14 September 2012

Historical note

The Sideshow was begun in mid-November of 2001, was designed on Notepad (although now I use the far-superior TextPad), and has been hand-coded throughout its tenure, hosted on my own web space.

Eventually, a comment widget from Haloscan was added by popular request, which worked out fine for a while until Haloscan was gobbled up by JS-Kit, who wanted money and also provided a crummy service called Echo. Then they jacked up the price to ridiculous proportions. I'm sure this convinced a lot of other bloggers to switch over to another method entirely, but for me it has mostly entailed private grumbling and the recognition that I was going to have to move to Blogger.

With the notice recently appearing at the top of the Echo comment threads to the effect that "This commenting widget will be discontinued on October 1st, 2012," the time has come, starting on that date.

My plan is to continue to write posts in TextPad and preserve them on disk, but post them here. This doesn't mean they will be any cleaner - typoes and mindoes will undoubtedly continue - and I don't like giving up total control, but that's life. Right now I'm just trying to figure out how to get control of general appearance and blogroll.

The Sideshow archives will remain where they are until...well, something else happens that makes me do otherwise.

- Avedon Carol



12 comments:

  1. Looks very... same. :)

    FYI - and you can delete this comment or whatever - I ran into formatting issues with Google blogger posts even when writing on notepad (though without great html skills). My solution was to use MS' Windows Live Writer. This includes the option to edit a post days after publishing it.

    The downside? When I forget and try to edit directly in blogger, I lose all my paragraph spaces - go figure.

    Oh, the other thing to know is that if you post pics - which you mostly don't - they get stored as 'public with link' on Picasa (sp?), and will re-emerge, unbidden and out of context on your Google+ profile (if you go that route).

    Mostly, tho, I've enjoyed blogger. I just don't write or edit posts there anymore.

    Best wishes. :)

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  2. Thanks. I haven't found where to post pictures yet - can you give me a clue? (Generally I have just uploaded them on my own webspace, or put them on flickr, and linked to them there.)

    I've already noticed formatting issues... will have to keep an eye on that, but I think I will find some way to deal with it. ;)

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  3. It could be worse. With a bit of luck the astroturf types won't find you until after the election

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  4. Welcome! And I see your full blogrolls are here! Excellent.

    Let me see if I can find how to get to Picasa. I think I just use the image button, but I don't post pictures often enough to remember.

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  5. You're a better steward of your blog than I was. I have three separate data bases laying around that are all that remains of the first three iterations of my blog.

    Always a good read and I'll gladly follow you to Blogger.

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  6. Welcome to the wonderful world of Bleh-ger. We will follow you anywhere. :-)

    BTW, on a sort of side note but related to following, I noted a few weeks ago that you mentioned how taking the stands you did on Obama-related things like Obamacare cost you a lot of readers. I'll just take this opening to mention that I became a regular reader precisely because of those stands.

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    1. Clearly, what I lost in quantity I made up for in quality. ;)

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  7. Try https://picasaweb.google.com when you're signed in; that should take you to the image hosting service which does not seem to be directly linked to blogger, the rats.

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  8. Link updated on MercRising.

    Welcome to Blogger. Sorry we couldn't talk you into Wordpress.

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  9. I don't think I've hand coded Anything Since, which is about how long I've haunted these hallowed halls.

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