Archive for the ‘Bloggity’ Category
I’m determined to be organized this year: I’ve already set up my 2012 booklog.*
(The snippet of Johnny Crow art is meant to be centered. I can see it right in the code: aligncenter. There is something wonky in my template somewhere that always overrides the centering of images. I’m planning a massive redesign in near future, so I’m not going to worry about these little finicky details right now.)
(And by “not going to worry,” I mean it’s going to drive me batty until I get it fixed.)
But enough of that. The big news, the exciting New Year’s news, is that the 2011 Cybils finalists have been posted. Let the library queuing begin…
*Whoops, had the wrong link here before. Corrected now.
Photo totally unrelated to the content of this post, offered for those who may not be quite as interested in social bookmarking as I am. 🙂
I still haven’t found the one best, perfect means of sharing nifty internet finds with others. To be fair, even before Google killed off Reader Share, I was forever searching for that one best, perfect show-and-tell vehicle. Reader’s share button was so easy that I took it for granted.
Linksharing is important to me. I truly loved being able to click through to your blogs and explore your Reader Shared Items widgets. I loved that I could follow those link collections on my own Reader. I love it when someone on Google+ or Facebook or Twitter shares an intriguing bit of reading—love it so much that I’m reluctant to rely on chance to put those links before my eyes in the rapid infostream. I want an RSS feed of your nifty stuff: that’s the bottom line.
Some of you share links right on your blog, and that’s terrific. I could do that myself, have done in the past, but over time I’ve found that I prefer to keep my booknotes and family chronicle separate from my show-and-tell treasures. I’m a compartmentalizer.
This past week, I’ve experimented with Diigo as my primary linksharing vehicle. I was already using it to share booklists in my sidebar. I love how its widget folds itself neatly into my blog design. And I love that it has an RSS feed so you can subscribe if you’d like. What it’s lacking—and this is a biggie—is reciprocity. As I mentioned yesterday, I don’t like that you can’t comment on links. Sharing isn’t as much fun if it’s one-way.
Diigo
For a while, I was using Tumblr as a way to archive my own online reading—not necessarily links I wanted to share, but things I’d read and wanted to be able to reference later. I fell out of the habit after a while. (Around the time of Comic-Con, I see, which explains the lapse.) As a sharing platform, it has much to offer: excellent visuals (you can share [and credit!] photos and videos as well as text links); a combox; an RSS feed. But its sidebar widget is incompatible with my blog design. That’s not a dealbreaker; I’m sure there are WordPress plugins for Tumblr feeds, and anyway I’ve got a redesign planned for early next year. (New books, new look.)
Tumblr
So for now, you may find (and subscribe to) my shared links at both Tumblr and Diigo, your choice. If I decide to let one of them lapse, I’ll let you know.
If you have come up with a replacement for your Google Reader Shared Items, please leave the link in my comments!
Following up on last night’s post:
I’ve come up with a solution to my Reader-share problem, at least for now. I use Diigo for lots of bookmarking purposes (my [out-of-date] sidebar “Rillabooks” log, for example) and have set up a “share” tag there that will feed into my sidebar here. See “Caught My Eye” under the Recent Comments widget on the right. You can subscribe to an RSS feed of those posts, if you wish. (Click the RSS icon at the bottom of the list, which at this moment contains a single link.)
As I said in the combox the other day, most of what I shared via Reader was different in tone and content from the more newsy links I share via G+, Twitter, Facebook.
I frequently Reader-share posts I find moving, lovely, heartwarming, funny, or thought-provoking—vs. the more informational, newsy link-sharing I do via other platforms. My Reader shares are from blogs I subscribe to & read regularly (stating the obvious, I know). Somehow it feels different to carry a link to FB, Twitter, or G+ and post it: more official, formal, thrusting the post into your stream if you follow me on the platform in question. Whereas with Reader Share, you come to it or follow it only if you *want* that content. Also, those other outlets are so very *public.* If [a friend with a quiet family-focused blog] write[s] a beautiful post I’d like to share, I might be hesitant to do so on G+ where I’m followed by hundreds of people I don’t know—I’ll feel like I’m invading her privacy or something. Sharing via Reader seems more personal.
For now I’m using Feedly to read my blog subscriptions. It has easy sharing to Diigo, Twitter, Facebook, etc. I’ve read that Google may roll out design themes for Reader the way you can get them for Gmail & iGoogle now. If that happens, I may return to Reader for feed-reading.
(Of course now I’m worried about Gmail too. They’re rolling out its redesign soon—you can see what it will look like by clicking the gear icon on your Gmail screen [upper right corner], Mail Settings, Themes. Select the “Preview” theme. More heavy black, excessive white space, ugh ugh ugh. I keep thinking about the design team who undoubtedly worked very hard on the visual elements of this grand Google overhaul—how hard they must have worked & how crushing to have the design met with such resounding disgust all over the internet. Such a bummer.)
Now I am also a GeekMom.
I’m delighted to say I’ve been invited to contribute to one of my favorite spots on the web. (I’m sure that bonnet photo had nothing to do with it.)
I’ll be sharing my San Diego Comic-Con experience over there in July. Here’s my first post, in which I contemplate the fact that the con is less than two months away.
If you have any thoughts about what kind of Comic-Con coverage you would enjoy seeing, I’d love it if you’d leave me a comment over there!
When you comment on a post (here or elsewhere), do you come back later to see if anyone has replied to you?
Do you subscribe to the comment feed? Here, you can sub to the comment thread of each individual post, or to all the comments in general.
Some blogs—I see it most often on Blogger—offer email notification of comments. I seldom subscribe to those, though: it can mean too much mail. I’m more likely to subscribe to the post’s comment feed, if that option exists.
June 6, 2011 @ 7:27 pm | Filed under:
Bloggity Our combox discussion turned to blogrolls, the appeal and difficulty of. I enjoy exploring other people’s blogrolls but long ago gave up any attempt to maintain one here. My worry, of course, was that someone would feel left out.
But I do love to share. So here are a very few of the blogs I read on a regular basis. I am going to include some of my favorites, and leave out some of my favorites, so that you’ll see it really is just a small sampling of the folks who edify and inspire me every day. (I should say every week. I tend to save blog-reading up for a few days and then attack it with zest.)
Mental Multivitamin. One of the first, one of the best. She reads, she thinks, I learn. And she just recently enabled commenting, which made my week.
As Cozy as Spring. Jenn’s lovely photos, piercing observations, and quiet musings bring a sparkle to my mornings.
Fiction, Instead of Lies. Smart, thoughtful commentary on books and the world by author Tanita S. Davis (who is extremely high on my people-I-hope-to-meet-in-person-someday list).
Girl Detective. For all I love to read about books, I’m often gunshy of reviews: I have a crushing case of spoiler-phobia, you know. Girl Detective’s very sharp notes on her reading are the sort of book reviews I read with relish, not fear. But she’s murder on the book budget.
Original Content. Gail Gauthier is a children’s book author who writes with refreshing candor about what she reads and about publishing in general.
Handmade Homeschool. Sarah’s someone I’d love to live near; I think we would get along famously. Plus, I bet she’d knit me some socks.
The Poem Farm. Amy’s daily original poems are a delight.
Knitting the Wind. Here’s how much I love Sarah’s writing: I have learned the time difference between here and New Zealand in order to speculate as to whether she’s likely to be awake and possibly blogging soon.
Baggott Asher Bode. I went to grad school with Julianna Baggott and her husband Dave Scott. I love them, the inimitable pair of them, enormously. Julianna doesn’t so much write about a topic as skewer, slice, and julienne it, using words like a Japanese steakhouse chef uses knives. The result is equally delicious.
Dura Mater. She is one tough mother indeed. Honest, tired, brave. I have been a quietly admiring lurker at her blog for at least five years.
If your blog is not one of these I’ve mentioned, please don’t feel left out. I really did omit some of my favorites on purpose. This was actually quite a fun endeavor, compiling this list; perhaps I’ll do it again upon occasion.
…despite its being, you know, Facebook.
Scott thought a remark I made in the comments ought to be pulled onto the main page and elaborated on a bit, so here it is. In response to a nice thing Melanie had said, I replied:
I do like thinking aloud about the new media…I tend to be an early adopter, and I’ve tried out loads of things that I didn’t stick with for one reason or another. The way I know something works for me is if I’m still using it a year later. 
There are many platforms I’ve enjoyed briefly but didn’t find expedient over time (for example, I love the look & functionality of Listography but forget about it for long stretches of time, which tells me it wasn’t quite the right platform for my daily needs).
There are things about Facebook that drive me batty (the privacy issues) but there’s nothing quite like it for staying in touch, is there? I mean, I’ve been on the internet since 1995, active on bulletin boards and email groups from 1995-2008, blogging daily since Jan 2005, on Twitter since 2007—but not until Facebook was I in daily internet contact with my relatives, high school friends, college friends, grad school friends, old work friends, etc. PLUS the interaction with online friends (with whom I became friendly first via boards, lists, blogs, etc), kidlitosphere colleagues, and so forth. And I find I really count on FB to let me know quickly who is safe when, say, a freak tornado touches down in Massachusetts!!
And actually, I think my main point got a bit lost in that paragraph. It’s this: not until Facebook was I in daily internet contact with my relatives. My closest cousins, some of my aunts and uncles, one of my sisters and her husband, my other sister’s daughter, three of my four sisters-in-law, many of my nieces and nephews on Scott’s side. That’s a big deal.
My father is also quite active on FB, to my delight—I seem to Like just about everything he posts 😉 —and he shows my mom all the photos and kid-quips Jane and I post there. But my affection for Facebook isn’t because it lets me share glimpses of daily life with others—as I said, I’ve been doing that via a variety of platforms (including, for a long while, a private family blog) since 1995. What I love about FB is that it, for whatever reason, seems to be the first platform that has compelled a large number of my loved ones to share glimpses of their daily lives online. And I really, really love that. Scott and I have never lived close to our families, and the telephone is not the easiest way for this mom-of-small-children to keep up with loved ones. Appropriate phone-call hours overlap too completely with attending-to-younguns hours.
In my first twelve years on the internet, the people I talked to were almost entirely new acquaintances. Some of them have become very real and dear friends—Huck’s godmother, for example. I’ve met dozens of internet-first friends in person, several of them repeatedly. They’re real friends, and I’m glad to have them in my life. But it wasn’t until Facebook, these past couple of years, that I had the pleasure of seeing, on a daily basis, what my cousins are up to, and my high-school friends, my college friends, my grad school friends…all of them, friends I’ve not lived near since the pertinent graduations, and so many of us busy these past two decades raising our families, attending to our jobs. It would take me hours and hours of telephone time each week to find out what Facebook can tell me in ten minutes.
(Occurs to me I can sum up this entire post with that one sentence.)
Don’t get me wrong—I love those long, gossipy phone conversations. I’m simply unable to manage them very often during this season of my life. And this season has been sixteen years long!
Keeping a blog doesn’t appeal to everyone. Commenting on blogs doesn’t appeal to everyone. For whatever reason— convenience, layers of (hypothetical) privacy, the visual format— Facebook seems to appeal to a much wider swath of people. I love being able to see, with one click, my niece’s prom pictures, a birth announcement from my high-school friend, a link to an article written by a grad-school classmate, and the beautiful wedding photo of one of my very first internet acquaintances—now a real-life friendship spanning sixteen years. I love the reminder that today is my Uncle Eddie’s birthday. Happy Birthday, Uncle Eddie!
June 1, 2011 @ 3:30 pm | Filed under:
Bloggity 
Thanks much to all of you who’ve chimed in on the linksharing survey (and if you haven’t yet, here’s where). I expected varying responses, which I’m getting, but some patterns are emerging: Facebook users tend to prefer links shared via that platform (I loved Susan’s “town square” metaphor). Non-FB folks prefer links on the blog, but not too many links at a time, and with short why-I’m-sharing notes. Hardly anyone looks at sidebars anymore. (Begging the question: are sidebars therefore a cluttery distraction? Or does it not matter because people are reading in Reader anyway? I figure sidebar content exists for a tiny but important minority, particularly newcomers, and therefore serves a purpose even if it is seldom used. I admit, however, that lately I’ve been craving a wide text column and only one sidebar, sparsely furnished.)
Sometimes I wonder if it makes more sense to move all link-sharing (I’m talking about items-of-interest like the midnight sun eclipse link I posted yesterday) to a separate venue, Tumblr maybe (which could be fed to Facebook or subscribed to in Google Reader by those who were interested). Reserving this space for booknotes, comic-con reports, travel notes, family tales, the inevitable garden photos. (Be warned: my sunflowers are mere weeks away from blooming. The bees go mad for them, and then I go mad for the bees going mad. Also: the milkweed is in lush bloom, and we’re expecting monarch caterpillars any day.)
But I don’t know. As I continue my archive cleanup, I’m enjoying revisiting the links that caught my attention at a given moment (if they still exist), and remembering that moment only happens if I see them in the context of my days and weeks.
Scott often teases me about my Charles Ingalls streak—I absolutely thrive upon a big move, a fresh start. (Even when we’ve been sad to leave our friends, like our New York and Virginia moves, I’ve been simultaneously grieved and exhilarated.) I’m sure part of my current metablogging preoccupation has to do with the fact that I’ve been living in this blog design for (gasp) four years now, and I’m craving change. Which generally starts with cleaning out closets and packing up things you aren’t using anymore.
Well, enough of this for now! I’m supposed to be doing a final pass at the beginning reader today. My editor said no rush—it isn’t scheduled to pub until Spring 2013—but I’m really enjoying these last little nitpicky tinkerings. Then it’s full steam ahead on the Alabama book. (And ooh, they’ve picked an artist for the middle-grade novel! Can’t wait till I have clearance to share! But it’ll be a while yet…)
Since my favorite thing about the internet is that it is one giant game of Show and Tell—you show me the neat stuff you’ve found, and I’ll show you the neat stuff I’ve found—I am perpetually pondering the best way to share things. I have this sort of hazily defined system for determining how to share a given link—whether in a post here on the blog, or via Facebook or Twitter or Google Reader or what. But I’m never sure what people actually prefer. (I’m sure it varies wildly.)
Well, anyway, I thought I’d ask. I’m interested in your general preference—i.e. where you, on the internet at large, prefer to encounter new links & are most likely to click through—as well as your preference regarding my shared links specifically.
For example, do you:
* like when I do a post here with links to three or four things that caught my interest (a la Delicious), perhaps with short notes about what made them jump out at me?
* prefer to check Google Reader Shared Items? (And if so, do you use the list in my blog sidebar, or do you read the “people you follow” section in your own Google Reader?)
* like when people share links on Facebook?
* hate when people share links on Facebook?
* keep as far away from Facebook as you possibly can?
* prefer linksharing on Twitter?
* deplore linksharing on Twitter?
* wonder why people like me are so doggone Twitterhappy in the first place?
* get annoyed when people pour their Twitter feeds into Facebook, so you’re stuck seeing each post twice?
* wonder if I’m overthinking this?
* subscribe to my Diigo feed (which was formerly my Delicious feed)?
* find yourself saying, Diigo huh?
* wonder if this post is a means of procrastinating some other task I ought to be doing, such as, to use a completely arbitrary example, tallying up my deductible expenses from the research trip so I won’t have to be plunged into hell come next April?
* need to break it to me gently that you skip over all that linky stuff, period, because let’s face it, you are coming here for book recommendations and/or pictures of bees?
Or, you know, none of the above. 😉 I’m just curious. And not procrastinating at ALL, no sir.
