Twitter seems to be down at the moment – or at least, it’s not accepting tweets, and I can’t log in at the website. But how do we know what’s happening without Twitter to tell us?
Edit: back to normal now. I’m @devilgate, of course.
Man, it’s been a long time since I posted. I blame Twitter.
You could always follow me there, if you don’t already.
Also my OU course. Which, ironically or not, is on Creative Writing.
Incidentally, if brevity is the soul of wit, then Twitter ought to be hilarious.
I’m trying out an offline blogging client that runs on Linux (these things are not that easy to come by). It’s called Drivel, and it seems to work OK, as long as you tell it that your WordPress installation is actually Movable Type.
Oh, and it looks like it only supports one category per post, and no native tags. Not very impressive, really.
Since I tend to draft in jEdit, I’ve often thought that what I need is a blogging plugin for that, and been surprised that it doesn’t exist. One of these days I’ll have to write it…
(ETA: tags added later via the web interface. Far from satisfactory, really.)
(E further TA: damn, it looks like this theme isn’t showing native WordPress tags, anyway.)
I’m trying out a different theme on here for a while, along with a WordPress Plugin called QuickPost .
Both the plugin and the theme are supposed to make WordPress be usable a bit like Tumblr. There are a number of flaws, though. The theme (Tumble-Hybrid by Tribe) is perhaps a bit too simple. I’m all for a clean, simple look, but this might have gone too far.
And the plugin doesn’t allow for a preview before posting (as well as not working properly with Flickr, though presumably that will be fixed in due course).
Edit: No, that won’t do at all. One or other of them disabled comments and lost the title (even though “Allow Comments” is ticked, and the title appears, in the main editor.
I suppose the thinking is that, for something quick and dirty you don’t want comments or titles, but I do. Even Tumblr has titles, if not comments.
Edit 2: Well, a bit of CSS hacking sorted that out. But posting photos isn’t working at all as I would expect. That may be to do with the fact that I’ve never really dealt with posting images before, though, rather than the plugin or theme.
Well, clearly no blogging happens over the Christmas and New Year period in the Devilgate household. In fact I didn’t even switch the computer on.
So we start the year without having done a review of the last one, and without even having posted all of last year’s Book Notes. I have nine (nine!) written or partially written, but unposted, mini book reviews, that I’ll try to put up over the next few days. Perhaps I should slap them all together into one, but that would really be too big, and would make it harder to find things in future. So Book Notes 2006 entries will keep on appearing for a while yet.
And since I’ve made myself a New Year’s resolution to write every day, I hope to be making considerably more posts in general than last year. We’ll see.
I hope everyone had a fine Christmas or other winter festival, and an equally good start to the New Year.The lovely Dave Hill has posted my piece in his Big England series.
Such is Dave’s posting frequency that it has already rolled off his front page. But such is his site’s popularity that it went straight in at number 10 on a Google search for my name; and it has now risen to number 3, I see.
Ironically, since I close the piece by being cruel and dismissive about cricket, yesterday’s news made cricket interesting. Who ever thought that I would know the name of a cricket umpire?
Dave himself has some thoughts inspired by the matter in The Guardian’s Comment is Free blog.
But pop over and read my ‘This Is England’. Oh yes, and: you need to scroll down to my comment to get a correction to the intro.
Dave Hill is a novelist, Guardian writer and prolific blogger. He is running a series of guest pieces on his blog. They’re on the theme of “What I Like About England (or not, as the case may be).” He was inspired to do this mainly by all the flag-waving furore during the World Cup (with maybe some influence from Andy Murray’s attire at Wimbledon).
I’m pleased to say that he has asked me to contribute. I’ll post here, of course, when my piece is up. In the meantime I’ve been thrashing out some of what I might say in the comments thread of one of the earlier pieces.
Dave’s overall title for this project is ‘Big England’. You can see all the pieces to date hereI doubt that anybody noticed, but my last entry has been missing a bit — in fact, missing most of itself — for a week or more. I don’t know how it happened. I did make a minor edit to it a few days after initially posting it, and I can only suppose that either I or WordPress somehow messed something up.
Unfortunately I had already deleted the draft from my PDA where I composed it. Fortunately there is a behemoth in California that looks after the careless blogger. A bit of obscure Google-diving and my post is back.
Thanks, Google. In future I’ll keep everything in text files.
Well, I feel like a proper 21st-century blogger at the moment: I’m sitting typing this in a cafe. Specifically, the Clissold House Cafe, in Clissold Park in Stoke Newington, North London. The kids are currently at a tennis ‘camp’ (two hours’ intensive training a day for four days this week). It being the school holidays, I’ve taken the week off work to look after them.
So with two hours to fill, I went for a wander round the shops of Church Street (only bought two books in a second-hand bookshop) and now I’m back at the park, waiting for the tennis to finish. I’m typing this on my Palm with folding keyboard setup. It doesn’t have anything fancy like WiFi or Bluetooth, so by the time you read this it will be (at least) several hours later, when I upload it to the PC and post.
The coffee’s not very good, either. Their specialty is more cakes here, but I’m holding off until lunchtime.
I’m am reminded as I type of the existence of John Scalzi’s book on writing, You’re Not Fooling Anyone When You Take Your Laptop to a Coffee Shop: Scalzi on Writing. Still, I’m not trying to impress (or, indeed, fool) anyone (nor, I imagine, succeeding in doing so).
At the same time I’m listening to Radio 4, where there’s a program about ‘battleaxes’, which is kind of bollocks, as all such stereotypes are. It isn’t annoying me enough to switch it off yet, though.
Curiously, they just played an extract from Fawlty Towers that I don’t remember ever hearing. There’s only about twelve episodes, so it’s hard to imagine that there’s one I’ve never seen. Then they’ve been talking about Thatcher as a battleaxe, which is an interesting one that I won’t go into here.
I sat down to write fiction, but ended up doing this. It doesn’t make for the greatest of blog entries, but I suppose it serves as slight relief from bleak political posts.
Damn, nearly made it without mentioning politics.
… same as the old blog.
Well, not quite the same. This one is on my own site, for one thing.
A new blog, though: just what the world needs, don’t you think?
As this is the first entry here, I can’t help but feel a certain… pressure, let’s say. Because, after all, in years to come, when this blog is one of the most popular sites on the internet1, millions of people will look back through the entries, and pay special attention to the first one. Obviously its content is critically important. Unfortunately, its content is rubbish.
Well, its content was going to be rubbish: or rather, about rubbish; about the guy who was fined for dropping rubbish into a bin.
But many people have written about the stupidity of that, and in any case, the council in question have already, and predictably, gone back on their foolish decision.
Instead I thought I might write about the hat woman. But actually that’s too boring to go into. Pubs with “no-hat” rules, though: truly madness walks among us. Actually, the scary thing about that story is that there are pubs with CCTV cameras inside them. Truly we are the most watched society in the world.
Maybe that should be the theme of this blog, if it needs one: the madness of modern society.
I’d hate to come over like some old grouch, though, railing against modernity: “It wisnae like that when ah wuz a wean, by the way jimmy.”
Or not too often, at least. No, instead, like most blogs — like all the best ones — I’ll just write about whatever the hell I feel like.
Modern weirdness, though: I just heard about the recent trends for “internet suicides” in Japan; and the fact that the US Nasdaq exchange has made an offer to buy the London Stock Exchange. Apparently there are shares in the Stock Exchange: it’s a company. For some reason I find this immensely surprising. I would have thought (if I had ever thought of such a thing) that it was some kind of public body, like the Bank of England. Apparently not, though. Life’s strangenesses, I think, will be a recurring feature here.
1. this is meant to be humorous, by the way.