[LMB] RE: Lois-Bujold Digest, Vol 18, Issue 4

[Tracy MacShane]

On Thu, November 2, 2006 10:32 am, Melissa Siah wrote:
> Lois Bujold wrote:
>
>>I'm occasionally tempted by the idea of setting up a blog or live
>>journal (what, by the way, is the difference?) except for a suspicon
>>that I'd never get another novel written after that.
>>
>>Ta, L.
>
> Synonyms, as far as I know. Blog feels more generic while Livejournal is a
> brand name.
>
> You could always copy the posts that you have already written to the list
> and the Bar, things like the home renovation updates, or add links to the
> posts for EOS (except maybe later if they want exclusivity for now), or
> just use it as a convenient place to put links to those places.  I think
the
> main> advantage is the permanency, collectedness and filtered nature of
it; the
> place is just for those who only want to see Your postings and comments are
> quite clearly separated out.
>

Wot Melissa says. I love Laurie R. King's blog, partly because she's a
fascinating woman, partly because I enjoy her discussions on politics and
her observations of the world around her, and partly because we get to
know what she's *writing*. So too with Melissa Scott. While hearing about
the sad death of her partner was horrible, it's been good to see her
getting on with things (and have an understanding of why not much fiction
writing has been going on!).

While L/J is a subset of blogging, I think of it as a place for community
interaction as much as posting one's rants. So, for someone who is going
to be posting as mainly their professional self, who is not going to be
necessarily wanting to "friend" people (and thus keep tabs of all their
rants as well), or participate in the community journals, then I wouldn't
think that LiveJournal would be necessarily the best place.

What's probably more in the line is a place where one can write posts,
have them categorised/tagged and archived chronologically, allow people to
comment, and get RSS feeds. So, more of a one-to-many form of
communication, rather than a many-to-many.

There are plenty of hosted places where you can place a blog. Laurie R.
King is on Blogspot, which is free. I'd only call it "adequate", since you
can't tag posts, and the interface looks like crap.

Wordpress.com is an excellent blogging site, again free, and it has a ton
of nice features. http://wordpress.com/features/ Thoroughly recommended.
You can pay to have custom formatting applied to the blog, but the
built-in templates are reasonably decent. Typepad is also nice, but there
is a small cost per month.

Of course, you can have blogs hosted on your own site. Wordpress release
their blogging software for free, and it can be installed on any webserver
that runs PHP and the MySQL database server. It's a doddle to install.
Typo is another blogging engine, this time using Ruby on Rails for its
code, as well as any SQL backend database.

The nice thing for me is that all of these blogs can be subscribed to via
their newsfeeds, and for the L/Jers, we can get a feed published there as
well.

So, pllllleeeease consider a blog. But ONLY IF fiction writing can happen
as well! :-) One advantage of it would be there would be no need to
publish multiple announcements of news and pimping in different areas - if
there is the one place to go for that info, that is where we would be
looking.

Also, I have had thoughts about the layout of Dendarii.com myself, since I
can find it hard to locate things sometimes. I'll have another look and a
ruminate.