New members, and using drafts

We have a few new people on board. Most of them are lurking, but at least one is posting...

Say Hi to Jack, everyone. ; )

When you utilize the draft functionality of Blogspot, be mindful of the date on your post. If you write a post and save it as a draft, you are saving that post -with the date-. So if you draft up something on the 6th, then go back two days later and finish it on the 8th and post it to the blog, it will still have the date of the 6th "attached" to it. If people have posted anything since the 6th, your shiny new post won't be at the top.

New posts not being at the top usually is not a problem, as all the posts "at the top" are "new". But if there is more than a few days lag between your draft and when you post it ( and you don't update the date ) then your post might get missed.

And that would Bite. thank you again, Blogspot.

If this doesn't make sense, email me and I'll explain it better : ) If you notice when you post something that it doesn't go to the top, let me know, and I'll fix it.


I mention this because Jack's first post was drafted on the 6th, but posted today. It is not on top, so it seems like it's "missing".

Bleh.

And welcome, Jack. : )

bios up

I added the bios we have so far to the "This is who we are" link. As I get more, I'll add them.

Quiet times here, last few days.

more changes along the side

You may have noticed that the list on the left is getting kinda long, and will only get longer. I'm redoing the navigation along the side, just putting a link that leads to a page with stuff, as opposed to writing all of it out along the side. The items/links on the left side will be:

The monkey picture : )

Who we are

( will link to a page with a description of, well, who we are. As a group and individually, maybe. )

About the blog

( A little bit about how to bounce around, what to look for, and what we post here. )

Essays by author

( a list of us, and stuff we've done. Pretty much the list you see now to the left )

Essays by topic

( I'll repost the topic description, along with a link list leading to people who submitted )


The archive dropdown and the email address thingy at the bottom will still be there.


A few questions:

We're growing a little, and maybe everyone doesn't know everyone, or maybe spelling out a little bit might be good for people who visit the blog but don't post. I was thinking about putting a bit about each of us, somewhere; a paragraph that introduces each one of us. This might be helpful to associate names with what we're doing. We'd write our own paragraph, of course. Any thoughts on this?

Any thoughts about how things are going, here? Something you'd like to see, or something you think we should do, or not do? Hemp and I have been tweaking things, managing as we get up and running, but if you have any ideas or questions, I'd love to hear them. If not, that's cool. It will be all done off the top of our heads.

; )

Some ideas

Now that our group is getting bigger and we're writing a bit more, maybe a few suggestions are in order...

Tags
When you write a post ( not a comment ) there's a field at the bottom below where you type the post in; it's called "labels for this post". When you write a post, you should at least label it with your name, and what it's about. If it's a project/assignment put the word "item" in there. The tags are what the search functionality keys off of... so what you want the post to be found for in a search should go in the tag list.

Project topics
To keep things a bit orderly, an idea would be to only post the new project assignments on Monday. A week for each topic seems to feel right, I think.

Feedback
Of course no one has to post anything... but most of the time most people do. Read that, and if you have some time, comment on it. Comments help everyone, if only showing that you read what they took the time to write. Mention something that you liked, something that stuck out as odd, or something that you have a question about.

Stuff besides assignments
If there's something on your mind about writing, or about the current project, feel free to post about it. It's not a blog about assignments... it's a community around writing. Share what's on your mind.


More later, probably. : )

Welcome, welcome

We have two new members... they have posted comments to the blog, and helped with editing, so it was natural to extend an invitation. I am excited that we're growing into an actual community, of sorts.

I'm not sure if they'll use their first names or some kinda nickname, so I won't name them here. I'll leave it to the two of them to introduce themselves.

Which they should, of course. We all should, now.

: )

next week's topic

I don't care much about the fiction/nonfiction boundaries -- any good exercise should really work for both (besides, obviously, those genres which can not exist in one or the other), and it should be up to the writer to alternate between the two (for example, if for "sin" I had written about the greed of, oh, I don't know, the CEO of Enron -- obviously I'd have to fictionalize some of it, but it would've still fallen well within scope of the exercise).

I personally hate research, so I'll avoid non-fiction as much as possible ;)

Anyways, I do think certain exercises are more fun than others, and after several weeks of essentially "write a short story," we'll change things up a bit. Everyone knows about Hemingway's six word story?

Well, I think six words is not enough, but I love the concept. So, this week, we'll use fourteen (twice one more than six, chosen mostly at random). Tell me a story in fourteen words. And have fun with it, kay? If more than one pops up, go right ahead -- they're short, so theoretically they should be easy, right? (right? Riiiiight?) Also, these can be non-fiction (see Shatner's six word story) too, if you're clever enough.

edit: because they're so damn fun, I demand five stories each. Please?

Essays, now up front

The completed essays/projects are now in handy link form, along the left side of the blog. Just scroll down and look to the left; there's a section marked "Essays" and a project/author list.

The ordering is chronological, of course.

Blogger: starting to make my balls ache

The idea that blogger is free and takes less time to set up that it would to read this post is pretty cool. But I am running into some limitations that are starting to bug me.

There's no way to notify all members of all postings -and- comments. You can subscribe to the RSS feed ( real easy, right? heh ) and the new topics will be listed, although you have to look for them. But the comments... forget it. You can't subscribe to a post and get notified when someone comments. You can't subscribe to an author, and get notified when that person posts anything.

Search Sucks Much Ass. I tag most post to enable an easy search. For example, all the essays are tagged with the word "item" and the authors name. In theory this should mean that when you type in the word "item" in the little search thingy you'd get back a list of all posts that include that tag. You don't. This is all the more frustrating because Blogger is owned and operated by Google; You'd figure "search" would be something they'd have down.

No post-trimming. Some blogs you see have about a aragraphs or two as a default, then a little "more..." link at the bottom. This fits more posts on a page, and makes reading the blog as a whole much more manageable. Especially when our posts are long ( like the essays ). Can't do this with Blogger, either.

And so on.

I have a TypePad subscription for my professional blog, although I don't know if it bends and stretches as I would like. Also, the url would change. Also, not sure if I could export what we already have by hand.

The blog as we have it here will do... but I recognize that the above issues are a pain. I'm working on fixing/hacking the ones I can, and I'm always open to adivce or suggestions of other blogging solutions.

Ack.

editing, anyone?

I am a horrible editor of my own work; I have help from two very talented people in this, Tammy and Steph.

Thank you both. You rock, and I owe you cookies. Or something.


P

Subscribe to this blog, and get all the updates auto-magically

Down at the very bottom of this page, there's a permanent link that reads:

Subscribe to: Posts ( Atom )

Click that link, and you can either subscribe via RSS or add a link to your FireFox toolbar ( just under where the url shows ) that you can click on and see what's been posted.

I'm working on a way to let people who opt in know that a comment's been posted somewhere. Stay tuned.

Heh

rung bell

Well, one of us rung the bell, and won't be contributing... at least for a while.

Sad, but not exactly unexpected. I have strong hopes for all of us, and I'll keep at it. For me, the regularity and the discipline of getting each thing done seems to be an important thing to keep up.

Just like anything in life, if something's important, you make time for it. Not everything can be important, and that's fine... we have to triage the crap in our lives; but with luck, it's the important stuff that bubbles up to the top, and not the garbage.

One week, post GenCon.

New assignment Monday morning; last week's writing is due.

published or posted work

If you have published work or stuff that's posted somewhere besides this blog, talk about it here. Do a posting on it, and provide a link so we can go see it if we want.

Drafts?

So, do we post drafts, or is that too painful, and only finished essays are posted?

Anyone? Bueller...?

We few, we hapy few. Er, "happy"

"
...Strange that you were strong enough
To even make a start
But you'll never find
Peace of mind
Till you listen to your heart
"

This is a blog were a few of us get together and write, right?

Right.