josephdunphy's Xanga

Why I stopped posting here

Sat, 25 Jun 2011 19:24:57 GMT

Site statistics indicate that somebody is reading my scribblings, so somebody might wonder why I stopped posting. In part, because I was busy, in part because this is a blog I write about what I'm doing with my other blogs (so there's a natural built-in delay), but mainly because Xanga has chosen to be a bad place to blog.

You need only look at the title atop my blog to see what was my first source of annoyance - being unable to set the title on my own blog, without having to give up my ability to customize its look and feel. What, aside from a desire to aggravate the user, is the point of that? But we move on to things worse than that. Take a look at today's top idea. The user, with a lot of support from her peers, has asked that the blogs of users who haven't been around for a while, maybe because they're off living their lives, be destroyed, the writing and work on them wiped out, because she wants to have the staff take the usernames away from those people, and give them to her, and other, likeminded spoiled brats. Kind of like going up to the city, and asking that somebody else's home be torn down, because she'd like to have the guy's address. There are plenty of usernames at Xanga available, and if you do the Math, you'll see that there will be plenty for some time to come, but she wants what she wants when she wants it, and with other a thousand users backing her up, this service that is willing to put everything to a vote might just give it to her.

Yes, this has been pending for a few years, but that speaks to a lack of motivation on the part of the staff, not to the presence of any common sense, and "common sense" is the applicable phrase, in this case. People read old blog posts, just like they read old books, and being read is the point of blogging. While obviously one doesn't want one's blog to wait a hundred years to find a reader, those latter day readers are still an audience, and they are still valued. A blog that is going to be knocked down the moment one is away for a while is a blog that is denied that latter day readership, and yes, that is a big deal from the blogger's point of view, if he is at all serious about what he is doing. From an economic point of view, the proposal is insane - diskspace already only cost 1/4 of a cent per Meg toward the end of the last century, and has been coming down in cost, ever since. The provider that goes along with such a request is telling its users to accept that many long hours of their work might go up in smoke the moment they stop working those many long hours, without pay, so that the staff can free up what almost certainly will never be as much as a dollar of diskspace, which would be 26,400 pages of writing, even at the elevated costs of the last century, and far more than that, now. Users will be, and should be, highly offended by such an idea. It is outrageous.

The conclusion I came to, a few years ago, after noticing that the Xanga staff wasn't willing to publicly reject this idea and give assurances that it wouldn't be acted on, was that to establish much of a presence on Xanga, on the terms we were facing, would be foolish, and that as young as my blog was, that I could act on this observation in a timely manner. Livejournal turned out to be a disappointment, itself, given its continuing tradition of censorship, but while I was over there, I got an invitation to the far superior deadjournal, where I am today. My blog is here:

http://joseph-dunphy.deadjournal.com/

The functionality is not all that I would wish it to be. I can only put five links in the sidebar, and have no way of entering code there, being forced to route my visitors through an ugly, standard livejournal format profile, if I wish to share more links with those visitors, which I do. I can not upload images to Deadjournal, still having to remotely host them elsewhere, and can't embed videos. But I can also, within the limits of the law, write as I wish, because the one guy who runs Deadjournal as a labor of love is willing to tell those who (like the writer of the proposal I linked to above) have decided to scream until they get what they want, to grow up and go away. Throwing a temper tantrum, and telling the owner that you're going to hold your breath until you're blue in the face if he doesn't delete content that you don't like, just won't get you anywhere with him, if past performance is any guide. As much as I miss the photo uploading and video embedding, the lack of censorship more than makes up for those two deficiencies and more, especially since the guy is running his service out of pocket, so let's give the guy a break? And indeed, we, his users, seem to do just that. He is doing his best by us, and we appreciate that.

Xanga can not say the same. Take a look at the code on your most recent posts, taking a close look at your outbound links. Notice how Xanga has slipped rel=nofollow in, on the sly? You don't see it when you edit your posts. You have to unrender your own page to find it, meaning while this will hurt you, grievously, in the search engine ranking, it wouldn't deter spammers, even if spammer were deterred by nofollow (which history suggests that they are not), because the spammers won't generally notice it. How many people go sifting through code? Xanga is going to harm its own users, just for the sake of proving that it can do so, and then refuse to listen when its users want to talk about the issue. How obnoxious is that? And it's been going on for a few years.

This is why I never made a serious effort to establish a real presence on Xanga, and have no current plans to do so, ever. valuing them, as a service, would be a strange choice on my part, when they so clearly do not value me, or apparently anybody else, as a user. I miss the look and feel of the templates available on the service, which can be customized with relatively little work. In terms of the beauty of one's site, if one overlooks the ugliness of the title on top, Xanga has no serious competitors that I know of, not even Blogger. But the price to be paid for that beauty is much too high, and so I settle for the humbler look offered by a more pleasant provider. If Xanga wants me, and so many other users, back, it can win us back by treating us better, but the company seems unwilling to do so, so for the forseeable future, Deadjournal is where this blog is going to be.

http://joseph-dunphy.deadjournal.com/

You know what? Deadjournal's been good to me. Even if Xanga does clean up its act, Stumbling in the Void will stay on Deadjournal as long as it can. But, if a miracle happens, I guess I'll find a new use for my Xanga blog. But miracles don't happen very often. That's why they seem so miraculous when they do.

My True Love is Legion

Fri, 21 Nov 2008 05:15:26 GMT

I never knew that I could be so darned irresistable, but I guess I must be, because women all over the planet are expressing their undying love for me with one voice. In fact, they're sending the same letter. Repeatedly, and from different accounts.

"Hello Dear,"

Oh, do call me "snookums" !

"I saw your profile today in this site (www.my.mashable.com)

On which little was to be found but my Yelp and StumbleUpon reviews, but I can see why that would arouse your interest, especially when you came to the Jazz anthology review, because Yiddish has long been known to be the most sensual of languages. "You're an unemployed engineer AND you watch Futurama - and you're not taken?" I know, I know, it amazes me, too.

"and i stopped to take a very good look at it."

Maybe not that good a look.

"I want you to know that i will be intrested to know you better because you sounded very sweet in your profile and i will like us to become friends and know each other the more."

You mean, like on my review of the Third Coast of whose service I wrote "but the kindest word that can be honestly applied to the service is 'uneven'; at times, I would use the word 'psychotic'. I still remember the server who was so angry that I'd ask for a spoon to stir my iced coffee with, that he threw it at me, ..." Yes, the love shows through.

"Here is my email address (address deleted) send me an email today please!
Yours forever,
kate."

Gosh, I don't know what to say. May I call you Katie Bear?

"(Remember that distance,age or colour does not matter in a real relationship but love matters alot)."

Enough that surely, later on, when one has established an online relationship with this new pen pal, one will surely be willing to send Katie some money to help take care of her poor sick grandfather, or save the family farm, or ... get the picture? Say hello to our old friend, the confidence man, who sees great promise in his fellow man and even greater promise in the anonymity offered him by the Internet, and the hope of consequence free grifting it offers.

"I am waiting for your reply now"

I think you just got it, "Kate".

AFTERMATH, 12:28 Chicago Time: Alas, my love was not true to me, for "she" proclaimed herself to be "yours forever" to many, oh so many users on Mashable, as one can see by visiting her Mashable Profile.

What a suprise. All I can do, now, is go out and drown my sorrows in caffeine, and find solace in the thought that the better man (or woman) has won my Katie's heart. If that is "her" real name.

Posted on my Tribe blog on Saturday, February 23, 2008 at 9:31 AM

JacksonPollock.org Post on StumbleUpon

Fri, 21 Nov 2008 05:06:05 GMT

Reference : http://josephdunphy.stumbleupon.com/review/15294215/

Note: Readers might note that I'm having them on, at least a little. Note the level of symmetry in a highly nonhomogenized field on view, in which the actual patches of color are sizable and not insanely numerous. What are the odds that, by the pure chance that I was pretending to rely on, that in all colors appearing on the screen, the patches would appear in so close to a symmerical manner, as one sees them to be doing when one cuts each picture both along the horizontal and vertical? No, that's not an accident.

But is this art?

Originally posted on Wednesday, February 20, 2008 at 4:00 PM on Tribe

Huh?

Fri, 21 Nov 2008 04:41:43 GMT

I've abandoned the notion of making this journal a theatrical blog, having found another purpose for it, a mildly urgent one considering the visible ill health of another provider.

Why is my StumbleUpon blog named The Void? As I've tried to develop my own style, I think that my use of negative space has been one of the more effective changes that I've put in place, and that thought suggested the name.

This will, in part, be a metablog, on which I comment on what I'm doing on my StumbleUpon site (hence the name) and other review sites.

The comments above originally posted to a Tribe.net blog of mine entitled "Stumbling into the Void" on Wednesday, February 20, 2008 at 4 pm. My Stumbleupon blog has since been renamed the Abyss because having the name of one of my blogs being a string within the name of another one of my other blogs seemed kind of lame. The name "the Abyss" still fits for a few reasons which I've already decided on, and which I hope will become clear to anybody following that blog.

This site has become a temporary resting place of sorts for Stumbling into the Void - let's say it's SITV in beta. Tribe has become extremely unsatisfactory as a host, experiencing far too much downtime and being much too troll friendly, with little functionality as a blogging platform even when it is working. I needed a new place for my posts. The service would have to be one whose feed included the entirety of one's posts, which would seem to eliminate almost every service other than Uber.com, Blogger and Xanga. This was necessary so I could run my posts on my Tribe profile, without the Tribe profile looking strange. What I wanted was for the profile to look as much as it did before the change, as possible, so much so that one would barely notice that anything had changed at all.

At the time of this writing, Uber.com has been down for a month, and given earlier announcements of impending bankruptcy, would seem to have entered the dead pool. I already have blogs at Blogger, so by elimination, that leaves us with Xanga, and so here it is - within limits. We still have the issue of the user not being able to choose the name for his own blog, leaving us with the shoddy looking title you see above, if you're viewing this on Xanga: josephdunphy's Xanga Site.

I'm never going to view any site on which I have that kind of unreasonable limitation on my creative freedom as being anything other than a sandbox, as I currently understand the term. I'll play around with the blog a little, probably leaving the original posts here, but when the blog gets going and takes on that personality of its own that I've been speaking of - I'll find a host with more functionality, and move the action over there. This might not be for a while, but eventually, that is what I will do, assuming that I continue on with this blog.

The next two posts will be reposts from my soon to be shut down tribe blog, and then new material will follow.

They like me, they really like me ...

Sat, 29 Mar 2008 21:50:39 GMT

How can one not be moved, even if one has been a little preoccupied lately, when one reads something like this?

"Hey joseph_dunphy - We've missed ya!
We've really missed reading your blog. We've been taking care of all your weblogs, photos, and other posts for you.
Sign back in to relive the memories..."

Sounds good, and no, I haven't been ignoring Xanga. I merely haven't gotten around to Xanga, yet. Sounds like I'm not valuing my membership? Quite the contrary. I'm valuing it enough to be sure to make it meaningful.

A few months ago, not so long ago as it feels, I started looking into social networking sites other than Blogger, and found myself presented with a wealth of resources, each of which I'm exploring as time allows. While I suppose that I could test my readers' patience (assuming I have any of those) by periodically saying "and I'll be blogging here this week, and there the next", I had something much different in mind. I'd like each site I work on to be distinctively its own place, with its own purpose and character, and character is not something that can rush into existence. I've taken a leisurely pace, allowing each site to define itself over time. The Abyss (my StumbleUpon blog) is sort of my online playground, on which I encounter new sites, and maybe not just tell you what I think about them, but play around with and sometimes build on what I see on them, letting myself be taken in unfamiliar directions in the process. Monday Never Comes is where I go to be a Centrist, and Darkroom Without Shadows (my DeviantArt page) easily defines itself, given the nature of the service. But what was my Xanga page about? That I had to think about, and having thought about it, I found that I had some work to do, in the real world, for what I wanted to do to become practical.

I had thought of it as being a place to post and discuss my amateur efforts at art, the journal at DeviantArt being as unsatisfactory for that purpose as it is. (I like the community, but the site offers no feed for our blogs, and doesn't allow us to embed images into the text). I might do some of that, but I'm leaning more toward this becoming an amateur theatrical journal, which is where the real life work comes in - where am I going to find the other players? Where we'd perform is simpler - outside, most likely, when weather permits, stage space being as costly as it is, and many of us being as poor as we are. But finding those who are interested, with that special condition I set ("that they not be unpleasantly insane") is not easy. There is that awkward moment when the first person shows up, and it's just the two of you, and I have never been very outgoing in general. Getting past that first moment is difficult, and that is what I am working on at the moment.

Aside from that, I'll just see what this place becomes.

Playing over on DeviantArt

Thu, 06 Dec 2007 07:50:46 GMT

Photography or at least something that started out as that. I was having a little fun with an image:

Forest Light by ~josephdunphy on deviant ART

Dullsville USA

Fri, 23 Nov 2007 15:11:01 GMT

Nothing much, yet. Still at the "registering and setting up my sites" phase. Yes, very dull, I know, but it gets more interesting from here, I promise.

BTW, should I be concerned about the fact that I have no pulse? That's usually not a good sign.