Tag: blogging

Curse you TomBeingTom

December 26, 2019

I despise these vapid Webby type contrivances designed to stroke the poles of bloggers and web developers since the late ’90s. My walls are lined with ribbons and placards of all the awards I’ve won. To add another is more nuisance than accolade.

(Mole dear, your wall is covered with posters of the Partridge Family, not web awards.)

Oh, right. Damn, that was the life I was GOING to have having dedicated my thirty’s to learning web languages and becoming a published web author. Alas, none of that panned out. I ended up working for failed startup after failed startup. (Geeze, maybe I’m the accursed one…)

OK, OK, here we go: Thanks TomBeingTom for, you know, calling me a female fox and obligating me to reply else I feel the heel and potentially miss the opportunity to flash my programming prowess, albeit, 20 years too late.

BlogEntry

That, my friends, is some of the first C# I wrote back in late 2002 when .NET first came out. And what did I apply myself to building with that great new language? A blog of course, or rather: Web Log, as no one called it a blog back then.

I managed to post more than 500 entries into my custom made blog over the next 10 years until my server’s harddrive failed and I quit trying to fool myself that I would ever win any praise as a developer. A living career, yes. Awards, never. (I did make copies of everything, I’m not entirely daft.)

My first ever “blog” post in January 2003: (I used XML as a storage format — pretty prophetic, no?)

BlogEntryXml

Blogging became more of a personal diary. But after things fell apart, I pishposhed about until I thought I’d better get back in and WordPress was a platform that seemed easy (free) and open (and free) and so I joined up (because it was free) in 2009; or so it says on my account page, I can’t believe it’s been that long.

Anonymole came a few years later in 2012.

The rest is all documented here in the pages of a subterranean gadriosopher (gatherer of knowledge). When it comes to life histories, brief is best. So, in short, I learned to code, made a blog, wrote some shit, the end.

But, hey, thanks AGAIN TomBeingTom for being the first to shine a bright light onto my failure as a web developer. (Kidding) [No, not kidding.] (No, seriously, I’m kidding.) [No, I’m not kidding at all, this is heavy shit. I think I may have to write another letter to Mudge begging to be consoled, placated at least, uncomfortably petted? Ya see, it’s all about bloggers getting stroked!]

Club Internet

April 8, 2018

If you have a raw nerve exposed, you can bet I’m going to be one of those who tries to tweak it, maybe shock it. Certainly pinch it a bit. OUCH!

Yeah, sorry about that. (But not really.)

And this is of course an exaggeration. I recently, yesterday or something, wrote about all of us being bloggers. 100% of us. And how I thought that that was an issue. Now, many of us here wanted to point out that, and rightly so, it’s not an issue, “exactly.” It is a “thing” and blogging does exist as a club or a membership but, so what? That’s not a bad thing. It’s just a thing.

So, I thought about this, and sure enough, I’ve come to realize that the internet has become an array of vertical stovepipes of membership. It is now Club Internet.

Let me take you back… In 1995 when I first began to “surf” the internet, that’s exactly what I did. It was a wild, unorganized place full of strange and odd and interesting stuff. I recall spending hours and hours just bouncing from page to page. There were no “search” engines, just some primitive DMOZ style indexes and link-exchanges. And there was no membership. It was just a vast, crazy “Woodstock” sort of experience.

Later, when I learned how to code the web, and built my own Web Logging software, there was still not much membership or exclusivity built into the net. My “blog” was just this diary I hung off a few of my sites — as was every other “blog.”

Today? Today the web is nothing if not collectives of “potentially” like minded people who “belong” to membership oriented enclaves. AND THAT’s OKAY.

When I wrote about bloggers being a circular group of people — well, they are, we are. But so are instagramers, snapchatters, fadebookers (I suppose), WeChatters, and so on and so forth. (In fact, nearly every site out there expects you to become a member, or join them in some way, and if you don’t, you can’t participate — period.) But, in the beginning, it wasn’t like that.

I think I was just now coming to grips with the fact that whatever I write here… Yeah, it’s not gonna be read by the “public.” It used to be read (or could have been read) by the public. But today? Only bloggers will read this. And, again, THAT’s OKAY.

100% of you are bloggers

April 7, 2018

Consider this:

A small town newspaper, with one reporter, one editor, one distribution manager, one advertising manger and one printer (all of whom are the same person) produces one edition per day.

The ONLY people who read this edition are the OTHER small town newspapers (those that also have a single reporter, editor, etc. all of whom are also a single person).

Imagine a network of small town newspapers that are read ONLY by other small town newspapers.

Does that strike you as strange? This is blogging.

Wouldn’t you, as a small town news/editor producer, want to have your paper read by other folks besides the editor of just the next-town-over newspaper? I would think that as a custom content provider you’d want to infiltrate other markets that are NOT just small town newspapers, right?

Something’s wrong here. It’s like were all just piranha (some small, some huge) all swimming in the same stretch of river. All feeding off of each other. What sense is that?

Why would I care that what I write is read by the next-town-over’s sole reporter/editor? Their town’s people ain’t gonna buy a copy of MY paper. (Nor will they actually by a copy of that editor’s paper…)

Blogging, as it turns out, is this incestuous, internally facing universe of people, writing, not for the world, not to be read by the “public”, but to be read by other bloggers — other small town newspaper reporters.

That seems like a broken model to me.

 

Blog me to death!

April 2, 2018

STOP!

Stop right fucking there. If you think there’s some gotdamned yardstick you think you’re measuring yourself against by posting every gotdamned four, or six or twelve hours to this got-forsaken situation (the web/internet) — then you’ve swallowed the wrong gotdamned pill.

This ain’t no way to run your pathetic life. The internet is not going to solve your social, financial, moral ills. It’s not. STOP. I know what you’re thinking, “Oh, if get 10,000 followers, 100,000 participants, 1M people to pay attention to the drivel, the absolute fucking drivel I spew out twice or three times a fucking day — then, I’ll be famous and achieve my life’s goals.”

Bollux!

Quantity is NOT, IS FUCKING NOT QUALITY.

Here’s some potting soil. Here’s some piss and shit from a chicken farm. Here’s some spring rain from Hawaii. Here’s a container — now go grow a fucking soul!

 

What was my first blog post?

December 8, 2017

I had to look.

Tom Being Tom prompted me to go back through my archives to see what was my first blog post. No, not here on WordPress (although it started about the same time I wrote my own custom code to process my personal blog posts), no, what I wrote was my custom blog engine. And what was my first blog entry?

Well, here it is:

<BlogEntries>
<BlogEntry>
<BlogID>33</BlogID>
<EntryDate>2003-01-28T08:40:16.00</EntryDate>
<Topic>Database</Topic>
<Title>NextGen Databases</Title>
<Synopsis>RDBMS's should expose ready made objects</Synopsis>
<Body>
RDBMS databases should provide their own object functionality.
From a CRM database one should be able to request, rather than
a recordset or dataset, a customer or customer collection. 
myCustomer = DatabaseReturnEntity("Customer", "id=932");
myCustomerList = DatabaseReturnEntityList("Customer","lastActivity='2/8/03'");
There is no reason why a BLL (Business Logic Layer) should have
to read in a dataset and repopulate a collection or object from
that data.
</Body>
<LinkList />
</BlogEntry>
</BlogEntries>

Isn’t it darling?

This is my own design (back when I was learning C#), and I used this code for the next eight years.

Those of you who are programmers will see the makings of what became MongoDB or AWS’s DynamoDB (a quasi-object database). Pretty futuristic wouldn’t you say?

(An RDBMS is a relational database management system; CRM: customer relationship management.)

From an elevated position

November 26, 2017

I stand before you. No.

I stand above you (on my soapbox) so that not only will I be seen and heard more clearly, but because of this, due to my elevated position (and by association — status), my opinion, ergo my “facts”, will carry more weight than yours.

soap

Blogs are soapboxes are they not? And everybody has a bog, I mean box, I mean blog. And from OUR blogs, WE get to pronounce, with assumed authority, things which we feel are true, or not, good, or not, or beliefs about any number of attributes about society and the world. We get to postulate and pontificate adnauseum. This is, after all, my box, er, blog — and what I say, goes.

But what about counter-argument invaders? This is my house and you will NOT tell me how to think in my house!

Do we behave like this? Do we believe that because we’re speaking from our own private corner of the web that we possess a sense of authority where none actually (may) exist?

And, what’s more important, do we take offense when someone, uninvited or welcomed, enjoins us in discussion and refutes anything or everything we say?

“How dare you tell me that a blog is NOT a soapbox! I demand you retract that statement else face pistols at dawn!”

Do you feel a sense of ownership over your blog and the facts (or falsities) you peddle there? And do you feel slighted when someone contests some notion of yours?

Please, someone, knock me off this damnable soapbox on which I stand.

Go on! I dare ya!