Really, why do I try?

In all my years of blogging, the post that got the most comments was the simple question "Am I the only one who still thinks of unlined paper as 'typing paper?'"

Today on Twitter, I repeated someone else's mild joke about President's Day and, so far, I've had fifty favorites and retweets, by far the most I've had for anything I've ever said.

Instead of spending all this time researching a book, I should have just gone on social media, written "So, what's the deal with mammoths?" and appended a hashtag for Jerry Seinfeld. It would have instantly made me Mr. Mammoth throughout the internet and gotten me an appearance on the Tonight Show and a fifteen minute NPR feature.

The Stupid Files, part 2

I'm a big fan of Tea Party Cat on Facebook and Twitter. For a few months now, she (cats are all girls, right?) has been giving us "Asshole of the Day" inductees. When there are multiple candidates for AotD, I always take time to carefully consider each candidate's contribution and vote. In a few short months I've Tea Party Cat go from a tweet, to a tweet and an FB page, to two tweets and FB pages to a blog, to a http://winkprogress.com/  I've supported TPC every step of the way. This morning, while inducting Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA) into "The Stupid Files," it occurred to me that I have a blog, I have a twitter account, I have an FB page, and I have a recurring political meme with humorous and outrage du jour potential. Maybe, I thought, maybe I could write up a small blog post for each inductee and, like, let you all know what I'm doing. Then I'd post it on Twitter and FB and become as popular as TPC*.

So here's the deal: as I see it, the only thing that my "Asshole of the Day" has over "The Stupid Files" is a catchy logo stolen from Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. I need a logo**. Send me your suggestions, either as an actual image or as something within my artistic abilities to create. Ideally, the image should be simple enough to make into a Twitter icon. I'll post your suggestions here and we'll have a contest to pick the winner.

Meanwhile, tomorrow I'll tell you why Rep. Rohrabacher made it into the Stupid Files.

* Yes, I realize this part is sad, sad self-delusion. Humor me.
** My catch phrase will be "The stupid is out there."

Today is a special day

I woke up this morning to find that it had snowed in the night. Not a lot, maybe a half or three quarters of an inch. This the only snow I've seen here this season. It's melting away and will probably be gone by dinner. The only real problem with the snow is that it took out the power. The computer has a good battery and I can get a wireless connection with my phone, so no problem there. But this has meant no stove and no stove means no coffee and that is problem. About a half hour ago, I couldn't stand it anymore and I went out to get a latte (a treat I very rarely allow myself). 

Oh yeah, today is also my tenth blogiversary. Maybe I'll fix something special for dinner.

Houston, we have comments

I had to get a new template to get new comments. But it didn't turn out that bad.

New Year's resolution

Fix the comments.

I gotta fix the template

Now that HaloScan is gone, I have no commenting system. My template is a very simple little thing that I whacked together nine years ago. I'm probably going to have to customize a Blogger template the get a new one with comments. That will give my a chance to update everything.

Speaking of which. I bought the domain name for Mammoth Tales, so I'm going to have to build a super snazzy site for the book and non-political blogging. I'd also like to add pages for things that don't fit in the book, such as my database of all the frozen mammoths ever found and documented.

I've now been blogging for nine years

Where's my check, Mr. Soros?

We made the big time

My latest mammothy post is being published in Scientific American's guest blogger series, today. It's a little mystery story about a small drawing of an elephant on a Renaissance map. It's distantly related to a post from this spring. The connection will become more obvious in a few weeks when I publish my third post on the mammoth-walrus-sea monster confusion. Until then, go over to Scientific American and enjoy their bloggy goodness.

Rerun season

We might have some sciency visitors today, so I'm going to repeat a few older posts for their enjoyment. I hope you regular readers enjoy them, too.

I've just been Borazed

It's kind of like being Pharangulated, but it doesn't sound quite as dirty.

Welcome everyone.

I've been thinking of giving up blogging

My frequency of posting has been declining for months now till it's not unusual for me to go a week or two without a word. Three things account for this. First, I've been trying to get more work done on the book. I've been making some big changes to it and writing some big chunks that don't lend themselves to blogging. Second, is despair. This blog has always been most of all a political/current events blog. These days, when I look at the world, I'm either pissed into incoherency or depressed into silence. Third, is my experiment in social media. A year and a half ago, I let myself be talked into Facebook, then Twitter (@archymck), and now I have a Google+ account. These are enormous time wasters but also replacements for blogging. Many of the things I might once have posted about, I now simply link to from one of those sites.

Which brings me back to blogging. On Archy, I have never been one for posting links without commenting on a subject. I don't really like blogs that just say "Heh. link" and call it a post. I feel like I should add some value to my links. Otherwise, aren't I wasting your time by asking you to come to my blog? Yet, that's exactly what I've started doing on the social media sites. Of course, social media forces that practice by limiting posts to 140 or 450 characters. Lately, I've been chafing under those limits and feel the urge to expound on things in ways other than "what he said." Sometimes, I want to expound on things that no one has mentioned this week.

So, I think I'll keep blogging. I'll try to find a way to integrate blogging and social media. Maybe I'll put shorter posts on the blog or start things over there that I can finish over here. Maybe I'll write a manifesto and turn Archy into a world changing movement, sort of like a Glenn Beck rally, only sane. And baby animal pictures; I need to post more baby animal pictures.

Blogiversary

Well, look at that. I've been blogging for eight years.

Still not blogging

I was lucky enough to have some paying writing gigs this last few weeks. Along with working for Clever Wife, that has exhausted most of my productive energies for the time. This is good because it means we'll be able to pay the major bills next month (though we still don't have enough to cover day to day expenses like food). It looks like I have a few days before the next bit of work, so I'm rushing to finish something interesting for the blogs. Most of the newsy things I wanted to comment on are now out of date, but i have some mammoth and science things in the pipeline. Watch this space; I haven't forgotten you.

Lots of happenings

The biggest news is that my friend Bora Živcović, better known to many by his nom de blog, Coturnix, is leaving Scienceblogs as the latest casualty of l'affaire Pepsi. This is probabty the clearest sign that what started as an internal crisis at Seed Media Group is resulting in a permananent and major reorganization of the science blogging world. Bora has been the mother hen for a large chunk of the science blogging world, encouraging writers, herding the group around, and making peace. For the time being, he has moved the A Blog Around The Clock archives to a WordPress site. Bora has been a great support to my own blogging. I'll follow him wherever he goes.

Eric M. Johnson, another casualty of Pepsigate, has yet to find a home for his fine blog Primate Diaries. Several bloggers offered to let him guest blog on their sites if the urge to write hit him before he settled down. I'm pleased to say he took us up on it and that the first stop on the Primate Diaries in Exile Tour is at my blog (below), archy. If the title "Scientific Ethics and the Myth of Stalin's Ape-Man Superwarriors" doesn't perk your interest, I don't know what will.

Finally, it may not be the biggest story in the science blogging world, but it's the most personal for me: my all science and history blog, Mammoth Tales has been invited to join a group. Starting to day MT is part of the Southern Fried Science Network. It's still a little rough, I need to customize the template with some mammoth art, but it has all the posts from the old site and will soon have some new goodies. Go check it out and check out the SFSN blogs while you're there.

The usual apologies

Posting has been nonexistant for the last two weeks due to an eye injury. I've spent a lot of time laying in the dark with warm compresses on my face. My skin is clean and soft now and I can see as well as usual (which is so-so). That means I need to get back to work. I have some mammothy and non-mammothy things in the works. Stay tuned.

Yay me!

I seem to have missed my own blogiversary. Archy turned seven last week.

Not my favorite tool

Js-kit won't let me manage my comments because, it says, I don't have a blog. It also won't let me fix it. So far, their new Echo system is vastly inferior to the old Haloscan system. I plan to dump it at the first opportunity.

Cognitive daily closes shop

The premier psychology blog in the SciBlog borg, Cognitive Daily, just announced that today is their final day. Dave and Greta Munger began posting five years ago today and have been a constant source of interesting information and experiments/tests. I was lucky enough to meet Dave at ScienceOnline2010 this weekend (Greta always seemed to be on the other side of the room or talking to someone). Dave promises to keep a presence online with other projects, but Gerta plans to commit all of her time to her teaching job at Davidson College. That's good for her students, but bad for us. Get over there and say goodbye.

Mammoth Tales: the blog

I have been thinking for a while about starting another blog. I began to think about this as I read about the advantage of an online presence for promoting a book. My idea was not to create a blog only about the book, but one that was less political, more sciency, and to perhaps limit the smart-assery a bit (but only a bit). Everything I learned at the ScienceOnline2010 conference tells me this is the right way to go. The biggest lesson of the conference, in this respect, was "stop goofing off and get it on line." That said, I'm proud to present Mammoth Tales.

As I just said, Mammoth Tales will be less political and more sciency than archy. It will be less of an all purpose blog than archy. Still

In politics, my editorial policy will be to exclude politics that aren't relevant to the larger theme of the blog. Politics, like religion, can be a distraction from a business' primary purpose. How often do we hear conservatives complain about how a celebrity's off stage liberal politics ruin their enjoyment of that celebrity's performances? How often are non-believers turned off by businesses that advertise the owner's religion? I am very strongly opinionated in my politics. If you hadn't noticed that, go back over archy's with a carefully critical eye. I don't want to unnecessarily annoy my other audiences.

It is not my intention for Mammoth Tales to be all mammoths all the time. I intend to use the site for anything I write that is related to science including science journalism, science education, history of science (and maybe a little plain old history). I plan to do more linking to stories that I find interesting, even if I don't have much to add to the stories. I also plan to us more capital letters in the titles.

For the time being, Mammoth Tales post will probably be not much more than a subset of archy posts. I'll cross post anything from archy that fits the editorial slant of the new blog. I'm thinking about a model in which I give some science news a short post in archy and a longer treatment in Mammoth Tales. We'll see how that works out. I plan to repost many of my old mammoth posts from archy and add updates to a few. I hope that makes it interesting enough that archy readers will want to check out both blogs from time to time and, on occasion, flip back and forth between the two driving up the hit meter on both.

Finally, be patient, the new blog isn't very pretty yet (it is nothing more than an off the shelf Blogger template). I still need to populate the blogroll and make a compelling logo. That comes later. the important thing is to get the site up and running and to put some words on it for you to read. As the old cockroach wrote:

they
are always interested in technical
details when the main question is
whether the stuff is
literature or not

I hope it is.

More adventures in commenting

What I have learned so far:

Several useful features require a thirty six dollar upgrade.

I found something resembling end user documentation. It's a wiki and a set of FAQs. A lot of the information is out of date and none of it appears to have been written by native English speakers.

I can't find the comment moderation page. I've found a page that says "Moderation", but it's blank.

I figured out how to display a Gravitar, but it is not retroactive. The process is to click on the blank picture and get the picture from some other account. Today, at least, the connection time from Echo to those other services is over a minute.

In order to change the appearance of the comment page, I need to hack the code.

Changing the order of the comments from newest on top (their default) to oldest on top (the standard in almost all blogs I read) requires disabling one of the primary features of Echo (live comment updates) and hacking the code.

The only way to the code is to go to my Blogger template. I don't have a Blogger template; I have a homemade one. I have no idea where the Echo plug-in lives.

I may have to go back to my original plan of modifying a Blogger template to look and work the way I want it, and enabling Blogger comments.