Pizza blog

This one's a corker.  http://www.sliceny.com/

* 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.

* Preliminaries, introduction

'You Blog!' That's what I originally wanted to call the course, but cooler heads prevailed. Here's the original course description:

Yes, you--putting a toe into the Ocean of Blog. You'll visit some personal web logs on line and then create your own, using templates on a free site--that's the easy part. The rest is figuring out what things you want to write and how best to deal with your subjects. The instructor is no computer genius, but he can help with strategies for creating light, personal sketches and journal entries and generally starting you on your first blog.


I was shooting for something informative, but non-institutional. Something that might make the reader smile, might make the reader slow down--something that might make the reader say: "Too weird for me." Or: "Interesting...."

In other words, the description was what the real estate agents call a qualifier. If it didn't work for you, you probably would never arrive at the website.

And this website? More of the same. If the tone and style and content don't work for you, probably the course won't.