New site URL: dangerousmeta.rocks
A Squarespace site. Tired of wrangling CMSs, for now. Besides, I want to play with their Developer features, and this is a good time. Plus all their social integration is pretty well ironed out, plug and play.
So, all future posts will be at: dangerousmeta.rocks.
I will be putting RSS buttons in the footer, but for now there’s a post detailing where they *should* be.
Adieu, DM! Long live, DM!
Looks like the EE1 install is finally at saturation.
I’m looking into starting a new blog presence elsewhere, leaving this up (but no commenting, etc.) until I pull usable backups. New domain coming soon (I have to leave dangerousmeta.com pointed here, otherwise the whole thing breaks). Stay tuned. Just the birthday present I needed! A busted weblog!
A question for regulars.
How often do you delve in my archives? I ask the question, because they score well in searches, but are not exactly lively. I’m tempted to move it all to a PDF ... which would free me to start afresh in another CMS, clean-slate. PDF would be searchable, of course. And mostly text, so it’d be small [well, smaller than other options]. Just thinkering out loud again.
Editor’s note: This site may disappear at any moment.
I’m afraid my CMS is starting to betray overdue signs of overuse and age. I wake up in the morning, the sidebar is gone. Today, the header was gone. A new “publish story” command seems to return it all to normalcy. But these little errors are piling up. I need to schedule in either an upgrade, or a switchover to another CMS/service [like I have time for this right now]. What form that’ll take, I have no idea. But it’s getting dicey on this end. So if I disappear, it’s not forever ... it’s just a momentary glitch. @dangerousmeta on Twitter to find out what’s going on - if I’m dead in the water, I’ll be using that more frequently.
Deadline tonight.
Links will be thin - as if they haven’t been! Sorry for the circumstance. That time of year!
Webdesigner Depot: Why brutalism boosts conversions.
Linked for the title. I picture a little dude and a big dude. “Hey, Lenny.” Little dude points me out to big dude. “He ain’t buyin’. See if he wants a knuckle sammich instead.”
FishbowlNY: Cuts Coming to Guardian US.
Terrible to hear. They’ve been my go-to alternative to paywalls at the Times and Post. Getting to the point where a guy can’t be a news blogger without investing significant $ to do so. Maybe if media orgs would stop posting opinion in what should be factual current event articles, they’d save money ...
“Mark All Read.”
I give up with the aggregator. I’ll just start from scratch and wait. Ya gotta give in sometimes, people.
Reuters: Parent bloggers question role in Mylan’s EpiPen schools push.
Note this is the same strategy big pharma uses with doctors; symposia held in exotic locations. Read: bribery. I used to wonder that anyone would accept such largess without having at least one night of moral indigestion. I’ve since learned humanity has an incredible capacity to rationalize just about any action.
Bloggers, wake up. List your favor-granting, tchotchke-supplying influencers. Even if offered for free or for ‘loan’. List your sponsors. I understand you want or need to make money. Be open and honest, please.
I have no sponsors, have had none. If I did, they would be prominently listed in my right-side nav section here.
So, the outage today.
Four hours. They changed from MySQL to a MariaDB install at the host. I’m surprised - EE1’s behaving. I was expecting to have to go into full triage mode. Thank goodness I don’t!
pshares/blog: Online “Nymphet” Culture and the Reclaiming of Lolita.
This should be compared to the Harley Quinn phenom (Suicide Squad).
Smashing Mag: Using A Static Site Generator At Scale - Lessons Learned.
Would I be insane for moving this blog to something like Jekyll? And how to handle comments. Asking for input.
10,447 unread.
I think I’ll just “Mark All Read” and wait for current news to hit. I did note that Gene Wilder passed away while I was gone. I think that was about the only event of real note that mattered. Many great performances, but his interviews after he left the spotlight were often just as memorable (IMHO). A clearsighted, good man. RIP, Gene.
Editorial comment.
After a week away from all the daily news-gathering and social-media-posting, I can’t express how insane this all is. I highly recommend a ‘technology fast’ to restore one’s equanimity. You may think you’re coping well - I did. I wasn’t. Certainly not cured, but seeing things a whole lot more clearly now.
Upcoming schedule for blogging here ...
I have a particularly strenuous photo shoot over the next few days, and I also have to make a push to comp up a rather complex site. That means I need to hunker down for a while, which diminishes my efforts here on the blog. I’ll try to look in from time to time and post something new, but my frequency will not return to normal until next week sometime.
As always, thanks for your continuing readership, and I’ll peek in when I can!
Mashable: You’ll soon be able to register a .blog domain.
Jeez, the early-access price. Vanity, thy name is .blog?
The Fully Intended: Being afraid.
Congratulations, Mollie!
BBC: News site Gawker.com to shut down next week.
Serendipita: Anniversary.
College Fix: Princeton HR department - Don’t use word ‘man’.
Should this be the new ‘default’ for all weblogs and social interactions? Asking. “I’d really like to know, man.”
Wonkette: Let’s Try Talking About Juanita Broaddrick, Again.
“But truly — back then, men were taught that a girl has to say no a couple times before she says yes, so no one will think she is easy.” Read it, see what you think. Most are only linking the original article; this is the ‘apology’. In the ‘90’s? Please. ‘50’s, maybe. I was born in 1959, and I understood “No” to be “No”. And it never went that far, in my hearing. And ‘taught’? Where in the world did that idea come from? And religious redemption is the slippery slope by which terrible politicians regain the limelight.
Sometimes, as a blogger, you have to step back and avoid the ‘I need to answer my mistake right away’ urge. A longer, more thoughtful process is required. Most readers will understand the pullback-and-contemplate time, if you ask for it. “I didn’t express myself well, let me take the time to carefully rephrase my intended meaning.”
Speaking more generally: Given the youth of today’s journalists, I really do wonder sometimes at their portrayal of previous decades. It only rarely resembles the realities I lived through. The first lesson: Avoid making broad generalizations without evidence!
FishbowlNY: NPR Is Closing Its Comments Section.
“Montgomery added that social media provides a much better platform for discussing NPR stories than the site’s comments section. He’s right, of course.” Um, Twitter just encourages snark. So I respectfully disagree.
Rolling Stone: Matt Taibbi on the Summer of the Media Shill.
“Media power comes from trust and respect, and both are eroded quickly if you only ever give people what they want to hear.” Can we underline that one, relink it generously?
FishbowlNY: The Drudge Report Meets Usain Bolt.
“In the month of July, there were a total of 2,678,400 news-making seconds. If you divide the Drudge July page views total by that number, you get an average of 549.66 page views per second.” One look at the DR, you feel the world’s falling apart. As bad as Amazon’s “Most Read” email, if not worse. Do we as a society really love bad news this much?
The Coolist: The 30 Best Action Movies for Men of the Modern Age.
Linked so you don’t have to read it: “... The Last of the Mohicans takes a hard stare at the cruelty inherent in the wild west as white settlers pushed native peoples off their homeland.” It’s NEW YORK, you buffoons. “Wild west”, my eye.
