Tuesday, July 6, 2021

Housekeeping/Blog Update

The blog now has a new, slightly different, though equally boring, look...

I switched a few months ago to following other blogs on Feedly rather than using the updating bloglist gadget from Blogger. The gadget was limited: there were a couple of blogs that didn't update properly at all, and any blog that updated more than once before I looked at it, the earlier update was invisible. Feedly seems to be fine for me at the moment. So I changed the blogroll to the static version, which takes up less space, and demoted it, since it was less useful. (Though a blogroll fits my retro design so I didn't get rid of it entirely.) But that meant I had some new prime real estate on the blog.

I've always liked the recent comments feature on blogs. I'm not sure that it's exactly useful these days since most blogs have a comment feed which you can follow using your favorite tool, but it shows the conversation, so I tweaked some version I found online and there it is, for now. We'll see if it stays.

But the big change is the 'From the Commonplace Book:' feature. I've been hacking at the code for a couple of weeks. Meanwhile, in a project of great idleness, during my pandemic I've been reading through old journals, typing quotes I'd once copied out by hand into a file to make an electronic commonplace book. And now I make them available to you! I've always been a fan of commonplace books and aphorists. Auden and J. D. McClatchy produced wonderful commonplace books, and I have freely stolen from them. The major aphorists have lent their wares as well: La Rochefoucauld, Lichtenberg, Nietzsche. Antonio Porchia. Don Paterson. Sarah Mancuso. Anyway, the point is, some of these quotes come from books I've actually read; some (many, most?) come from collections I've plundered. I make no claims to be as well read as these might make me look. 

If you hover over the quote (the tooltip) you can see where I found it. Which may or may not be where it originally appeared, and may not even be all that accurate...I did some checking, but I can barely read my handwriting in old journals, much less rely on them to be accurate as to attribution. Right now there's a library of something over two hundred quotes, one of which is selected every time you refresh the page, but I've got the wherewithal to expand it. Enough so that (I hope) you shouldn't see the same quote every time you look at my blog. Should you poke around in the source I'm sure you can find my list of quotes and RUIN YOUR SURPRISE AND SPOIL CHRISTMAS FOR EVERYONE. So don't do it.

I also got rid of the feed button, which linked to a couple of applications that likely don't even work anymore. The feeds remain public of course. I'm curious: is there any other feature of that sort you like and would use? (Follow by email, etc.) If you're reading this, you've probably already found some way to follow my blog, but if you have a favorite missing feature, put it in comments. Thanks!

Also anything that seems buggy or weird, please do let me know. When I was still a professional programmer, they said of browser-based applications that they were: Write Once, Debug Everywhere. I've tested on a few platforms, but much less than everywhere.

What hasn't changed is my utter lack of capability in the graphic design department. I had some hopes, alas they've once again been dashed...but I might still try to do something with the cool and obscurely bookish images (they come from the covers of two Ogden Nash books) included in this post...One of these days!

Please do let me know how it all works for you.



10 comments:

  1. i didn't gather who did the bird(s) but they're terrific! being computer illiterate, i didn't follow what you're doing too well, but i saw where the excerpt/quote thingie was and the comment seems to work. i must say, i'm glad your post is so easy to comment on; some of the other ones i'm interested in, i can't get the comments to work at all; probably having to do with missing passwords(my bugaboo) and like that... i enjoy your blog very much and am glad that it will be here to look forward to... i can't recall whether i mentioned it (forgetfulness is increasing, now), but any errors are probably due to me being 78 and not having a complete grasp on reality any more, lol...

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    1. I didn't know who the pictures were by until just now--I looked inside the flap of the book--they were drawn by Maurice Sendak. No wonder I thought they were cool.

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  2. Love your Commonplace Book feature with the different quotes! Very fun and cool. :)

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  3. Looks good!

    I used to keep a journal but honestly would be afraid to read it now. Probably a lot of adolescent/young adult whining. A commonplace book is a much better idea and probably less embarrassing.

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    1. There was definitely some of that.

      It's been interesting to go back through them, though. Mostly it is just books I've read, but occasionally I seem even to have had an idea...

      I've done it so long now it would be hard to give up.

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  4. I wish I had a good way to know when my favorite bloggers post. I've tried doing a blogroll but it doesn't always work well.

    I discovered Canva a few years ago, and I spent a great deal of time (too much, perhaps) working on graphics for my blog.

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    1. Thanks for the tip about Canva. I'll take a look.

      Feedly's not bad. It seems to work pretty well.

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  5. Congrats on the updates, and I love the refreshing of the commonplace nugget. Complete with hovering citation! I can't think of a feature that's missing. Do you know about the "classes" you can take via TPL, they used to be "Lynda" and have recently become "LinkedIN Learning"? There are several on imagery; I took the one on GIMP (like Adobe, but open source, online) and found it very interesting and helpful. (But I am still very much a novice.) I know other people like Canva, but I feel like their templates are a bit too, I dunno, I want to say Instagrammy, but I'm not sure that translates. (But now I have Bo Burnham's "White Woman's Instagram" running thru my mind!) Have fun with your "home" improvement projects!

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    1. I downloaded GIMP and played with it a bit, but it is a bit overwhelming. I should look into the online course.

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