Thursday, October 3, 2002

blogging on my iBook Well, I've decided that whatever happens with my Radio blog, I'm likely switch most of my blogging to the Mac that I have at home. I installed Radio for OS X on my laptop this morning, and it actually seemed to fix the worst problem. At least I now have something that looks like a Radio blog that I can post to! The older posts aren't immediately accessible, but they're there if you have the permalink or put in the right URL. I hope that this problem will be fixed, but if it's not, things could be a lot worse...And I was planning on archiving all my Radio posts in LiveJournal - which allows back-dated entries. Why am I thinking of switching my blogging to my home computer? I've been wondering how much of my blogging is strictly work-related. It is and it isn't. I feel like it's fine to spend some work time on it, but of course not all my work time. I think it's all right for me to spend some unpaid time on it, but it wouldn't be fair for it to be entirely unpaid, because much of it is relevant to my job and could benefit my employer. No matter what happens with my Radio blog, I think that I'm going to do more work on the LiveJournal, to the point where it will become the main blog and the Radio blog will be the mirror. I'm particularly interested in posting the blog as a script onto my own webpage. Then I can do a lot of customization without having to fuss with all the tricky templates. Another factor is that last night I tried NetNewsWire (a free aggregator for Mac OS X) and was very impressed. I think I'd prefer using it to the Radio aggregator. One of the underlying reasons is that I just like to work on a Mac. This way I will update the blog in the evenings (and early mornings - but I'm not much of a morning person). I will still be able to update the LiveJournal version during the day at work. 6:08:44 PM     first post of the month meltdown [Originally written yesterday evening] Was my decision to start mirroring the exploded library in LiveJournal a premonition of what was going to happen today? Well, if it was a premonition, I wish that I had acted on it some more! Usually I get along with software pretty well, but I have been having the worst luck with the Radio blogging software. This afternoon, after finishing that last, refreshingly non-technical entry here, I had difficulties posting in the Radio version. It said that it couldn't find a certain file on my hard drive - prefs.txt - and wasn't updating at all. This was where my impatience got the better of me - and I decided to uninstall & reinstall the software, hoping that it would fix things. I made a point of backing up all the crucial date somewhere else. No doubt it would have been better to wander around in the fog that is Radio's documentation, hoping that I would stumble across an answer. Anyway, when I tried to get into my blog, I noticed that it had given me a different URL. It used to be http://blogs.salon.com/0001429/, but now the number was in the 1500s. Everything else was right, but I knew that this change of email would muck up everybody's news aggregators. So I tried it again, making sure that I manually deleted all the files that were left after the uninstall. This time, I was able to keep the URL, but if you look it, you'll see that it's definitely not working very well. The information is kind of there but the blog is unusable. 6:03:19 PM     too shy to be blogging [This was posted yesterday afternoon in the LiveJournal version - just before all the trouble started] Yesterday was a busy day at the reference desk: lots of undergraduate legal studies students and first year law students rushing to finish their legal research exercises. When I did get a minute to update the blog, there was some problem with my computer, and so that didn't happen. Then today I was reading through Radio's news aggregator and saw lots of interesting stories which I might like to post. But most of them somehow got deleted! Still, I'll try to look some of them up manually. On the plus, I just noticed today that Salon's Scott Rosenberg mentioned the exploded library in his blog on Monday. How frightening :) I swear that I'm too shy to be blogging. Especially since this blog (now two months old) is evolving into something a little more personal than most other law/library blogs. This is generally not a place for scoops, where you'll learn a bit of important law/library/information news that you didn't know before. No, this is more about opinions and ideas than news. I've been thinking about this stuff because tomorrow I'm talking to the MALL Downtowner's group about blogging. I have some trepidation because up to now the blogging side of me has been quite separate from the rest of my professional life. I don't think that any of my immediate co-workers read my blog (if you are - you'd better let me know! :) )and I'm just fine with that. On the other hand, they say that more integration is better. 5:55:42 PM     New Blogger in Australia - Kim Weatherall is lecturer at the University of Sydney in Australia.  She is interested in Technology and Intellectual Property.  She notes that the CLRC (the Copyright Law Review Committee, apparently a copyright legal group in Australia) has proposed laws to prevent copyright holders from using private contractual agreements to unreasonably extend their copyright powers. [Ernie the Attorney] It's always nice to see another Australian blawger! 8:12:41 AM

© Copyright 2003 Morgan Wilson. Last update: 5/14/03; 12:10:25 AM.