Idiotprogrammer: Texas Literary Blog

Category: Art of Blogging

  • Getting Up All Riled Up for Nothing

    This morning I spent 2 hours reading about a semi-scandal on the Net. I am not going to be specific or even link to commentary about the scandal. I don’t want you to be distracted; I actually spent a lot of time reading about it and the back and forth between players. I even wrote…

  • Jake Seliger’s “The Story’s Story” blog has been moved

    Here is the link to Jake Seliger’s The Story’s Story blog. (Good blog about literature, writing and culture, by the way). You can ignore this post. Apparently through some bureaucratic  mishap, his domain was not extended, and godaddy snapped it up and is now selling it for $38,000.  I’m just giving some much needed google…

  • Be Gone, Blog! (Oh, Wait…)

    I’ve been blogging for over 10 1/2 years (actually 11 1/2 if you count the pseudonymous Diaryland blog I kept for about a year). But now it’s time to say goodbye.  I’m just too beat to do it anymore. My life, priorities,  etc. (fill in the blank here).   Now I need to focus  on my…

  • Another approach to blogging: Bus-blogging

    As mentioned a week ago, I have taken a long hiatus towards blogging. In fact, I have not been writing at all  between March and April, but then, an amazing thing. I have started to use my ipad to do a LOT of writing on the bus. I bought a bluetooth wireless keyboard, and for…

  • Tufekci on Twitter, Chilean miners, wikileaks, ipad, etc.

    I am still behind on blogging, but here’s some nuggets from  Technosociety blog, a  fresh blog about the relationship between technology and society by Zeynep Tufekci. Lots of deep thinking here. Here’s her take on the Nobel Peace prize announcement and Twitter: The Internet is not a game-changer in the sense of a cat-and-mouse game…

  • A few notes about posts and fonts, etc

    Out of sheer boredom I have decided to change the font of my blog to one of the new and sexy Google fonts. Instead of Georgia fonts (which looked perfectly fine, I’ll admit), I’m changing to Cantarell for the blog posts and Cardo for headlines and stuff. Let me know if it looks wretched. (I’m…

  • A new blogging strategy

    Believe it or not, I usually hate blogging. It can be distracting, and it’s impossible to decide what to blog about. There’s just so much to write about (and finite amount of time). A writer/blogger needs to be ruthlessly selective, or else he may end up just blogging about everything. I face a dilemma. I…

  • Just One Thing

    Jed Perl on the virtues of not trying to publish writings by a person when they weren’t intended to be published: Writing, before it is anything else, is a way of clarifying one’s thoughts. This is obviously true of forms such as the diary, which are inherently solitary. But even those of us who write…

  • Pushback on Social Media

    Mike Phillips on Digg being dead: The biggest problem with Digg in the past was that unless you devoted serious time to it and knew how to work the system, you had little hope of ever making the front page. The only stories that made the front page were typically those voted up by voting…

  • Bequeathing images of myself to posterity

    While checking my referrer logs, I see that a CC photo I snapped of a family Thanksgiving is used ironically on a post about murdering family members.  I generally don’t care who uses my photos although probably it would be taking things too far to use images of children inappropriately (see this case). But as…

  • Searching & searching and finally finding it!

    Wow, I bookmarked something in delicious a few months ago and only today got around to wanting to look at it again. It was an important page for me although I had no plans to use it immediately.   So I bookmarked it on delicious and thought, gee, it’s always there when I will need it.…

  • Trolls (oops, I mean “Conversation Hackers”)

    Here’s a reason I can’t resist blogging. I have lots of browser windows open and it’s easier to record them on my blog instead of other mechanisms (delicious, etc). Olivier Morin on people who troll on websites and why they do it. A long fascinating read. We suggest, instead, that peace could be made between…

  • Paging Michael Barrett

    In my last post I alluded to a writer friend Michael Barrett who consistently refuses to set up a home base of operations on the Internet. He writes a lot and faces a lot of difficulties being found on the Web. For one thing, he wrote a few hundred articles for San Express News, whose…

  • A new look

    Yowza! I’ve ditched my old wordpress theme and migrated to a new one  called thesis that affords a little more control over layout and design. I still have a lot of tweaks to do; it’s not anywhere near done.  (You can check out a screencast of the thesis theme in action). Now wordpress supports theme…

  • To the person who is not reading this

    Just out of bored curiosity, I have decided to experiment with various wordpress themes. So you might notice a little more anarchy than usual here.  I like the old theme, but it’s a new year, you know; time to solve global warming and change wordpress themes.

  • Public Relations, Monetizing and Niche Blogging

    I thought I had read everything notable by Paul Graham, but here’s his piece about Public Relations. PR is not dishonest. Not quite. In fact, the reason the best PR firms are so effective is precisely that they aren’t dishonest. They give reporters genuinely valuable information. A good PR firm won’t bug reporters just because…