Category: blogging

Molly asked the question and I’m here to provide an answer. It may seem strange that a white male is providing the answer, but I step in and help where I can. Even though we pale males are over-represented in the blog-o-whirl, we still serve a purpose sometimes.\
I’m not sure why this is a question, but since it is, I’ll provide an answer. I don’t know why there aren’t more women at the “top” of the blogging heap. But, I think that question is the wrong one to ask. Blogging isn’t, and shouldn’t be a popularity contest, and it’s certainly not a heap. It’s a community, and each person’s blog is their front porch. How many people you have who come to your front porch isn’t as important as the people you want to come to your front porch. If you write for your family, and they’re the ones who come visit, you’re a success as a blogger. If you’ve made progress on whatever goal you’re trying to accomplish by having a blog, then you’re a successful blogger. Stratifying everyone is an old-world paradigm, that I think is damaging to the medium. I could care less how popular a blog is. If the writing grabs me, and the blogger expresses themselves in a unique and personal way, I’d consider their blog successful.\
The first blogs I found were written by women, and they’re well-represented on this list. Here’s my list, in no particular order other than the order they happened to show up in NetNewsWire:

• Heather Armstrong
• Heather Lawver (I got her started blogging… yay me)
• Jodi
• Suzie
• Lifehacker
• Rashunda
• Jessa
• Betsy Devine
• Bazima
• Melly
• Meg
• Andrea
• Molly
• Chelsea
• Sarah
• Gail\
  I got into blogging because of Megnut and Heather Champ. So, my view of what makes a blog a blog was formed by reading their words, which may be why I consider all these women successful bloggers. I never look at their “stats” or see how many other people are reading them. They’re just good people, good writers, and all have interesting things to say. Isn’t that enough to consider someone a “success”? The people who make the most noise are probably always going to be at the “top” in terms of stats, and they’ll probably all be men. We know how to make noise and cause trouble. You can look at the state of the world, and it becomes painfully apparent. But, is that success? There are probably just as many women blogging now as men, maybe more. Isn’t that some measure of success?

If you’ve got a keen eye, you may notice some changes around here. I’ve started playing with making my MT categories tag-like, and then using rel=”tag” on the categories to make them all Technorati friendly.\
Why? I think it’s cool, which is the only reason to ever do anything on a blog.\
My only issue now is getting Marsedit to create categories for me.

On conference calls recently, I’ve been browsing Flickr tags. Here’s a handful of my favorites:

• Burning Man

• Beach

• Monkey

• Baby

• Mirror

• Football

• Dancing

• Jump

Have I mentioned how much I love Flickr? I mean it, I really do.

Oh, and this burning man photo is my current favorite photo. It’s spiffy.

In an attempt to woo me further, the lovely couple who give the world Movable Type released a new version yesterday with support for MySQL, which is kind of what I was waiting for. Now there’s no excuse other than time, and now that I’ve installed it once, I think I’d be OK installing it here. Look for neat-o stuff in the very near future (although I may wait until my vacation to do this).

So, I got Movable Type installed on the uber-box (running, of course, AOLserver). It was surprisingly easy. I didn’t have a lot of the required Perl modules installed, but that was also extremely easy to fix.

I may just have to go migrate myself. I don’t know about Jen and Max though. We’ll see, I guess. I am a little worried about migrating over almost 700 days worth of posts, and whether mozBlog will work with it.

In other extreme navel gazing, I’m here at work early for a 9am meeting I don’t want to go to. How wrong is this? I have a 9am meeting today and tomorrow. At my early morning meeting tomorrow, I have to give a big presentation, which I’m not done with. Wish me luck.

So, my site’s been moved. I now have MySQL, PHP and all the other cool things that make things… ummm… yeah… cool. So, now that I have PHP and a database, should I do like everyone else and install Movable Type? I know there are other pieces of software out there that accomplish the same thing, should I use one of them? Should I stick with Blogger? Should I build my own? So many options!!

There’s nothing like coming in to work and running from the start. It’s 11am now, and I’ve been working on fire after fire since 8:45. It’s satisfying but exhausting. It’s time for a nap, I think. Has anyone else noticed that I post a lot more now that I’m using mozBlog?