An interesting link.
Just a quick link to an article about the newspapers in the days before radio, television, and the Internet:
The Lost World of Joseph Pulitzer
Comment
What is a blog?
Or, more specifically, what is my blog?
Blog is short for Web log. From the moment I discovered blogging — back in September 2004, I think it was — I’ve always thought of a blog as a sort of online journal. A place to write about the things I think and do. A way of recording them for the future and sharing them with others who might either think or do similar things or find my thoughts and actions interesting.
That’s what my blog is and always has been: an online journal.
Bloggers have been getting a lot of press lately. Especially political bloggers. I just read “Not Just Another Column on Blogging,” by Jack Shafer on Slate.com. In that piece, he discusses several things that have changed the newspaper industry. Blogging, he argues, is one of them.
From his article:
Michael Kinsley made me laugh a decade ago when he argued against Web populists replacing professional writers, saying that when he goes to a restaurant, he wants the chef to cook his entree, not the guy sitting at the next table. I’m not laughing anymore: When there are millions of aspiring chefs in the room willing to make your dinner for free, a least a hundred of them are likely to deal a good meal. Mainstream publishers no longer have a lock on the means of production, making the future of reading and viewing anybody’s game.
The problem, it seems, is finding the 100 capable of making a good meal. Fortunately, I don’t spend enough time surfing the Web to sample the available offerings. (And I hope you don’t, either. There are far better ways to waste time.)
Anyway, this isn’t me that he’s talking about. My blog may state political opinions, but it does not attempt to replace reporters, who I still try to trust to report the truth. Some of my blog entries are rehashings of the “truth” that I’ve heard or read, filtered through my brain, which includes personal experiences and preferences.
Again, from the top: my blog reports the things I think and do. It should not be used as a primary source of information for anything. (Does that sound like a legal disclaimer? Kind of eerie, if you ask me.)
Also, my blog has never been a way to gain popularity with readers or site visitors. In fact, some of my viewpoints are very unpopular with certain subsets of people. But this blog isn’t an entry in some kind of popularity contest. It’s my way to exercise the free speech I’m granted in the U.S. Consitution. (The same Constitution that has been in the news a lot lately.)
I’m also not trying to convince people who don’t agree with me on issues to agree with me. I hope that people will think about the things I write here, even when they don’t agree with me. After all, I think about most things I hear and read. That’s how my opinions come about. I don’t just echo the sentiments of others.
(I also hope that people think. Period. I’m so tired of talking to people who echo the thoughts of others.)
In general, I don’t care if others agree or disagree with me. I’d love to read (and share) rational, well-thought-out arguments from both sides. That’s what the Comments links are for. (Duh.) Just don’t get nasty. Nasty doesn’t get deleted. Nasty remains online to show the world just how immature some people can be.
Anyway, this entry was brought about primarily by reading Mr. Shafer’s article today and thinking about how my blog doesn’t fit into what is quickly becoming the definition of a blog: an amateur’s attempt at serious journalism.
This isn’t journalism. It’s my diary. I just don’t keep it locked up.
And heck, no one is forcing you to read it.
Fifty Writing Tools
A good resource on the Web.
A few weeks ago, I stumbled across a series of articles on the Web titled “Fifty Writing Tools.” The series was written by Roy Peter Clark. It appears on the Poynter Online Web site, which is subtitled, “Everything You Need to be a Better Journalist.”
If you’re serious about writing, I highly recommend that you check out this series of articles. Although they’re primarily written for journalists, there’s a lot for all writers to learn in these pieces.
Land of the Sun Endurance Ride
I mark horse butts and time in the riders.
Yesterday was the Wickenburg Horsemen’s Association’s annual Land of the Sun Endurance Ride. And, for the fourth year in a row, I was one of about 80 volunteers enlisted to help out and make the event run smoothly.
For those of you who don’t know what an endurance ride is, our endurance ride is a 25- or 50-mile horseback ride over trails in the Wickenburg area. Endurance riders — people who actually like to cover that many miles on horseback — come from all over the southwest to participate.
The trails are created or maintained and then marked with ribbons by volunteers organized by Robin Ollendick and Nancy Halsey, who manage the whole thing. There are two loops, each of which are 25 miles long. The 25-milers do one loop and the 50-milers do both. There are vet checks, water stops, and check points along the way. There’s food and beverages for riders and horses at the vet checks and riders are required to spend a certain minimum amount of time at each one to ensure the health and well-being of their horses. There are drag riders who follow the last group out and remove the ribbons.
It’s a big deal and a great western event. This year, we started out with 148 riders. A few were pulled early on or on the trail for various reasons — for example, a problem with a horses’s gait or a horse “tying up” — but the vast majority finished their courses.
As a volunteer, I had three official jobs.
The first, on Friday, was to use “paint sticks” to mark numbers on horse butts. Each horse had a number and the number had to be visible by the folks at the check points so each rider could be tracked through the course. We used yellow, pink, or green markers to put the numbers on. The markers are similar to Cray-pas — soft crayon-like markers I used as a kid. But they’re fat — at least an inch and a quarter in diameter — and they’re a pain in the butt (no pun intended) to get off your skin and out from under your nails.
My second job was to make the vegetarian bean soup I make every year for the lunch stop. A lot of the riders are vegetarians and it seems that most other people put some kind of meat in their soups or chilis. I make it without any meat at all. The flavor comes from the root vegetables I include — onions, carrots, turnips, parsnips — as well as celery and leeks. I got it cooking in our camper, which we parked at the rodeo grounds (It’s for sale and we wanted to show it off to potential buyers.), on Saturday and it was ready just in time for lunch.
My third job was to work with Janet, timing in the riders. The first 50-milers, who had left at about 7:00 AM (before dawn!), started showing up at 9:45 AM. That’s 25 miles in 2 hours and 45 minutes. On horseback. Janet wrote down numbers and times on a clipboard while I handed out check in slips with numbers and times. The 50-milers were required to wait for a hour after their horses “pulsed down” before leaving on their second loop. The 25 milers didn’t get check in slips, but they did get champagne. By 1:30, the 50-milers were coming back from their second loop. Janet and I were relieved at 2 PM, when all the excitement was pretty much over.
I didn’t take any pictures yesterday. I was too busy with my jobs. But if Janet sends photos of the winners, I’ll insert them here.
The big surprise: the winner for the 25-milers was a rider on a mule!
WordPress Power
I start to tap into the power of WordPress for Web publishing.
WordPress is an Open Source blogging tool. At least that’s how it’s promoted. But it’s so much more than that.
WordPress is a highly customizable Web publishing platform. With WordPress, a server, and a little ingenuity, you can build a Web site with nicely formatted static and dynamic pages. New content can be added by anyone you give access to. Site visitors can add comments — if you allow them to. Best of all, because it’s based on a blog engine, blogging features apply: date-based content display, automatic archiving of content, support for pinging and trackbacks — the list goes on and on.
I started getting a real feel for WordPress when I started rebuilding wickenburg-az.com, a Web site I have been maintaining since 1999 to provide information about the town I live in, Wickenburg, AZ. I started off keeping it simple, choosing a nice looking theme called Connections by Patricia Muller to control the appearance of the site. I immediately started tweaking the theme, changing the link colors and the header image. Then, after I had some content added, I continued tweaking by adding more features: automatic article author images, Webcams, random list of articles on topics pages, random header images, site statistics, weather, donation button, calendar of upcoming events, and Technorati tags. I added some “under the hood” features, too: comment spam protection, automated database backup, and sticky posts (which can glue a post to the top of the Home page until I release it). Right now, I’m trying to add the Users Online feature I have on this site, but I’m running into a page formatting problem and still need to work out the details to get it to work.
Every change I make to the site teaches me something about the way WordPress works. I learn more about HTML, PHP, CSS, MySQL, and Apache every day. For years, I’ve avoided digging deeply into advance Web publishing coding because I knew so little about it. Now I’m forcing myself to learn by working with it daily. I love the challenge. And I love applying the things I learned yesterday to the things I do tomorrow.
I’ll be writing more about WordPress in the weeks to come, so if you’re a WordPress user or are just curious about it, I hope you’ll keep checking in. Together, we’ll learn more about this great Web publishing tool.