* Install a traffic counter

You can install a traffic counter on your blogsite very easily using:

http://www.statcounter.com/

* Ethics and ethos of blogging

http://civpro.blogs.com/civil_procedure/2004/06/mosaic.html

* Finding something to write about

This fellow started first of the year with a writing prompt and has added one every day since and intends to keep adding until Dec. 31 at least. So--you lonely, bored and distracted writer--stop your whining, stop your cursing, refrain from pulling out your hair, or heading downtown for neon relief from your writing duties. Check this website (archives are on the left) and write your little heart out.

http://onionboy.typepad.com/writing_prompts/

PS--if you can't link directly from the website pasted above or below, blame Blogger! I've done everything I'm supposed to, but that function seems extremely hit & miss. I've screwed around with it for fifteen minutes or so, trying this and that. Now, I really really am moving on to other things--hear that, Blogger, you rascal, you?

* What's a blog, Part III

Actually, there is a list of twenty different things a blog might be at: http://weblogs.about.com/gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?site=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.wordbiz.com%2Farchive%2F20blogdefs.shtml

* Blog bells & whistles, blog resistance

June 19. Going to a lot of blogging websites and teaching-blogging websites to prep for my blog course this fall and my other blog course this fall. Yes, I'll be talking to the boss's boss next week about getting admin support to find students who might like to take an ENG 101 special topics: Web Communications. I suppose that after talking with the boss's boss, it will all become incredibly difficult, darn near impossible for a dozen good reasons I just wasn't privy to, and I'll leave the office feeling like a fool for coming up with such nonsense and bike home cursing myself for wasting my time yet again. But it's hardly fair to tax admins with being woefully out of touch and then refuse to talk to them when they ask me three times....

Anyway, I get tired of figuring out the blog bells and whistles very fast. I have to get just enough of it so that I can at least tell my students what it is I'm NOT going to help them with--stuff like blogrolls, counters, and template tweaking. The basics are what I'm trying to teach myself and what I'll pass along.

The actual writing I feel less diffident about.

June 19. Resistance to blogs. I mentioned something I'd blogged to a colleague the other day, and she wrinkled her nose as if I'd committed an obvious solecism. She doesn't want to face reading it--but she doesn't want to face not reading it either! Blog fatigue, blog resistance!

I have shortcuts to 20 blogs on my desktop. I check four or five of them every day, religiously. Some of the others, though, while I liked them once--and for all I know, still would, if I read them--I have a huge resistance to opening. I don't really know why. Some are political or educational, some are personal. Some are loquacious, others laconic. Some have nifty graphics, some don't. I don't know why. Just fickle, I guess.

Eventually, I come on a new blog I like, make a shortcut, and delete one of the old shortcuts, feeling like a heel as I do. What kind of friend am I to Sgt Stryker or Tony Woodlief or James Lileks to be dumping their blogs from my blogroll?

* Ten tips for writing on the internet--good stuff!

http://www.alistapart.com/articles/writeliving/

* Screw-ups, Part II

You've got to take blogger with a grain of salt. I've been trying for ten minutes to modify the What's In A blog Part 2 post by adding this website which connects to a lot of blogs doing music, book, movie reviews.


http://www.blogcritics.org/

Blogger just doesn't seem to want to bend to my will. This brings up a philosophical question about our relationship to our mechanical servants and why one tends to take their failures personally. But, y'know what, I don't want to talk about it! I just want some peace! So here's a separate post to pass along the site.

* Screw-ups

You'll notice in the previous post that one website is linked--if you click on it, you'll go right there--while the other is not linked. You'll have to copy it and paste it into an address window to follow it. Why the difference?

The difference is that blogger let me insert one link and, for some reason, would not let me insert the second.... One would like everything to run perfectly, but in the great scheme of things, this is not a big deal. Down a little farther on the blog (there are no bookmarks here, so I can't jump you to the post), I talk about problems with the blogger photo software. I'm still getting a software pop-up first thing every morning, when I fire up my computer. Annoying.

But minor. Major is writing, topics, working up an appetite to post and to shape one's blog. My own blogging at http://www.emcc.edu/faculty/jgoldfine feels forced and tired tonight without the stimulus of students, classes, papers to read. Another night I'll feel differently--a lame post is just a post and can stand without touching me.

* What's a blog, Part II

'What's a blog' is below. Here are some websites with links to lots more definitions and thoughts:

http://blogosphere.swiki.net/1
http://www.elearnspace.org/Articles/blogging_part_1.htm


http://www.blogcritics.org/

(Some of these you can just click on--others, god knows why, blogger won't let you click on so you'd have to copy and paste the addresses.

* Meaning and purpose of journals--stealing from my other blog

Dec. 12. Journals. I had a conversation with a colleague Wednesday about keeping an online journal (what my 162 students call a 'log-in life.') He thinks it's silly, show-offy, a bit pathetic (sign of low self-esteem), attention-demanding, self-indulgent, embarrassing (no one wants to know about your personal issues, he said), and just generally a bad way to do what is called in edu-speak 'initiate dialogue.'

He likes to talk about stuff but says he doesn't have time to read www.emcc.edu/faculty/jgoldfine !!! (Excuse me, but the person who is tired of www.emcc.edu/faculty/jgoldfine is tired of life!) The colleague speedreads everything--and claims to have no time or desire to write responses.

Time for Colleague Smackdown: how can we teach writing as a vital and ongoing part of an educated life without ourselves practicing it? Is writing just a tool for classes, something like algebra, a tool no one would pick up and use unless they had to? I reject that totally.

(When I get through with my classes in a couple of hours, I'll be back writing, not talking, about what the missus said about hating writing and the emotions it brings up, about dogs and thinking, about the prof 40 years ago who told us we couldn't think without language; I'll defend journal writing as valuable and not synonymous with self-indulgent therapeutic baloney. I'll talk about the self-educating quality of a journal like this and how it's affected my professional life.

But right now, I have an eight and then a nine o'clock class I can't disappoint.)

Later. (I've only got a minute, but will be continuing my defense of journaling eventually.) Here's the next bit:

A sociology professor leading into a discussion of wild children living without human care told us that thinking without language is impossible. I guess I saw that, but then I became a dog owner. Dogs know a few words and signs, but don't have language. But do they think? They sure do! Chloe and Scoot have all kinds of ideas. But the prof was onto something: it's hard for people to be sure what it is we really think unless we can articulate it in words--get it outside our minds, either orally or in writing.

(And the rest will follow, but here comes my eleven o'clock class.)

Later. I don't know what I think until I try writing it. I'm not a great speaker, and I certainly don't think well on my feet (See Dec. 10 post on Speech, Speech!). I say all sorts of stuff I wish I could take back because it's stupid, shallow, not what I mean, or not said in a way that conveys what I want to convey.

My faith as a writer and teacher of writing is that there are dark corners in the mind (John, didn't you promise weeks ago to stop using dumb mind metaphors--what is this: the mind as attic with corners, cobwebs, and a lot of useless junk? Bogus! Sorry....) And you don't know what is in there until you slip out the flashlight (Will you cut it out! Is this flashlight supposed to be writing? Lame!) Until you slip out the flashlight and light the corners up--that means writing.

Writing surprises the writer. If the writing is alive, if it hasn't been outlined to death, then it can-- (Gotta go to class again. I don't know how this sentence is going to end! Maybe I don't need to end it--something about creating reality instead of just describing it, but that's so fatuous I won't let myself write it.)

Later. I was losing it in the last few grafs above. I was in the New Roost and a half-dozen guys were in there talking guy talk. I'm a potty mouth myself, though I keep that under wraps in this venue, but these guys were so crude that it was hard to concentrate. Is it me getting old and fuddy-duddy, or is it 'Clockwork Orange' time?

Anyway, yeserday I was talking to the missus about what my colleague said about journals, and forty years after we first met, she still has the power to surprise me. Jean can write well and has sold her writing. She has writing projects. But now she tells me she hates to write; she dreads sitting down and facing the blank screen! Hey, Jean, you have to pay me to listen to that kind of talk!

So, even the missus sees a journal as an exercise in masochism!

There was a time I hated to write, dreaded deadlines, and despaired at blank paper. No more. The computer freed me from most of my difficulties. As long as I don't have to rip out a sheet of bond paper and retype a whole page because I screwed up a subject-verb agreement, I'm good to go.

This journal is the opposite of masochism--and I don't mean sadism. My pleasure, not pain, is the principle here. I've been creating a character a lot like me, who has some things to say, but who hasn't got my personal life (journals are not necessarily therapeutic and self-indulgent, not that everything therapeutic is self-indulgent anyway....) Writing gives me immense pleasure and to write about my professional life, a matter important to me, is the kicker.

I've used the journal to figure out what is happening in my professional life. I've been plucking bits and pieces of events and dressing them up as posts. I've dug out prompts for exams, ideas for 162, and tentative proposals for a couple of new online courses. I'm planning to argue that these online journals are a serious part of my professional development and should be counted as such by the people who do the counting. And, as I say above, I've found out all sorts of stuff I didn't know I knew until I wrote it.

Not the least of which is that my colleague (whom I've spoken to between the beginning of this post and now) absolutely refuses to read any further posts including this one!

If only I could make any headway at all with FrontPage!

Housekeeping, course information

This is a 16-hour course: 16 hours of writing or writing about writing or, at least, worrying about and procrastinating about writing. We'll meet four times at the Waldo Center to get to know each other, to establish blogs, and then to talk about blogging.

You'll also work on your blog outside of class--I'm assuming that any participants will have their own computers at home. One of the pleasures of blogging is sitting in your house before 6 in the morning, wearing a Swanville Maine baseball cap and drinking dark French roast right at the computer--and blogging! But I've seen blogs done by homeless people in public libraries and by students in school computer labs, so there's no gotta about having a computer.

There will be no grading or evaluations. If you need some sense of how you're doing, if you're not happy unless you're in a race, well, I can't take you out to the track, but you will have me and other participants reading and reacting to your writing--and that ought to be challenging enough for anyone.

You don't need to let me know if you're going to miss one of the sessions at the Waldo Center--what you can do is to turn your out-of-class activity into a blog, as long as it's legal and decent, of course.

Photo Problems Part II, The Mutant Software!

I see this morning that my photo problems are not quite over. The software I downloaded to let me post photos on blogger left behind a desktop-shortcut icon, which is S.O.P. I deleted it and got on with my life. But this morning I find that the little devil had migrated to my toolbar and erased my desktop background, a delightful picture of two dogs and two cats staring at the photographer. When I tried dialing up, a photo-software popup appeared. You do not win friends and increase business with stuff like this!