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April 27, 2005

A screaming comes across the sky...

I haven't written here since I DID IT: I finished Gravity's Rainbow. Actually, since then I've also plowed through Douglas Coupland's new one Eleanor Rigby. A contrast in styles for sure--I had to make a conscious effort to keep my eye from moving too quickly across the short, easy dialog set in fairly large type, in contrast to the dense paragraphs of tiny type in my copy of GR. I liked ER, and I think it's the first DC novel with an ending that satisfied me. As for GR? I liked it, and some parts were especially great. Many say that multiple readings are really rewarding, but I think that rather than ever understanding it, I'll sort of always regard it as a curiosity to sort of ponder from afar, like a photograph in National Geographic.

Posted by lld at 11:35 PM | TrackBack

April 13, 2005

Wishlist for features promoting interoperability between LiveJournal and Movable Type as a result of the 6A/LJ deal

I run this website on MovableType, a weblog management system that provides an easy framework for publishing entries and managing templates. It's basic enough that most people could run it with minimal tinkering, and powerful and flexible enough that you can customize it endlessly. I can do stuff like integrate a whole weblog within another weblog, using behind-the-scenes stuff like PHP includes and special MT templates (that's how those sidebar links over there work).

But I don't write here often, probably because I feel like I'm writing into the void. I suppose for many people, that's exactly what they find appealing about publishing online; me, I'm too used to the combination of community and commenting I get from my LiveJournal. I like that when I write an LJ entry I know that my friends read it, because they check their 'friends list', which is a page aggregating all the entries from each of their defined friends' journals and community journals to which they subscribe. It's really easy to find out what my ~100 friends are doing every day, I just fire up my friends list when I sit down to my computer, and everybody's posts are delivered to me integrated into one place, recent posts first.

Also, it's easy to comment on a LiveJournal post, the comment view is nested in an intuitive way, encouraging conversations rather than simple, static 'comments'. These kind of conversations can even sometimes lead to big ideas, and I think that there's something about the community there that facilitates this ease of communication.

So now that Six Apart owns LiveJournal, I would love to see these two publishing methods gain the ability to intertwine somehow. I think the way I'd most like to see this implemented is as some way to seamlessly publish my LiveJournal posts into my MT blog, preserving commenting and security settings (LJ allows you to restrict an entry's read access to friends only), and allowing my posts to still show up on my friends' friends lists. I know that there is already a way to embed LJ into any website, but I'd like to see this become an official intra-company flip-of-the-switch type thing that people could elect to do simply.

This wouldn't be hard, right? Maybe LJ comments could be streamlined to fit into an MT entry, userpics and all, a la Hicksdesign? When I view a friend's LJ, it knows whether or not I'm logged in and displays locked entries accordingly--maybe an MT blog could do something similar with LJ logins, showing an entry I designate as for friends-only only if the viewer is logged in to LJ? I'm not a web programmer, but it seems like the people behind MT and LJ are some smart cookies, and I'd happy keep ponying up the cash for my paid LJ account to do it.

Posted by lld at 11:29 PM | TrackBack

April 10, 2005

Kottke posts a follow-up report

Kottke posts a follow-up report today about how his fund drive went. He makes some insightful points in the meat of the post about 'new media' and how things we consume are paid for. Take for example this line, which sums up nicely why only 1/3 of 1% of his readers contributed:

I think it's difficult to "sell" media in an environment where people are increasingly not paying directly for media.

Absolutely. I'd even amend that to say "...not paying at all for media". Looks like people in small-time creative industries other than music might be starting to feel the effects of the filesharing culture too.

Posted by lld at 04:57 PM | TrackBack

April 08, 2005

Spring is in full swing in my backyard


Click for bigger, and more pictures of backyard flora.


Posted by lld at 02:52 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack