blogging

Heather “Dooce” Armstrong has had a busy few weeks. The book she edited was released, she went to New York and came back, and she appeared on National Television™.

Hidden in among all that activity is as eloquent a defense of blogging about your kid as I’ve ever read, and it’s well worth reading for not just mommybloggers but for everyone who writes about the people they love.

There are many who find “mommybloggers” and the whole concept of blogging about ones kids distasteful. They dismiss is out of hand as exploitive. Typical mommybloggers that I have met are not that, though. They don’t cross over into a kind of “stage motherhood”—I feel like that’s when it gets hinky. If you’re pushing your kid to be entertaining. If you’re neglecting your responsibilities as a Mom to service your audience. If you’re more a blogger than a Mom, I think something is broken, and you will have rather more to answer for when your kid grows up and says “what’s this blog thing.”

If you’re simply using your family and friends to entertain, and losing sight of what it means to have family and friends, then that’s broken too.

It’s worth a read: Newsletter: Month Fifty and Fifty-one

But I guess there are some people who are very uncomfortable with the fact that I and many other women are writing about our children on our websites. How dare we violate your privacy like this, how dare we endanger you like this, we obviously care more about ad revenue than what this is going to do to your adolescence. And I have been asked countless times if I am at all worried that you will totally resent me for the details I have shared here. Of course you will you resent me. I have no doubt that you will spend years of your life resenting me and being embarrassed that we have the same last name, despite the fact that I have and will spend years of my life writing love letters to you on the Internet. Despite the fact that I have declared to millions of people that you are the most amazing thing that has ever happened to my life.

You will resent me for your curfew and the fact that I will not let you leave the house in that mini-skirt. You will resent me for showing up to your school in my pajama bottoms and for raising my hand in a PTA meeting when I hadn’t brushed my hair. You will text message your friends to tell them that I am the most horrible person on the planet because I’m forcing you to study for your exam in the morning. You are going to think that I cannot possibly understand what you are going through, and you will slam the door in my face.

Will you resent me for this website? Absolutely. And I have spent hours and days and months of my life considering this, weighing your resentment against the good that can come from being open and honest about what it’s like to be your mother, the good for you, the good for me, and the good for other women who read what I write here and walk away feeling less alone. And I have every reason to believe that one day you will look at the thousands of pages I have written about my love for you, the thousands of pages other women have written about their own children, and you’re going to be so proud that we were brave enough to do this. We are an army of educated mothers who have finally stood up and said pay attention, this is important work, this is hard, frustrating work and we’re not going to sit around on our hands waiting for permission to do so. We have declared that our voices matter.

Movable Type went open source yesterday, and I don’t care. Too little, too late. A long time ago, it seemed like MT was the way to put together a blog. It was free for personal use, it was good, it was used by heavyweights of blogging. But I could never get past two things: the first was the fact that the license was not actually open source, not a BSD license, not a GPL license, just “you can use it and it’s free.” Well, I did use it at one job I had many years ago, giving a set of internal developers blogs to keep track of their stuff. I also experimented with installs over the years, but for this blog I went with Blogger initially, and eventually, in 2004, I went with WordPress. The second thing I could not get over was the way comments were handled in MT. I have no idea if it’s still the case that commenting in MT spawns new processes for the Perl interpreter with each comment, but I do know that messages like this one, with people complaining about the performance of MT, are nothing new. Meanwhile, WordPress has superseded MT as the blogging software of choice. It’s not without problems, but the license makes it completely hackable, and I can modify and redistribute whatever hacks I make as much as possible.

Something that’s been important to me since I started blogging was that my site would be portable, forever and ever. Anything with a restrictive license or that puts me in a position to be beholden forever is a nonstarter. I use flickr, sure, but there are options to export everything from flickr, which I take advantage of. I think it’s time to think about a mechanism to export entries from twitter, too. Despite it being so ephemeral, I’d like to capture that stuff too and move it out should I choose to.

The language in this is not safe for work, but the sentiments are important: How to Irritate and Annoy People in the Name of Blogging

A lot of people I know or know of are blogging about the fires in San Diego: Sassy, JeSais, MAS, MissEwon, Chuck, and Geoff. Also, people I haven’t met: Raph Koster, Cocky Bastard.

Google is changing their PageRank algorithm? is a question/inference the blogosphere is drawing. The working theory is it’s for selling links. They’re diluting PageRank. I’ve had several offers to buy links here on ArtLung.com—and I’ve turned them all down. Typically the link buyers want the links to be permanent, as in, forever and ever. No. I don’t do forever and ever unless you pay me big big big bigtime.

While we fight fires, China launched a lunar probe. In 2001 I posted a story that they’d have a man on the moon by 2005. They didn’t make that, but a moon probe is pretty good. In 2003 I blogged Bruce Sterling’s Wired op-ed on a China-India Space Race.

High School band covers Zappa. Wow.

GIMP 2.4 is out. I’m going to try it out. The interface is not PhotoShoppish enough though. via Paul Slocum of Tree Wave.

Dorothy (of Cat and Girl)’s computer is broken. Sad.

There are two free songs on http://www.stewsongs.com/ right now: Black Men Ski (previously mentioned here) and Pastry Shop (previously). Also, I moved Stew’s blog to a subdomain a few weeks ago: http://stewsez.artlung.com/.

Jason Scott, who was interviewed by Leah and the BBS Documentary, writes about two subjects which make me wax nostalgic for Amiga: Fred Fish’s death, and The Juggler raytraced animation. That animation was truly magic at the time. It was like looking at an alien spacecraft, and there it was for me to study and think about. I never got to render anything, the programming was too inscrutable for me. I did like to mess with DPaint though. Which makes me think about the fact that I’ve been doing computer graphics for 25 years, since I was 13 years old.

Man, I really do like that Endicott song. Seriously.

Be safe out there people. Onward.