puzzling.org

I think there are several bad reasons to keep an online diary, including using it as a poor substitute for a paper diary, using it to experiment with hyperlinking writing, or using it as a forum for your opinions. Each of these needs is better served by alternative forms. On the other hand, online diaries are maligned as being necessarily uninteresting due to their trivial nature. Trivial and uninteresting do not always go hand in hand, as diarists and letter writers have appreciated for hundreds of years.

The online diary is a format held in peculiar contempt, for several reasons. Most of those reasons are due to the usual meaning of ‘diary’ — that is, a more-or-less secret record of one’s life, written, presumably, for your satisfaction alone, and deriving much of its power from the fact that it has no readers, freeing the author both from the stylistic constraints of writing for an audience, and from the judgements of that audience.

The online diary format naturally loses much of that power. The disadvantages of the online diary format compared to the paper diary format include less honesty (or less sweeping honesty anyway), and much less privacy. It also leaves the author wide open to charges of narcissism, since they are writing about themself for an audience of other people.

So, let’s free the online diary from those constraints. You do not keep an online diary for the same reasons you keep a paper diary. The disadvantages include a lack of complete honesty and privacy. If you want to write with complete honesty and privacy you should keep a paper diary or correspond in private with trusted friends who will destroy your missives rather than hand them to anyone else.

I also suggest that you do not keep an online diary in order to experiment with stylised writing, because you’re likely to attract the wrong audience. Audiences seeking experimental writing styles don’t expect to find it in online diaries, and audiences reading online diaries don’t expect highly stylised writing, or content that deviates radically from the normally online diary content (that is, a person’s record of their life).

Most of the good stylised writing I’ve seen on the Web has been noticably free from the constraints of chronology. Online diaries are tied to a date based format, and people who are interested in telling stories or linking ideas together would be better off with a more integrated site, all of which is an ongoing work. I consider gruntle, raze, and the Jargon File to be excellent examples of the power that loosely organised, heavily hyperlinked sites offer to writers interested in experimenting with style and content that doesn’t fit in a chronological format. If you want to tell stories, I highly recommend this form over the online diary format.

If you’re interested in writing opinion pieces, rather than snippets of your daily life, I suggest you consider blogging, rather than keeping an online diary. Blogging and online diaries are both presently primarily chronological formats, and there is a gray area between them, since people use the same tools for both. The primary distinction between the stereotypical blog and the stereotypical online diary is the amount of linking in the former. Blogs link to websites, link to each other, comment on each other, discuss each other, discuss links, and discuss ideas. If you’re interested in taking part in intellectual crossfire, the blogging tools and communities will be much more satisfying than the online diary format.

Where experimental sites link internally, and blogs link externally, online diaries are largely hyperlink-free. The form requires authors to relate chosen aspects of their life on a loosely chronological basis. They attract readers who like to follow simple story lines, who like to feel involved in the lives of others. As often as not, the readership is made up of people who know the author and people who would like to.

So, what are good reasons to keep an online diary? If you need pre-digital examples of online diary-like writing, consider letter writing one hundred years or more ago. Letters of this time were often gossipy, personal, entertaining, bitchy and informative. In retrospect, some of the writing in informal letters is not only historically interesting, but very very good. So, if you think that one hundred years ago you would have liked to sit in your drawing room and write to your sister in the next town about your housekeeping, giving interest to the mundanities of your life, then online diary writing is probably a format you would enjoy.

Battle of the Pizzas, preliminary round

In the spirit of the original Free Your Pizza these are the toppings that did battle tonight:

Pizza #1, in the red corner: spanish onion, sweet potato, lamb, fetta cheese; and

Pizza #2, in the “everything goes” corner: salami, capsicum (red and green), bacon, Rogan Josh lamb, mango chutney.

The base was controlled: both pizzas had a base made of white flour, with basil and carraway seeds (spiv‘s sister has determined that this adds Latvian flavour). Both pizzas were topped with grated cheese and cooked in a pan brushed with olive oil.

Notes: carraway seeds and basil are both a bit strong for a pizza base. Use wholemeal flour next time. Also, I always put too little flour in dough.

Life

I call it “university”.

I’m trying to divide my project into small enough bits that I can procrastinate and still be working on my project!

Code

Poked at Woven last night, and it looked like a cool and efficient way to pump content out cleanly in the minimum lines of code. Pity my host doesn’t run Twisted Web (word up to the Northern Hemisphere: hosting at home is not economic in .au). So all I need to do is coerce it to write out static pages…

Automating your advogato posts

… or “jdub has done it, so should you”…

hereticmessiah and others: use cmiller‘s advodiary script to help you automate advogato postings.

I don’t have any content anywhere else to source advogato entries from (no .plan, no log, my other diary is somewhat baroque and quite non-advogato) or I would also jump on this bandwagon.

Life

Silently dropped off a bunch of mailing lists for the duration of Crunch Time I (the Coursework Descends). I can’t even claim community involvement this month. I’m currently taking half an hour off between the two assignments that are due today.

Finis

I graduated for the first time yesterday (B Science and B Arts). Graduation number two expected this time next year (B Science (Honours)). Honours thesis due Nov 11.

Energy

All my creative energies are being sucked into university work. In some ways it is good that academic work is requiring writing, editing and coding from me, but in other ways it is sad, since it leaves me drained.

Free Software

My involvement continues to be community based. Still on SLUG committee, still involved in LinuxChix, still running the (tiny) local Python Interest Group. My HOWTO Pay for Free Software is slowly improving and is near version 1.0.

I am so pleased that after years and years of waiting, my coding skills have reached the point where I feel confident reading and repairing other people’s code. This bodes well for Free Software development in the future, but I’m trying to keep a lid on avenues of prostratination this year. I have constant struggles with procrastination, motivation and guilt which I am trying desperately to resolve, and alas, I’ve decided that stepping back from the keyboard after hours is likely to be part of the solution.

I’m sure that this will spawn a "how to be a non-annoying…" series to rival "… considered harmful" essays. Next stop, "How to be a non-annoying user of public transport".

The basic principle of being a non-annoying mailing list subscriber is, you guessed, being low maintainence!

Don’t quote excessively.

Well, OK, this is just one of my pet hates. Successful quoting indicates you’ve read the mail you’re replying to. Good work.

Dont quote badly

There’s nothing worse than multiply quoted lines, half of which have over-flowed onto the next. Either get an editor that can successfully reformat quoted blocks without littering "> >" into the body of the quoted text, or don’t re-format them. There is no middle way.

Do not hold the list responsible for its silence

It doesn’t matter if someone was advocating eating the entrails of new born puppies on the list, something like 80% of subscribers will not have noticed. 95% if the person doing this was at the tail end of a flamewar, particularly if it’s in the middle of badly quoted yuck-mess.

Silence is not the same thing as consent. This is not a political arena where real decisions are made. This is a mailing list. Silence is the same thing as boredom.

Do not attempt to emotionally blackmail the list

It doesn’t work because they can’t see your puppy dog eyes.

Do not use grandiose names for yourself

People calling themself "Brain Trust" asking for help with their maths homework look stupid, not just momentarily homework-impaired.

Do not post threats to unsubscribe

Most subscribers will immediately take a position on the question of whether you should or should not unsubscribe, and it will be the former position.

Do not trust the mailing list

It is archived. There are thousands of silent subscribers, watching you with blank faces. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Do not expect affection from the mailing list

Its subscribers do not love you. Generalisations are never ("never?" says the smart alec, never comes the reply) true, but this one is close.

I’m finding myself getting a bit paranoid on IRC. Every time someone private messages me, or persistently questions me about why I keep logging off and logging back on, I find myself metaphorically looking at them through narrowed eyes.

I don’t like being private messaged by someone I don’t know very well for the same reason I don’t like getting into long email discussions with someone I don’t know very well — I’m forced into either an ongoing dialogue, or extreme impoliteness. As part of a public discussion in person, on a mailing list, or on IRC, I can slip away, cease to follow the discussion or let others pick up the slack if I want.

In a private discussion I’m called upon to invest extra energy that I may not want to expend. Insisting on extended private message with someone you don’t know well is a good way to make yourself look high maintainence before you look worthy of it.

I hate to step on people’s definitional toes, but if I’m going to talk about why [we]blogs sucks, I need to define them.

A blog is an evolving website, with distinct "entries". These entires are long or short, titled or not, and almost always have some kind of distinct URL so that you can link to them directly. Blogs often link to one another, but that doesn’t matter for my purposes.

The key feature of blogs that sucks is the way the entries are ordered: chronologically.

Chronological ordering makes sense in certain genres. It makes sense when writing a piece of history: the text is linked together by certain events. It makes sense when writing a diary: the overall patterns and relationships are not perceivable to the diarist, but they are what makes diaries interesting. It makes sense when writing a narrative.

It doesn’t make sense when writing essays. There might be a certain amount to be gained by discovering how a particular author’s opinions have changed over time. When a blog is a quasi-journal, a chronological ordering makes sense.

But many blogs are ordered by time by default, and for many of them a chronological ordering doesn’t make sense. If I read a good essay about environmental concerns, I am more likely to want to read further essays on environmental concerns than I am to want to read the same author talking about their sexuality, even if the two were written on the same day.

Of course, if the quality of this author’s writing is good, then I am at least somewhat likely to be interested in their writing in general, so the ability to find posts by the same author would also be valuable.

A blog is good at letting me find entries by the same author (spectacularly so – most blogs have only one), and entries in the same time period, but terrible at letting me find related essays, unless they are specifically linked to.

Compare forums. Forum-type webpages (also known as webboards) are good at letting me read entries by many authors. But since they are discussion oriented, they contain few extended self-contained pieces. The quality of writing on webboards is also much more variable – a blog will tend to be either good or bad, not mostly bad with a few gems, like a forum.

The type of content I like most is extended, self-contained pieces. I would like to be able to find many extended, self-contained pieces on similar topics. What is the solution?

Blogs as they currently stand are only a partial solution. If I find a well-written entry in a blog, it is at least possible that the majority of entries will be well-written. Blog entries tend to be self-contained, and are sometimes extended. Some blogs allow authors to categorise and sub-categorise content, so that I can easily read many related pieces by the same author, provided they’ve chosen to use this feature. Many don’t categorise entries – entries are ordered only chronologically, which is much worse.

Forums are only a partial solution. They tend to group entries by category, but the quality is wildly variable and there are few extended pieces.

Search engines as they stand are only a partial solution. They are good at finding pages that concern a particular topic, increasingly good at qualitative judgements, or at least at producing some kind of measure of the judgements made by others, but poor at judging qualities like "self-contained" and "extended".

But essentially what I want is a growth in user-generated content, linked by topic and quality controlled. At this point, hyperlinking is the best solution to this problem, but a more formal method of aggregating suitable content would be a better solution.

I want to be able to access a wealth of similar quality themed content from a single site.

Since web content can be dynamically generated, the ordering and selection of that content should be able to be user-defined, not centrally defined. If I want chronological ordering, I should be able to have it. If I want content by a particular author, I should be able to find it.

My proposal differs from current blogging practice in two ways: I want entries aggregated on central sites. The central sites could aggregate different kinds of content: posts by particular authors, posts on particular topics, posts in particular time frames. The same content is aggregated by <em >multiple sites</em> – a post on dead women might be aggregated on a site about death and one about women.

The central sites should exercise editorial control of some kind, and allows user-defined sub-categorisation of content.

The beauty of this proposal is that the sites don’t need to be created all at once. I could decide to create a site aggregating content about Linux, and soliciting people to allow me to collect their content. As I run the site, I can make editorial decisions. Someone else could do so for women, for death and for the colour purple. The result would be a wealth of excellent topical user-generated content, something that is currently widely distributed, and hence difficult to find.

…. finished undergrad …

but about to go back to university for honours. And I dreamt about failing first year history last night, and having to take a maths course over the summer to make up the credit.

… writing a HOWTO …

on paying for your Free Software (I’m equating contributing with paying). It’s not even properly proof read yet, let alone finished, or licenced…

… still around LinuxChix …

although it mostly sails along. jennv has even been able to take a writing holiday.

… still around SLUG …

my contributions of the past year were starting a Python Interest Group, and our hugely exciting (*excited*) new constitution, which was dragged into something like current practice. It’s nearly as exciting as the insurance.

… scripting …

It’s all webby bloggy stuff, but isn’t everyone doing webby bloggy stuff these days?

The more people code webby stuff, the more their private code library seems to approach middleware. But I’m reliably informed that existing middleware sucks. At least, once you’ve polled three random web developers, the union of the sets of sucking middleware encompasses all middleware, all software calling itself middleware, most databases, several scripting languages, object orientation in general, and probably a few endangered species.

At the moment, the favoured way to develop good middleware seems to be doing it all by yourself.

Rolling Stone magazine informs me that marketers of a brand of lipstick has appointed celebrity spokeswomen.

I am, quite frankly, mystified. Lipstick isn’t for talking in, it’s for pouting in. Talking is the the death of a really good lipline. Taking a sip of water at a press conference is the nail in the coffin.

The canvas for a good lipstick doesn’t move. You don’t do anything with lipstick. You either have a $60 kiss-me pout, or you don’t. And you don’t want to talk about your perfect pout under lights for an hour, because your pout will diffuse slowly across your face.

Actually, you don’t want to kiss with a perfect kiss-me pout either. Noone can appreciate your steady hand and even application when you’re smearing lipstick unevenly over someone else’s face.

You don’t touch, you don’t listen, you don’t converse. You are seen.

And besides, what is there to say about lipstick?

There’s an old question: "if you knew what was Right, would it be Right to force other people to do what was Right?"

The most obvious fudge is to say that part of knowing what was Right would be knowing the answer to that question. There are also several attacks on the premises, the most obvious of which is that "nothing is Right", at least in the sense that the question assumes. Perhaps what is Right for you is Wrong for others, or perhaps it doesn’t make sense to talk of Right and Good.

I tend to question ideals of tolerance, in which everyone has their own moral system, which is as equally and validly right for them as anyone else’s moral system. If nothing else, a good fraction of those moral systems are actually fairly intolerant. Is it possible to be tolerant, open, and accepting, of closed and intolerant ideas? Is it possible to be tolerant of someone else’s abhorrence for tolerance? Is it possible to tolerate people trampling on the tolerance of others?

I feel that in the act of exercising tolerance in these situations is often akin to asserting the superiority of tolerance, which leaves tolerant ethics in a bind in which they accept nothing quite so much as acceptance.

That said, the moral sky has not fallen in now that we are prepared to live with people who have different gods from us, or no god at all, or every god under the sun. The extent to which you can adhere to an absolute ethical system when surrounded by happy, content and ethical enough people who seem to hold fundamentally incompatible belief systems from each other is limited.

Even a humble absolutist who does not believe that they have a good personal connection to the ultimate truth at least asserts one truth: that there is an absolute morality out there somewhere. Relativists are doubly bound, as they must assert that everything is relative, except relativity, because it is absolutely true that there are no absolutes.

The natural answer in a pluralist society seems to be to not know. To be uncertain of whether or not there is absolute morality. The question then is how to be an idealist.

How can a person who has not decided whether being a better person is absolutely defined or purely subjective try to be a better person or to better anything? From where do ideals arise?

I have some faith in the interpersonal context. The question of things being better, or being a better person in a solipsist universe is meaningless. Hence ideals are not found by retreating into some system, either resolutely absolute, or completely relativist, that exists independently of interpersonal context. The only possible meaning that acts can have is with reference to something external. Reality kicks back, and the feeling of such kicking gives us better grounds for action than any internal decisions about morality.