Moving on: Check out blindflaneur.com

Many of this blog’s channels and tangents, conversations and concerns have moved to a blind flaneur. Please take a look.

About the Channels & Tangents

Jazz at Café Mouffe

Playing By Ear

Re-Imagining Accessibility

Banging the War Drum

Media Bottom-Feeder

Tutelary Spirits

Meta-Blog

Welcome to Version 2.0

It isn’t a dramatic change, but it’s enough for me to know that I’ve moved on from version 1.0 of this blog. I had come to loathe the old Tekka template, especially its default Trebuchet font. Early travails using the old Blogger format made me wary of template changes. I didn’t want to lose (and have to rebuild) the sidebar page elements. Switching templates turned out to be as swift and painless as working with CSS should be. The new template is called Stretch Denim. It seems to fit; we’ll see how it wears. The typeface is Verdana. I think the overall look is cleaner, but hey, I’m half-blind. What do you think?

I know I still haven’t explained what 2deepgeek means. It’s one of those ontological problems that keeps me up nights. I’ve said something, certainly not everything, about riffing on the genome. And here’s a gloss on the inspiration for version 1.0. Merlin Mann of 43 Folders explains it in a podcast called First-time sex and the Beauty of 1.0. Start somewhere, he says. Do something. Revise as you go. Like the first time you have sex with someone, it’s likely to fumble. It’s enough to not end up in tears in the Emergency Room.

So, moving on to version 2.0, I can report no tears here, and no regrets.

Blogging Software Platforms

• Moveable Type - http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/
• Nucleus - http://www.nucleuscms.org/
• Live Journal - http://www.livejournal.com/
• Blogsphere - http://www.blogsphere.net/
• Serendipity - http://www.s9y.org/
• JRoller - http://www.jroller.com/
• Subtext - http://subtextproject.com/
• 20 Six U.K. - http://www.20six.co.uk
• Word Press - http://wordpress.org/
• Dotclear - http://www.dotclear.net/en/
• Drupal - http://drupal.org/
• Lifetype - http://lifetype.net/
• Textpattern - http://textpattern.com/
• Greymatter - http://noahgrey.com/greysoft/
• b2Evolution - http://b2evolution.net/
• MindSay - http://www.mindsay.com/
• Multiply - http://multiply.com/
• bBlog - http://www.bblog.com/
• Blogger - http://www.blogger.com/
• Pivotlog - http://www.pivotlog.net/
• Xanga - http://www.xanga.com/
• Geeklog - http://www.geeklog.net/

Thanks to JoAnn for the pointer to OTAI, the Online Teaching Activity Index.

An Experiment in Link Blogging

These are copied from del.icio.us/willis.creative/war_drums.

Sic Semper Tyrannis 2007: A Phased UK Withdrawal 022207
Guest analysis by Wayne White. UK pullout of Bosra will threaten US-Kuwait supply lines and pathway for exit strategy.
to Iraq Bush politics war_drums z07_02 ... saved by 1 other person ... 22 hours ago

Sic Semper Tyrannis 2007: Bureaucracy's Cost 022107
Pat Lang on the scandal at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Talk about supporting the troops...
to Iraq Bush politics war_drums z07_02 ... 22 hours ago

How to Leave a Comment

I want to read your comments about 2deepgeek, unless you are a spam robot or its human facsimile. This Blogger template (it’s called Tekka) has an obscure user interface for comments. It isn’t as inviting as I would like, but it’s shown me what to look for in the next blog platform.

Here’s how it works.

1. Look for the line at the bottom of the post that begins with “Posted by…”.

2. Click the link “0comments”. That’s your invitation to make it “>0comments”.

3. That click takes you to the post’s comment page, where you can add your response in a text field on the right side of the page.

4. Don’t forget to hit the “publish” button. You’re good to go. Thanks!

Blogger, Beware: You Get What You Pay For

I’ve been ant-crawling through the blog’s html code for the past two hours. I finally figured out why some key words (usually place names) get chopped out of the blog feed in Bloglnes. For example, if you read Hail to the Bully in Chief in Bloglines, you wouldn’t know where the cruise missiles might have been headed. I won’t give you the answer here because it would just get hacked again in the feed. When I looked at the code surrounding the word, I found that Google/Blogger inserted something like this:

st1:place st="on" Tehran

Ihad to modify the syntax so the code would appear here and not be swallowed up as another tag. This is too 2Deepgeek! Bloglines choked on it. So did I. My guess is this is some kind of tag for Google advertising. And also some kind of geo tag. Maybe if I activated AdSense you’d see an advert for the Tehran Hilton.

I read blogs in Bloglines, not on the blog page itself. When I read pages with conventional blog architecture, pages with text tumbling down one fat and one or two skinny columns, my screen-reader (ZoomText 8.1) reads across the columns. The content gets garbled. It sounds like Finnegans Wake or a teenager’s continuous partial attention. Reading blogs in a feed aggregator like Bloglines allows me to separate signal from noise because feeds usually deliver only the fat column’s content. that’s how RSS revolutionized my ability to read on the Internet.

So when I launched this blog, the first thing I did was subscribe to the feed. I’ve been very disappointed with the result. I thought I was doing something wrong. It’s the kind of problem that gives editors ulcers.

There’s a reason why this blog is designated version 1.0. Version 2.0 will be powered by a different blog platform that allows me, not Google, to control these shenanigans.