Category Archives: Blogging

Take that in your archive and smoke it

It is risen from the dead! Or from the bowels of an XML file, anyway. I’ve been able to get my archive online again, though I’ve lost all the images and attachments. They were only slowing me down anyway. But at least I’ve managed to salvage the posts, which is the main thing. And that one success has me back on the blogging track again.

Look and feel

I’m having difficulty changing the style of this blog, which has been due for a refresh for nigh on a couple of years now. It crashes every time I change the settings, though I’ve managed to turn comments back on for new posts. I’m not sure if it’s down to an old version of WordPress (which I can’t update right now due to being on an ancient hosting package) or conflicts with my browser, but I’m working on it.

 

Damn you, technology

As my site is PHP 4.4 and the latest WordPress needs 5.2.4, the Akismet update has left that “missing argument” line across the top of the page and I can’t, as yet, fix the damn thing.

Update: Deactivating Akismet lets me do actual proper stuff in terms of blogging, which is handy as you might expect, but the lack of spam filtering could prove troublesome.

Rebooting

My last post was in February – bloody hell, where has the time gone? It was about that time that I began my own personal reboot, with a return to the Irish Examiner, this time as Chief Sub-Editor (I have my own business cards and everything, so it must be official). All is going well enough so far, although it means this blog will be steering clear of most media stuff to avoid any clashes of interest.

In the spirit of rebooting, here’s the Downfall take on DC Comics’ decision to restart every one of its titles.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UpUh_Yl49l4[/youtube]

So while I get this blog back on is feet (not to mention my history blog at Chronica Minora), connect with the Examiner on Facebook and Twitter.

 

Information spring cleaning

For the past few months, perhaps even year or more, I have been inundated with information. This is a particularly digital-age concern, where we are bombarded with so many inputs that it becomes a full-time job just to separate the useful sounds from the background noise.

Tonight I unsubscribed from a good number of blogs that I had been following – in name at least – for years. I won’t name them or link to them here, as that would be pointless. But what I realised when looking at my Google Reader, with it’s unread count almost permanently stuck at 1,000+, was that many of these sites were no longer relevant to me. And yet in several cases I felt a deep resistance to what I was about to do. Some of these feeds had been with me so long to imagine my Reader (and before that, Bloglines) without them was unthinkable. They fell into the category of “I really want to read these, but I don’t have the time now”, or often, “I really should stay subscribed to these, as they’re about Very Important Things”. These things included politics and economics, as well as digital media, transparency, and information exchange. But they did nothing for me. Whatever had drawn me to them originally had passed.

This could be for any number of reasons. Too much information to process. Too few posts directly relevant to my interests. A decline in the quality of posts. A tendency to visit individual websites. The fact that I no longer cared about what some sites had to say. The list could go on.

I am certainly a very different person now to the one of years gone by. My interests have changed, my work has taken on new directions, I have had my energies spread too thinly across too many projects, I have grown up, moved on, and got engaged. That doesn’t mean that I have stopped caring about learning – I’m working on a PhD, as you may remember, and learning is the name of the game. It just means that I want to learn in a different way. I want to try something different, expose myself to new ideas, and peer into nooks of knowledge that I had never considered before.

Some of these will be shared here, and I will be doing more short posts. Some will be shared on my history blog, while others you will only know about through my Facebook, Twitter, or Academia accounts. The decision is yours.

To the future!

It's alive… it's ALIVE

Sort of. Apparently at least two quick posts I wrote in the last month have vanished into the ether, but no matter. My thesis is finished and I have started on my PhD. I need to do some overhauling of the blog but that’ll take a while as I have a fair bit to do in the real world.

If you’ve come here and been greeted with some sort of Twitter authentification window, apologies. I only found out that was happening tonight. I have removed the Twitter feed from the site as I don’t like that sort of thing. I might re-embed it when I figure out something better.