I figured I'd try doing some regular blogging instead of the essays I was used to. The idea is to make it easier for me — what usually happens is I get to Wednesday night and start hammering away at trying to write something coherent. I think it might be easier to dump my thoughts into a blog and let the chronology sort it out.
So, at the advice of my friend Mike, I'm trying to use WordPress. Right now I have it set up to just insert blog entries into the old JayceLand page in place of an introductory essay, but I think I'll soon be changing the site over to more of a WordPress-centric design.
The other thing I did was to quit the titles. Now it's just the start-date of the events calendar. When I first started, I was using movie sequel numbers to match the update number, but they petered out around 9 or so. Then there were various common things like 39 being the width of a twin bed in inches. But that soon ran dry as well. Most of the recent titles have been in reference to events that happened that many years ago. But searching for an event, birth, or death that definitively occurred in a particular year before 1550 or so is getting to be a royal pain. So, I figured I'd give up on it.
Basically, this should all be easier for me. For you reading the site, well, I think there may be more blog entries (with categories) and I suppose there's feeds, permalinks, and comments and other such technology. Of course, the titles go the way of the dodo and there will no longer be a proper essay — so no longer neatly joining the events of the past week together.
Egads. What happened? I rely on Jayceland!! I read it every week!!! What happened? Where are the Weekly archives? Where is the current Week? Please change back to the old format! Please don't stop the weekly listings!
Oops! I'm still working through the bugs of trying to allow WordPress to work and at the same time not trample the old site. (For those who didn't see, Sammy got the blog home page rather than the regular JayceLand page.)
It's about time! For all these years, i've wanted comment on posts, but could not in a coherent fashion without a comment mechanism, trackback, or even permalinks to the specific post until the following week! By then i no longer either cared or could remember what i meant to post. I suggested use blogging tools, and specifically as opensource, WordPress, but all i heard back was, 'I don't care if others don't find it useful. It's just for me and for events i want to track.†For a un/blog Jayceland slid toward worst practices.
Now, bring the calendar up-to-standards with microformats and hCalendar!
If you mean "worst practices" as in "snappy and responsive on old computers" then yes, guilty as charged.
I installed WordPress for me — so it's easier for me to compose the weekly essay and so I could have a blog under my own control. But thanks for trying to claim that it was your influence.
And instead of barking orders at people to try and force them to do things for you, perhaps it would be better and less frustrating for you to run your own calendar.
Hmm, i usually dislike smiley emoticons, but i think whatever tongue-in-cheekiness i had got lost in translation.
I see …
Okay, seriously now, i actually do run calendars, but not all necessarily my own, for example, along the sidebar of my online vitae, and socially networked sites such as facebook, Upcoming, Last.fm. In addition, i try to maintain the Rochester Wiki guide to local calendars. The point here is not so much to run my own calendar for others event, but to help people find events otherwise not easily found via search, and to encourage the propagation of events through social networks, like they do through word-of-mouth, rather than through top-down advertising. I had thought you would like such appropriate uses of technology for supporting grass-roots and independent projects and would have long adopted them.
My eventual goal is to make a calendar site that meets both ends of the deal. All your solutions offer is a way for people who collect information to collect it more easily. The other side, though, is easy entry. Bobby T. at the Bug Jar (or, as last I knew, Rob) has a hard enough time getting their events posted on their own website. To ask them to migrate to the tool-of-the-day — be it Yahoo! Calendar, Google, iCal, or whatever — is just more work and therefore more resistance.
If they could send an e-mail to some address, for instance, with a message like "11/10 Quitters, Hinkley" and have it interpret that to mean that "The QUiTTERS (of Rochester, not Boston) and Hinkley will be playing at the Bug Jar on Saturday November 10, 2007. Doors at 9:30 p.m., 21-and-over, $6 cover" then they might be interested. Now to me that would be a tool. I've got a bunch of other ideas for it, but so far open standards have only really helped the end-user of the data, not the person responsible for it. Unless, of course, they are well-versed on the technical end.
So, if I'm going to bother changing JayceLand at all to support such standards, I want to do it all the way and set up an architecture to do it right. WordPress solved the headache of "crap, now it's Wednesday and I need to crank out some kind of an essay." It also helped resolve updating of the archive page as that's now done mostly automatically. I can see the elements I've been adding to make it useful to let me do updates easier as well.
Next is the calendar stuff. The next big hurdle is looking at some 45 Rochester calendars and plucking what I want. I'd rather have that be easier for me to do myself, then to open it for others to add events, and then — using those swell standards — to make it easier for me to pick what I want to do that week.