Category: Blogging

Posts about this blog and blogging generally as an activity and social phenom.

A very dated blogroll

Do blogrolls even exist anymore? Are they a thing? I remember the day there was this awesome new blog toy called blogrolling.com. It was this cool site where you could collect links that you wanted to include on your blog and then you put a little code into your blog’s sidebar and, voila! Instant blogroll! I loved it. That was the kind of geek I was back in… 2003? But time is accelerated on the internet. Blogs were a new thing then and now they are old things that no one has or maintains anymore. They have been taken over by corporations and talking heads. Maybe it’s not just blogrolls that have gone extinct, but blogs themselves. Is anyone out there?

But, yes, of course there are blogs out there, as the blogroll, or link list, in the sidebar of this blog here will attest. Some of the links there are dead, or lead to places that have grown dusty and disused. Some of those links (ok, most of them) I haven’t even visited in years. But it’s fun to revisit old haunts, to see what’s still out there, alive and kicking, and what has gone dormant or slipped away into the internet aether. Hello, Blonde Justice, so nice to see you again, or still — since 2004!?! I am amazed and impressed. In awe, really. Also, not only is she still there, but still hitting it out of the park with great posts that capture what it means to be a public defender. And Skelly So great.

I look forward to going through the blogroll again, saying hello to old friends, getting reacquainted, finding new links, and to letting you know what I find.

Poooof! Blowing the Dust Away

It’s been a long time. Apparently it’s been five years. That’s long enough for a lot of hackers and spammers to have trashed the installation of WordPress this site runs on because I wasn’t actively keeping it up to date. One of the drawbacks of setting up your own blog back in the dark ages of blogging was that you had to do so much of it yourself. At the time (way back in 2002!), I had time to maintain a web server and make sure the code stayed up to date. How things have changed!

So much has changed that I don’t even know where to begin, so I will just begin with this: Hello again. I’ve missed you. Let’s start again, shall we?

RSS Help please?

The RSS feed on this blog is broken. I don’t know how to fix it. Can anyone help?

Somewhere along the way, I think when I moved from Moveable Type to WordPress, I thought it would be an awesome idea to sign up with Feedburner to handle my RSS feed. The idea, as I recall, was I could somehow keep the same feed regardless of where my blog lived so that anyone subscribed to my old feed would remain subscribed to my new feed. Magic. Awesome. Great.

Except… not, because now it doesn’t seem to work and I’m really not sure what to do. Feedburner’s troubleshootize page is not really helping me. Any other suggestions?

Oh, also, this may have to do with how my WordPress template describes the feed, but, well, what should I change?

I’m getting too old for this stuff. Playing around with the guts of a website/blog was just much more fun 10 years ago when I started a blog. Things were so much simpler then! And yes, I know I sound like an old grump, but, well, grr….

Documentation would have been good

One reason I rarely post here anymore is b/c the design does not reflect what I’d really like to do with this page. I’d really like to make some minor changes, and maybe over a longer term redesign the whole thing, but I never seem to find the time. Plus, I don’t really remember what I was thinking when I put this together. I made few notes to myself about how all the pieces fit together so now if I start digging around under the hood it’s like starting from zero. Maybe that’s the way to do it. Start at the very beginning. It’s a very good place to start.

Or not.

Blog with care

You know, I’ve never posted online a great deal about work (when I worked, that is). Here’s a reason why:

Talk about looking a gift horse in the mouth. One might think that Kathy Kelly, of the Capital Post-Conviction Project of Louisiana, jumped for joy upon discovering this blog post by Patrick Frey, a Los Angeles Deputy District Attorney who writes an off-the-clock blog, Patterico’s Pontifications. Not only did Frey build a case for witness misconduct and evidence tampering by two prosecution witnesses in a Louisiana murder trial that landed Kelly’s client, Jimmy Duncan, on death row, but he even conducted an interview with another prosecution expert witness. Given that a post like this one — coming from a prosecutor — could potentially provide grounds for appeal, you’d have expected Kelly to get on the phone with Frey ASAP.

Kelly did indeed contact Frey — to threaten him with an ethics complaint!

It’s kind of a crazy story. Apparently the misunderstanding has since been resolved with an apology from the defense attorney. Still, it’s a good reminder of just why it’s often better to say nothing about your work than to risk saying the wrong thing.

Now, if only I could find work to say nothing about…

Two feeds?

I know it doesn’t seem to readers of this blog as if anything is happening here. If you subscribe to the RSS feed you’ve gotten a few twitter updates recently, but that’s about it. The truth is, I’m kind of busy, but I’ve also been thinking about what to do w/the site. My initial thought was that I’d make the whole thing into a tumblelog, a single stream of pretty much everything I stumble across in my my web travels that seems interesting, funny, or otherwise worth sharing. For some, that would be fine — you’d be happy to skim through the twitter updates, the links to random articles, the quotes, whatever, and just pay attention to whatever you find interesting. I’m sure others would find that annoying — the signal-to-noise ratio would be too high.

The solution I’m considering at the moment would be to promote two feeds — one would be for substantive content and would be updated relatively infrequently, while the other would be more stream-of-consciousness and random. You could subscribe or pay attention to either, both, or neither. Thoughts? Suggestions?

A few resources that might be helpful in this project (mostly for my own benefit):
DIY WordPress Tumblog
WordPress plugins for tumbling
T1, a WP Tumbletheme
Tumble-hybrid Deuce theme

Whining

Random thought while reading 9 REasons Not to Attend Law School”: Lawyers who regret and complain about choosing to become lawyers are a little like addicts complaining about taking their first drink, hit, whatever. Shut up and deal, people.

And yes, I’m talking to myself here.

BTW: I’m still trying to figure out what to do with this blog. Patly because it’s so dormant, I sometimes feel official retirement is the way to go. And then I think, no, it just needs to be changed up. And then I think: Quit distracting yourself from studying for the bar, you idiot!

Thank thank thank soon

Still here, just busy. I’ve been having a little fun helping out at PD Stuff here and here, while also applying for jobs, searching for jobs, trying to network, oh, and don’t forget getting ready for company. And “testing” my new iPhone. Wow.

Oh, and trying to figure out what to do with this blog. I’m pretty sure it’s going to be under construction in the next few weeks, not that it should matter to most readers (the two of you) — I will try not to break the RSS feed. The rough idea is to try to integrate the tumbroglio with the imbroglio, so that everything in my flickr, del.icio.us, twitter, and Google Reader shared items will all appear here seamlessly. No more “bits” in the right column, no more separate place for tweets, just a regular flow of whatever I’m posting wherever it may be. That’s the idea, anyway. Who knows if it’s possible, or rather, if I’m capable of making it so. We’ll see.

But first, it’s gluttony week! Perfect for a nation whose economy is in the toilet because of too much credit, too much borrowing, and basically overconsumption. But that’s a crap way to look at it. Forget I said that and if I don’t get back for a bit, Happy Turkey!

Public Defenders Overpaid? Right.

So says a hatchet job article in the Boston Herald. The comments do a pretty good job of pointing out how misleading and inaccurate the article is. It’s sad when something like this can be called “news.”

But and so, what the heck has happened to Public Defender Stuff? It’s been silent for a month and while that’s pretty normal on this here blog, it’s very not normal for PD Stuff. Gideon is still posting regularly on his main blog, which is good, but… I miss PD Stuff. Anyone know what’s going on?