Gulp! Blog and be damned

[taliesin]

I cracked.
I could no longer resist reading other people's blogs without starting one.
I've held off from mentioning it to most friends here, but enough people have now seen the past week's occasional efforts for me to risk it.  
It's still extremely experimental and needs more "technical" work than I'm finding time to put into it, but my motivation is sufficient for the rudiments of HTML to begin to "stick".
When first I mentioned having a go, I was enthusiastic about iBlog, which has made recent progress.
But with trial and error, I found this still buggy and it didn't give me future options I wanted. It could be fine, with more work, for people seeking easy blogging with iLife integration.
Blogger didn't suit me either. I downloaded two other options and blanched at their sheer complexity! Then I read this piece by Pierre Igot (it's in English) at Applelust.com.
And I was off.  
My tools:
- I decided to pay for Netnewswire from Ranchero (before the bundled-with-Spring offer currently on their site). The free Netnewswire Lite is terrific, but the full works give you a great weblog editor and a particularly handy kind of notepad.
- I'm using my .mac account and iDisk for what passes for initial "artwork".
- apart from AppleWorks and GraphicConverter, the free Resize! is quick for scaling what goes to the .mac account.
- and for host and much fine tuning, I'm with Radio Userland and have installed Radio 8.0.9b2.

Today, I intended to progress by reading the help pages in the Radio app, still on trial. I guess the fact that I haven't yet, a quick skim apart, shows that almost any fool can do this! But the skim reveals that there's a lot of potential tucked away behind the scenes.

Ok, time to face the music: taliesin's log

Oh yes.
Why?

Because I can't keep my mouth shut.
Because the "formula" suits my purposes, just as it seems to please a growing number of other bloggers! Some of theirs are most impressive.
Because I don't want a "traditional" website, with the tremendous amount of work that entails.
And because since I love TS, I'm proud of this place, I'm also committed to our "guidelines" and the spirit behind them.
Some of the "OT" views I hold have no place here.

[pendragon]

Nick,That is an incredible undertaking. I don’t know where you find the time. Yeah, the site will undoubtedly evoke passions (and maybe some discord), but I suspect you are no stranger to that.

A very nice Blog indeed. Thanks for sharing it.

Harv

[tacit]

I've been blogging for quite some time. Rather than trying to "roll my own" using my own server and a Weblog program, I'm on LiveJournal, a Weblog community with about 900,000 members.

My Weblog is here. A word of warning to the easily offended: It does contain strong sexual content.

Using a Weblog community like LiveJournal offers several advantages (you don't have to put the Weblog on your own server, you don't have to tinker with the software, you can create "communities," you can create "friends lists" of other people in the community whose Weblogs you enjoy reading), and some disadvantages (LiveJournal is a non-profit community with nearly a million members, so sometimes the servers get overloaded).

It's a good introduction to blogging, because you can create a LiveJournal Weblog very easily, with zero technical knowledge.

[snuffysbluff]

Tacit...

Reading your web log (good reading) and emailed the link to my son at Hallmark.

He may find the Tues Feb 11, 2003 entry interesting. I think he may go for it.

I also linked him to your site. I think he'll appreciate your outlook. Hopefully from afar.  

Enjoyed yours also Taliesin...I laughed, I cried...it became a part of me.

[kps]

Hey, that's pretty   , you guys.

 I know I couldn't keep up with that. I'm still working on my web page... since 1996.

[tacit]

So if he goes for it and starts creating some  new greeting cards, does that mean I get royalties?  
 
 [ 03-05-2003, 12:46 PM: Message edited by: tacit ]

[snuffysbluff]

quote:Originally posted by tacit:
So if he goes for it and starts creating some  new greeting cards, does that mean I get royalties?    

Son's response...
Actually it costs about 3 cents to make your average card and there are no
price points of $3.50 in any Hallmark Card line.
$1.85,$2.95,$2.49,$3.99 being the most common.

To tell you the truth there is no money in BDSM greetings at least enough to balance the damage to  reputation. The  core consumer is a woman and 40 years old(average) and "Christian".

They would be fun to do from an Artists standpoint and we come up with
plenty that never see the light of day.
Bummer!     Lots of "rabbits" out there.

[Epaminondas]

<< My Weblog is here. >>

Tacit,

I am pleased to see that you have solved your shyness problem. ;-)

And to think that I always thought that Windows users were a bunch of masochists.

I will never look at a "Marks-A-Lot" again in quite the same light.

_______________________________________________

As to the greeting card issue - I find it more effective to just create my own.  I mean - it really is a lot less work than searching through a zillion cards designed for 40-year old Christian women.  Dear hearts that they may be.

God bless them.

Anyway -

What could be more romantic that a Valentine's Day card where all the hearts are both hand drawn and anatomically correct?

Not to be gushing -

_______________________________________________

Tell me - is that OUR Kelly you're writing about?

Kelly - you dog you! ;-)

Y'all have fun doin' what y'all do best -

Epaminondas

_______________________________________________
 
 [ 03-06-2003, 12:01 AM: Message edited by: Epaminondas ]

[kelly]

No. Different kellys alltogether.  

I'm a middle aged Male.

She isn't.

[tacit]

Hmm. That's interesting; two of the three cards I ended up buying for Valentine's Day were $3.50 at the Hallmark shop. I wonder if they were $3.99 originally, and marked down?

I'm not looking for BDSM cards--only for cards that acknowledge that not all relationships are monogamous. I bet it'd be possible to do this in a way that's subtle enough not to get the archetypal 40-year-old Christian woman irate. American Greetings makes a card that my girlfriend got for us that reads "Our relationship may not be what other people expect, but it works for us." Something like that.  

So if it costs 3 cents to make a greeting card, and they sell for $3.99, that's a profit margin of thirteen thousand, three hundred percent.     I'm in the wrong business!

Hmm...I wonder if there's money in alternative greeting cards... (Walks away into the distance, stroking chin thoughtfully...)

[snuffysbluff]

Sorry Taliesin, for taking your thread so far off topic, and I am enjoying your WebLog.

Tacit...
I'm certain you know that the overhead costs of producing and printing is reflected in the first 500. Be it business cards or comic books.

Since Hallmark probably prints in the 5 digit thousands at a time, the costs are spread much thinner. It would certainly cost more per card in a smaller operation.

Your mileage may vary  

...and, as the boy indicated...It's all about money and attitude.

He rides a Harley, shaves his head (except for a two foot pigtail), has an earring (I hope in the hetro ear), is six foot five and weighs over 300 lbs. He's a single father and his favorite photo is of his toddler son and him standing in front of a billboard advertising a meat market . The billboard's headline reads: (how can I put this) "Consume our Product".

If Hallmark was his company, He'd go for it.
 

Now back to the regularly scheduled thread.

[RobW]

Sorry to go "OT" again, but Snuffy, it's so shocking that  your son would "think differently.:      

BTW, I hate to break the news to you--but the ear that a guy wears his earing in no longer is "code" for his sexual preference.  Hasn't been since about the early '80's I guess. (Gotta miss the good old days when you could always know about a person by the earings that they wore. None of that always having to guess.   ) Check out lots of athletes on TV--they've got lots of earing in either or both ears. I'd hate to raise that question with any of them. Could get painful.  

Ok, back to the thread.

[taliesin]

Hey, Snuffy, it's hardly a guy like me who minds a digression or three!

It's time, though, to say thanks publicly to everybody who has encouraged me in this effort, as well as those who had other ideas.  
I held off coming back to this thread myself because I was curious to see whether anyone else would own up to a weblog. I find it hard to believe that of all the people here, tacit and I are the only ones keeping one.

You're right, Harv, but what fun would it be if nobody disagreed with what I write? Speaking of differences of opinion, the debate sparked off by ejc on "Why I see no need to adopt OS X" is one example here of something eminently "bloggable": an entertaining, informative and at times feisty read. I've been enjoying it.

As for the time it takes, the software does most of the work, allowing me to focus on content. There are things I'd like to tweak and to add, but still I haven't read those help pages at Radio Userland, while the longer I work with Netnewswire, the more I like it. What I need most to get to eventually is sorting out sidebar links to other people's places.
The surprise of the past week has been the response from people where I work, scattered all over the place, and it'll take a careful editorial balancing act to cater occasionally for the 'friendlink' items they want without boring everybody else. I certainly don't have the time to run a separate AFP blog.

The only risk to people here is that blogging encourages me to take a closer look at the homepages of TSers than I've sometimes done before.

Be warned: you never know when I might pounce now.  
There are some mighty good ones - and what a variety!  

OK, back to those earrings.

[sandbox]

A fine job indeed sir,    but  a question, why is the page so W I D E ?

I have found in the past that side scrolling calls for a third hand.

The earring thing is still left of center, at least for scooter folks. It works well when looking for that third hand. Rings like computers come with peripheral attachments. Say you need a place to hang your beer? Well, you just select the Alligator Clip peripheral attachment and dangle your beer from your ear. Beer’s getting a bit warm up there? No problem, you can lock the scooters throttle in your right hand, reach across to your left ear and with fingerless gloves pinch the clips and grab the beer without spilling a drop.     Now that option is pretty old, and with new attachments coming out every year one might select the upgrade. Like, the cooler on the head with a straw, attached to 2 earrings, but a cooler seems so much like a helmet that it could hurt your neck, so the old school scooter riders stick to the one ring option, preserving their necks for a technique known as rubbernecking. (which has something to do with a gleam in your eye)

[neokm]

Kelly and other TS faithfulls- - - this is an example of the euro page layout which I referred to last week (wide-screen formats), and led me to asking help from TS to reconfigure my monitor - (since I'm surfing euro sites halfof my time on-line).
Mike