BeigeJournal

Tramp Lamps, underwear transformed into light fixtures.

Fen living somewhere vaguely near central Illinois may wish to consider attending Chambanacon. Chambanacon was my first con, way back when, and I suppose ought to blamed for my involvement in filk. It is now moved to Springfield, Illinois (The state capitol! In the middle of a large flat region!) in the Hilton Springfield, which for some reason is approximately 30 stories tall even though it’s located in the middle of a large flat region. The view from the top is quite nice, you can get lots of exercise if you choose to use the stairs, plus if you get a good strong Illinois wind (the state capitol is right nearby, so there is always wind from the politicians if from nowhere else) the building sways slightly and creaks like a wooden sailing ship. It’s cheaper than a cruise.

Chambana used to be a fairly large filk event. It has shrunk a bit, but some very interesting people still usually show up. I have no knowledge of anyone’s plans for this year other than my own, but usually Bill and Brenda Sutton are there, Juanita Coulson is a frequent attendee, I believe Margaret Middleton has been heard there, and Phil Parker is always there as the con’s filk person. Jan of the Magic Fingers and Spot of No Fingers At All have been, um, spotted in the audience. I’ll be there.

In Industrialized Nature I read that the Eletronorte power company in Brazil, when building the Tucuruí hydroelectric project, didn’t communicate with the forestry bureaucracy, and so instead of cutting the trees first and then flooding the forest, they flooded the forest first, and then, yes, used underwater chainsaws and scuba-diving loggers to harvest the trees from the bottom of the reservoir. “Eletronorte specialists now talk excitedly about the valuable submerged wood they harvest from the reservoir’s depths, and the proudly proclaim that recovery of the wood provides local employment.”

As I gather is common I didn’t really understand blogging until I tried it. As I write more fairly frequent, fairly short comments, I better understand the desire to do so. The weblog format is natural for that sort of thing. The notion of a frequently updated, chronologically ordered set of short pieces didn’t really mystify me before, though. What I really didn’t understand, but do now, is blogging software. I figured if you want to write, fire up Emacs or vi or Notepad or whatever and write. Why all this software? Having now spent a few weeks installing and configuring and messing with software (Blosxom, specifically), it all becomes clear.

Benefit 'o blogware number one is the ability to easily get all the usual navigational doohickeys, like the calendar, the find function, the categories list, and so on. I can just keep writing stuff and the software will automatically display a finite number of entries at a time and allow the viewer to navigate through the archives.

Benefit number two is that with a pre-written html template the software plugs your writing into and pre-written css, you can get a sharp looking site without knowing what you are doing or putting much work into it, and you can easily tinker with the look of the site just by changing two files (and maybe adding some plugins to get more features).

Benefit three is that if the pre-written theme was any good you should be getting near-perfectly valid HTML/XHTML/CSS/etc. as well as RSS out of the thing, even if you don’t know what you are doing, which is a wonderful thing for interoperability. (And I do recommend that you run your HTML through a validator and fix all those tiny nit-picky pedantic things it complains about. That way when you make a change that causes a problem, you can run it through the validator and see what it says without wading through 500 nit-picky pedantic warnings that you were too lazy to fix before.)

A fourth feature is the easy inclusion of writebacks, trackbacks, automatic weblogs.com pinger, and so on. How many sites would be trackback enabled if they were hand-hacked in vi? Not many. New features diffuse rapidly.

The amazing thing is that with zillions of bloggers all using various different but fundamentally similar blog software packages, we get things like All consuming, which checks the recently updated weblogs listed at weblogs.com for URLs pointing to books at the usual online booksellers, and, on the assumption that if you are pointing to a book at a bookseller, you must be writing about that book, gives us a near-real-time look at what books people are writing about in their blogs. This without the active cooperation of the bloggers, who need not even have heard of All consuming for it to work. It’s the sort of thing we’ve been promised for years, that in the future computers would scan the net for us to gather valuable information and report it back to us automatically. Now we are starting to see that. I’m sure we’ll be seeing more of this sort of thing in the future.