I’ve been very impressed with the help provided by Benjamin Trott in finally getting this blog running on Moveable Type.
I had alot of problems with signing in on my new ISP and Ben stuck with me to get the page up and running.
That’s way too much work for $20, but it made a believer out of me. I don’t think you could go wrong having them set up the site for you.
Thanks.
I’m going to try to pull a Jeff Ward here and tie together a bunch of disparate crap to explain my obtuseness, as if it needed an explanation. When I wrote yesterday’s entry I was unaware that Mike Golby was undergoing a crisis of sorts over at his web site.
So, when I read Jonathon’s entry about “families” I was unaware of much of what appears to have motivated him to write. The problem is that my “virtual community” has grown way too fast, and I’m having trouble reading all the entries that I normally read. It used to be in the “good old days,” say a month or so ago, I used to read all of the sites I link to every day, and sometimes more than once a day, particularly because I was never sure when they would update their site.
The list has grown and I keep another longer list of sites that I visit many times before I ever link to them at my site. At the moment, I’ll have to admit that I’m beginning to have problems keeping up with reading them. I’m no longer reading ever site every single day. Unfortunately, the problem has been exacerbated by a new favorite toy, NetNewsWireLite, a RSS newsreader. I’ve begun to use that tool to tell me when some of my favorite sites have updated their page. Unfortunately, only a small number of sites use that technology. In regards this apology, it’s particularly relevant that Mike Golby’s site doesn’t tie in with this newsreader. To make a long story short, I’ve begun to rely on this reader far too often and find myself neglecting some of my favorite sites only because they’re not listed there.
Another problem I’m having with virtual communities is that we don’t always know the same people or follow the same conversations. The incomplete diagram below indicates part of the problem. Jonathan has a different circle of friends than I do, even though we share a number of the same acquaintances. To complicate matters, even though I never address some of these people directly, I have followed their conversation on other sites, particularly Shelley’s site, and I’ve occasionally followed their pages directly. I even know, for instance, that Joe Duemer and I both had David Wagoner’s classes at the University of Washington. The problem is that it’s not always possible to follow the conversations carefully enough, and we pull a “Shelley” and end up with a foot in our mouths, he says as he tries to extract it without magically disappearing an entry.
Mike Golby is one of these shared “acquaintances,” but obviously Jonathon was doing a much better job of keeping up with his writing than I was. It wasn’t until after I offered my rebuttal to Jonathon’s, and Joe Duemer’s?, argument, that I realized I was probably only a footnote in it and Mike was the main content. Of course, I realized this only when I finally got around to catching up with Mike’s page late last night.
While I stand by what I said yesterday, I am in full sympathy with Mike’s stand and agree with Jonathon that Mike’s site is a vital part of the blogging community. I first encountered Mike when he made a reference to my discussion of Kerouac’s On the Road because we had very different views of the book and of Kerouac. At first I was a little taken aback by the stinging rebuttal of my review, but as I’ve read his site I’ve slowly realized why his view was so very different from mine. He comes at the book from a very different background than mine. Having read his site has even made me see Kerouac from a different perspective. In many ways, Mike is the “Kerouac” of blogging, offering us many of the same insights that Kerouac brought to the wider community.
As I’ve noted earlier, I do temper what I say on my site somewhat because friends and relatives occasionally read my blog, but it would be a terrible loss to the blogging community if Mike felt like he could no longer be honest and forthright about his feelings because of the objections of a few family members.
Unfortunately, Jonathon is also right that the “perfect” family is probably over represented on the web, while there is far too little exposure to those who are struggling to transcend their background. As an ex-teacher and ex-caseworker, I know that far too many people are caught up merely trying to survive and have neither the desire nor the ability to express the pain that they are feeling publicly. As a result, they are often stereotyped and shoved aside while less-deserving, but more vocal, “chosen” people try to design the world to fit their needs and punish those who don’t fit in.
Well, there’s one way to waste a weekend. After installing and uninstalling MoveableType three times and coming up with different error messages each time, I’ve decided that $20 is a reasonable amount to pay to have the program installed. At the way I’m going, that’s going to work out at less than $1 an hour, and even I don’t work that cheaply.
In the last two days, though, I have learned more than I wanted to know about transmitting files and setting permissions. I had to download a new ftp program because Adobe GoLive’s ftp seems to automatically recognize whether a file is text or binary. Apparently I’ve never had a secure site, though, because I could find no way to set permissions in GoLive. It’s nice to know, though, that I’ve now been "$chmod ded" just in case I ever need to give permission for someone to transmit me somewhere.
I’m still unclear why the program won’t run, but I don’t think I’m willing to get a telenet program and start relearning that in order to find out what the correct path is to my db, especially when I’m not even sure I have a db after all these hours of sitting at the screen, hours that could have been better spent finishing Catch-22.
Luckily, I’m sure that I will still have lots more to learn once they’ve installed the progam. After all, I still have to learn how to modify it in order to change colors and make it look the way I want it to. I’m looking forward to that I’ll tell you.
Looking back, though, I must admit I keep thinking that I can find the typo or the misplaced directory that keeps the program from completely installing. I suspect it’s probably a "/" at the end of a line either being there or not being there since I have no idea what it means to have one there or not have one there.
Trying to install the program reminds me a little of those Christmases where the kids received a fabulous unassembled toy from the grandparents and I’d spend the day trying to assemble it while reading directions written by an underpaid foreigner who really didn’t understand English any more than I understood Chinese.
Melly Clismas in September. Loren will have to wait awhile to play with his new toy.
Here’s the way I’m envisioning my new web site. Since I don’t have comments here, I guess I’ll have to assume that it looks okay to you, too. I kind of wish I knew what it meant, too.
I finally got my new address lorenwebster.net and my account set up so that I can start installing my new MoveableType site. I’ll be doing that today and over the weekend, so I don’t imagine I will be posting here much until Monday. I’ll post a link here when I have something that is working.
The plans right now are to post everything I write in both places until I can figure out how to set up the whole site and transfer the files from here to there.
I’m looking forward to having permalinks, comments enabled, and an automatic way of sorting the files so that I don’t have to move them around manually constantly.
I’m not looking forward to actually installing the program and trying to redisign the site so that it better fits my vision of what I’d like to be saying to people. I’ll just say that I envision multiple blogs so that people who are only interested in my literary opinions won’t have to wade through my feelings on environmental issues, and vice versa, of course.