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.

* 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/