Morgan Wilson: about this blog

should I stay with Salon blogs or switch to TypePad?

Tue, 12 Aug 2003 06:06:06 GMT

I find it quite amusing and ironic that less than two weeks after I promised myself that I wouldn't switch this blog to MovableType, I am feeling very drawn towards switching to MovableType's TypePad. Of course, I did give a proviso to this undertaking - "unless Movable Type became idiot-proof." While no blogging software is truly idiot-proof, except possibly AOL Journals (see this amusing piece about them), TypePad seems way more user-friendly than standard MovableType and a lot easier to work with than Radio Userland.

So I'm seriously considering defecting to TypePad. So here are my pros and cons about switching to TypePad -

Pros:
- I don't really like the Radio Userland software that much. Although it's easy enough to start a bare bones blog with it, it isn't very user-friendly IMHO. I find it difficult to understand for customizing and think that the documentation is poor - especially when compared with TypePad.
- I haven't really been following the flame wars associated with Dave Winer. But what I've heard makes me feel uneasy about the future of Radio. I worry that Radio Userland is isolating itself in the blogosphere.
- TypePad is web-based, so it's very easy to update from anywhere. No more being tied to the one computer!
- TypePad offers more gadgets for blogs - which are really easy to implement. This goes back to one of my complaints with Radio - yes, you can do a lot with it, but a lot of it is quite difficult and arcane to configure.
- I like TypePad's photo album feature
Cons (and there are quite a few):
- It's more expensive than Radio. I'm interested in the intermediate $8.95/month option.
- I'd also need to get a separate news aggregator (maybe this isn't all bad), which I may need to pay extra for if I want a good one.
- I think that initially, my readership would plummet. (but is this really an issue?)
- I would leave the Salon blog community, which I like a lot. I would get onto the Salon blog webring, but that wouldn't be the same. The issue is, if Salon blogs is on a sinking ship (Radio), do I show solidarity and stay until things get worse, or do I just seize what seems to be a good opportunity at this moment?
- It's not as if TypePad is the only option for me, either. Maybe Blogger Pro will get better under the ownership of Google. Maybe I should support fine Mac only software such as iBlog. And don't forget AOL - for which I'm already paying for. Nobody will probably take an AOL blog seriously, but it might offer a way of communicating with a wider audience.

Well there's no rush to do any of this. I'll give myself a least a week before I do anything rash.

the exploded library is now one year old

Sat, 02 Aug 2003 01:35:00 GMT

I wasn’t planning on updating this blog today, but then I realized the date - which happens to be the exploded library’s first birthday.

I started this blog as a lark. I was writing an article on blogs and thought that the best way to really understand what blogs are about was to make one of my own. During the past year, my intentions have changed a number of times, as have the content & style of this blog.

I am surprised that this I’m still doing this. The blogosphere seems even more transitory than the rest of the web - better blogs than mine have arrived and then faded in the past year. I think that this is because blogging is so personal. Even if a blog isn’t about personal events, its oxygen supply is dependent on the blogger’s personal life, which we often don’t know about.

Here are some important happenings of the past year: Switching to Salon blogs; switching to blogging on my iMac; taking a few more risks with my content - especially about political issues. Most importantly, it has been slowly discovering what I really want to do. I prefer to take a limited number of issues and look at those from a slightly different angle. Maybe this is looking at the law as a librarian, or viewing library issues with a legal eye. Viewing the US against my Australian perspective, or commenting on Australia from my viewpoint as an ex pat who's living across the Pacific. This blog is about ambivalence as much as it’s about law libraries.

So what’s on the horizon for the next year? Hopefully more regular updating. I know that Google prefers it when I update every day or so - but that doesn’t fit in with my temperament and circumstances. I find myself very attracted to writing a lot when the inspiration takes me, and then doing nothing for a little while.

I can promise that I’m not switching this blog to Movable Type - which everyone else seems to be doing - not unless they make an idiot proof version. I may consider switching to iBlog. I’d like to personalize this blog even further with some of my own graphics.

Input into this blog - I have a low tolerance for information overload and if I added every worthy blog or news source into my aggregator, I would never get anything done. That said, I would like my aggregator to be dynamic and up-to-date while still manageable.

I want more value-added content. Although bare links (called "mere mentions" in this blog) and unsubstantiated rants have their place, they are more ephemeral than pieces which combine links and the other fruits of research with analysis, commentary and opinion. This also shows how librarians can add value in the exploded library. I plan to be updating my article on news aggregators (which thanks to Yahoo, gives me a large proportion of my hits).

Most importantly, I still want to be blogging in another year.

Music: Björk, Live at the Royal Opera House DVD, Human Behaviour

summer work

Wed, 16 Jul 2003 04:55:42 GMT

(All of what I’m writing tonight is really one entry, broken into different paragraphs, but I’ve decided to separate it into separate postings.) Many bloggers take a summer break. I wasn’t planning on doing such a thing, but it happened any way – hence the lack of the standard announcement of light blogging. As I have mentioned before, the summer seems more busy for me in the law library. Although there’s less reference work, we are expected to do more in the way of summer projects. For me, I prefer the randomness of answering people’s questions – most of whom are very nice to work with. This isn’t to say that all of my summer projects are boring – but they are more work.

Working on getting EZProxy working in my library so that our users will be able to authenticate to the proxy server and then access our IP address restricted databases from anywhere.
Include entries (with working URLs) for our full-text electronic journals – chiefly available via HeinOnline – into our online library catalogue.
Make new floor maps of the library that can be put onto the library website and integrated into the library catalogue.
Work with other public services staff on a faculty services handbook.
Participating in an IT committee that is investigating portal solutions for the university web site as a whole.

Music: Liz Phair, Liz Phair, Why Can’t I?

musings about Content

Mon, 09 Jun 2003 16:21:38 GMT

I was thinking of adding something like "a radical law librarian's perspective" at the end of the description, but decided against it, because I didn't like the idea of my description being 3 lines long.

I was also toying with the idea of capitalizing the word Content or putting the word in quotation marks because I find it deeply ironic the way that all of the important things on the web have been reduced to being just one form of content or another. Sometimes I get the impression that some techie people think that one sort of content is interchangeable with any other sort of content. Of course, in a way this is true, but this attitude defeats the whole idea of content in the first place. The whole point is that words, images, sounds etc have context, and are not interchangeable! Also it leads to travesties like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which side-steps the crucial idea/expression of idea distinction by declaring everything to be digital media.

Anyway, I didn't do this because a capital letter would have stood out like a sore thumb and some people think the ironic use of quotation marks to be pretentious - or something which Dr Evil likes to do :) Not that I really care if somebody thinks I'm pretentious - that's her/his problem - but I am aware that quotation marks lose their effectiveness if they're used too frequently.

a new look and description for this blog

Mon, 09 Jun 2003 15:28:04 GMT

For the fourth time in 10 months, I've changed the look of this blog. Goodbye to the Woodlands theme. This time I've become a little more ambitious and worked out how to modify this theme. Little by little I begin to understand this software.

I've changed the description far less often. The previous version ("analog information rights in the "digital millennium" - law libraries - information overload & searching in the exploded library") was once truly my focus, but that has changed.

my first impressions of iBlog: Mac-only blogging software with a news aggregator

Tue, 20 May 2003 03:02:47 GMT

Ever since I first heard about iBlog a few months ago, I've been wanting to take a look at it and write down my impressions. iBlog is Mac-only blogging software. It's built for OS X and sports the increasingly ubiquitous brushed metal interface. Because things have been kind of busy for me lately, I wasn't able to take a very detailed look at iBlog. I was half-afraid that the more I looked at it, the more likely I'd decide to dump my Salon/Radio blog for iBlog.

I was very impressed. iBlog also has a built-in news aggregator. What struck me the most is how easy to understand the iBlog software is. I took a quick look at the various files that it created in my Mac's library and I could actually understand how it worked. I'm sure that this simplicity would make it that much easier to customize a blog. As much as I like the Radio Userland software, it's taken me a long time to understand how it works, and I've been blogging with it since last August. But on the other hand, iBlog is like Movable Type in that you need your own server to publish your blog on. But this could be a .Mac account, which is becoming an almost essential subscription for Mac users.

Maybe it's because I'm a librarian, but I really liked the category feature in iBlog. It made assigning and organizing categories to be very easy. iBlog also generates an RSS feed - which is essential for blogging software, I think.

I do have two negative things to say about iBlog. The first thing is that although I like its news aggregator, it provides no simple one-click method of posting items from the news aggregator to the blog. Radio Userland does this - and I thought that was the whole point of having blogging software integrated with a news reader. It is very likely that this omission will be fixed in future releases of iBlog, so this is not a huge problem.

My other concern is more of a social rather than a technological issue, but it's real and is the major reason why I don't switch to iBlog tonight. It's that iBlog is so relatively new and has not yet established a community of users. I've talked about blogging communities before (see Digression2). Although I think one's blogging software is a very loose and less significant community, it does count for something. Maybe it's also because most of the time I feel quite at home in the Salon blog community.

Anyway, I'll finish by recommending iBlog to anyone starting a new blog on a Mac (OS 10.2). Because it's on a Mac and the software is very Mac-like, you won't waste as much time figuring out the technology and can spend more time being creative.

my links page

Mon, 05 May 2003 12:58:47 GMT

Well, I have finished my page of links to other blogs. I expect that I will be the main person who uses this page. I will now be able to keep track of my favourite blogs whilst at work. Although I love news aggregators, and am back to liking the Radio Userland news aggregator which I use, it is very interesting to view the actual blog and see all the design changes which bloggers are constantly making. Like everything else in the blogosphere, this link page is a work in progress. It is just a selection of my favourite blogs. To list all would be information overload. I do hope to maintain a featured blog of the week/month - highlighting a recent discovery or another blog which I view in my aggregator.

This page also serves as a bridge between the exploded library and my quite rudimentary personal web page at Hamline.

blogs that I read

Thu, 17 Apr 2003 13:46:15 GMT

I just added a link to the blogs that I read. The permanent location of this is at the end of the navigation links in the left column. This links page is very much under construction. I'll let you know when it's finished.

catsitting and war

Thu, 27 Mar 2003 04:53:09 GMT

First I was away from my main computer catsitting for some friends. Then this inevitable war broke out - which was always going to happen, despite the opposition of so many "focus groups" in the US or the rest of the world. No, I haven't been spending all my time following this Glorious Showdown with Saddam. I just needed to take a little break and switch off from these depressing, disheartening times. But now I feel ready to get back into the fray...

redefining the exploded library

Tue, 25 Feb 2003 02:53:48 GMT

This blog has changed a bit since I started it in August 2002. It's strayed somewhat from the original idea of a law library blog. It's now more of a personal blog by someone who happens to be a law librarian - who's also a Tasmanian living in Minnesota - who's left-handed and left of centre politically - who likes computers, especially Macs - Etc. etc., you get the idea ...

This is an experimental weblog where I try to combine a wide range of my interests - from the professional ones, like law libraries, blogging and searching, to personal ones, like creative writing and my green left political views. There are topics like intellectual property and library privacy which straddle the fence between the professional and the political.

This blog is not a place to get all the details about the latest developments in a particular field. Often I will mull over something before posting it. It's more important for me to reflect & contemplate than to be up-to-date.

I am very aware of the problem of information overload. There is too much information and not enough time or energy to make sense of it. This is something I'm trying to do for myself here in the exploded library. This is why I try to limit my postings down to one per day - except on Mondays.

I highly recommend that you take advantage of the exploded library's categories. Each of the categories can be subscribed to as a separate RSS feed. I have categorized postings by format as well as by topic. This means that if you are interested in my essays or comments but not my rants, it's possible to subscribe accordingly. The same applies with topics, if you are interested in my postings relevant to libraries, but not the ones concerning Tasmania or politics, you can filter those out.

This blog is also mirrored on LiveJournal - which is now very easy to maintain thanks to iJournal. The LiveJournal mirror serves three main purposes. It will be a complete archive of this blog, even of the posts from the earlier incarnations of this blog. LiveJournal offers a few helpful features, such as better commenting system and mood tags. Finally, it's a good working backup, as simple as that.

denial of service attack against LiveJournal; concerns about the longevity of Salon blogs

Fri, 21 Feb 2003 04:56:07 GMT

It's been a quiet week on the blog - reflecting the reality that I've been unwell during this week as well as very busy. I'm a little behind in reading all the news in my aggregator, although I did read about Salon's dire financial situation. People are wondering what will happen to the Salon blogging community if Salon folds. All I can say that is that cost of starting a Salon blog is the same as starting a general Radio userland blog - so I would be very surprised if the existence of our blogs on the web would be threatened.

I had been thinking that in the worst case scenario, at least I have the LiveJournal version of my blog. That somehow seems more secure. That was before LiveJournal was shut down for around 24 hours with a denial of service attack. At first I had no idea what the cause was. My imagination invented disaster scenarios that my two LiveJournals had just vanished for ever. It would be very annoying to see the exploded library mirror go away - but that would be nothing compared with losing my concealed more personal journal. This one has more or less superseded my paper journal.

All this makes me wonder whether words are safer if they're stored as marks on paper or as a string of 1s & 0s on a computer storage device. I guess either way has its downsides - although most of the time we aren't aware of how potentially transient electronic information can be. Backup, backup, upgrade to newer software and hardware when you can. Not doing this would be like keeping a paper diary on the backs of ATM receipts, hoping that none get lost or go through the washing machine...

easing back into blogging ...

Tue, 28 Jan 2003 01:15:51 GMT

... with a meta monday

I'm back

Wed, 22 Jan 2003 17:36:40 GMT

After 30 hours of travelling, I finally made it back last night. What a change - from sunburn, temperatures in the mid-30s (C) and the smell of nearby bushfires to frigid -15 C in Minnesota. Curiously, both Tasmania and Minnesota are suffering from a drought - of rain in Tasmania and of snow in Minnesota.

Again, I'm not going to make a deliberate effort to catch up with everything I've missed this month. I have a few ideas of things to write about, but not right now, because my jetlag is catching up with me ...

Leaving for a 3 week trip to Australia

Tue, 31 Dec 2002 06:59:46 GMT

I don't usually work on my blog this late, but I've been very busy tying up various loose ends before I leave on New Year's Day for a 3 week trip back to my home in Tasmania. This is my first trip home since May 2000 - and it feels long overdue. I'm particularly looking forward to escaping January in Minnesota and doing a lot of bushwalking and other summery activities. I can guarantee that the exploded library will not be updated during this time, but look for me on January 23. Happy new year!

more work on the LiveJournal version, categories revisited

Tue, 17 Dec 2002 01:36:19 GMT

I found an easier way to keep the LiveJournal version of this blog up-to-date, so I'm going to start doing that again. I've also started the arduous task of archiving stuff in the LiveJournal - which allows you to back-date entries. Today I started with August 1 and hope to do at least one day everyday.

I also tentatively restarted some of my categories. I had them before but they all disappeared in the meltdown of my work PC blog.

a new home for this blog

Thu, 12 Dec 2002 04:31:56 GMT

I managed to move this blog to my iMac - without any disasters, it seems. This will make it a lot easier to work on. Big thanks to Max from Germany for his helpful advice!

trying to move this blog to my new computer

Thu, 05 Dec 2002 15:20:33 GMT

I'm breathing a big sigh of relief - I think that I just managed to avoid erasing everything I'd done on this blog in the last 2 months. Well I guess that's something positive to be said for my mistakes in the past - I'm now more cautious and managed to avoid something quite unpleasant.

On the other hand, although I was able to save this blog, I wasn't successful in moving it to my new iMac. And I'm giving up for the time being. I'm a bit annoyed at Radio Userland and its documentation. Moving a blog to a different computer isn't such a strange thing to do. Why can't there be some clear, step-by-step instructions to do this for the OS X version? Suggestions, anyone?

winter plans for this blog

Mon, 02 Dec 2002 03:15:16 GMT

I've been wanting to do some refurbishing of this blog for a little while now. I surely would have done some of this during the Thanksgiving long weekend, except that I was busy getting used to my new home computer (a beautiful G4 iMac) and tidying/organizing my home office area. I feel so relieved to have done this work - it will it so much easier to get things done.

But I've also been thinking about what I'm going to do with this blog. In December I'd like to archive all my old posts (starting from the beginning on 1 August 2002) in the LiveJournal version of this site. I also plan to keep things updated - every other day would be nice. After that I'd really like to make a new personal website which will incorporate my LiveJournal blog.

spooked by Radio's first post of the month bug

Sun, 10 Nov 2002 02:09:39 GMT

It's been a little while, I know. At first I was reluctant to post anything because of this bug which caused so much havoc for me over a month ago - I wanted to be prepared for all sorts of trouble before I posted in November. Then I got sick and then got a little behind.

The bug did reappear when I tried to post tonight. I don't know if Radio has a cure for its Mac OS X software. So I posted an untitled test post first, and then was able post as usual. I'm glad I've found a work-around.