promoting of a particular organization, product or service. Enjoy!

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...

From 1962 to 1965, well before I was born, my father served in the U.S. Army. Most of his time was in Germany based at Bad Aibling Station, a military intelligence listening post, which was closed in 2002. During this time he wrote many letters and postcards to my grandparents and other family members, which they took care to preserve. In 2001, I took the time to transcribe these letters into a database and then into a navigable set of HTML documents. Despite some trepidation about making them...

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,...