Category Archives: Blogging

Design

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What but design of darkness to appall?–
If design govern in a thing so small. [link]

Welly, welly, welly, welly, welly, welly, well. …Welcome back. There were a few changes while you were gone.

Alex: Hey dad, there’s a strange fella sittin’ on the sofa munchy-wunching lomticks of toast.
Dad: That’s Joe. He lives here now. The lodger, that’s what he is. He rents your room.

Oh I do amuse myself. A bit of the old Robert Frost, and lines from A Clockwork Orange. That (1971) movie nearly ruined Beethoven for me. And milk. And spaghetti. But those are other stories.

I gave the old blogywog a touch of minimalism, which I hope makes it ever a bit more readable. Which is no guarantee that next week there won’t be a background of lumbering elephants and flatulent flamingos.

If you don’t like the new design, feel free to click here and say so.

Isn’t the plumage beautiful?

hey email subscribers

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A friendly reminder to folks to subscribe to Metaphor by email:

Use the links in the email to come to the real blog. Otherwise, you won’t see everything and you won’t see anything quite right. Videos, for example, don’t show up in the email at all.

The post titles and the word Metaphor at the top of the email are links, as in this image:

metaphor_links

(click to enlarge)

The subscription email is cool, but it’s really just a way to let you know there’s new content. It’s not substitute for all the amazement that is Metaphorical. Or something like that.

reminder to email subscribers

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If you subscribe to Metaphor via email, that’s great. Much obliged.

But don’t forget the email is to serve as a reminder to read the blog, and a general idea of the post/s of the day. It is not a real substitute.

The blog as hosted here at http://kylekimberlin.blogspot.com is fully formatted html, surpassingly beautiful. An unwavering study of its sublime mnmlizt design and trenchant insights will bring more tears to the critical eye than a bucket of onions mashed flat by a truck.

Besides, the email won’t have the occasional videos.

Accept no substitutes, is my point.

Use the links in the email to come hither and behold.

time flees

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In today’s Writer’s Almanac, we learn about the poet May Swenson, who said that poetry is, "based in a craving to get through the curtains of things as they appear, to things as they are, and then into the larger, wilder space of things as they are becoming. This ambition involves a paradox: an instinctive belief in the senses as exquisite tools for this investigation and, at the same time, a suspicion about their crudeness."

My first thought on hearing this (I get the podcast via iTunes) was oh, that’s going on the blog. Which immediately points out a recurring problem for me with the art and artifice of blogging; to wit, its capabilities for instant publishing. Whenever I think about blogging on a topic, I get in a hurry. Must type quickly and click Publish, before the furiously-spinning earth turns too much farther into the night.

The arrow of time has been launched, and we are flinging ourselves through space in pursuit of it. The concept that the sooner I type something up, the sooner I can instantly publish it, just makes that pursuit more frenetic.

Incidentally, the Latin phrase tempis fugit means time flees, not time flies, and not time is of the essence, though I suppose it’s all the same.

Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.
– Douglas Adams

So I am going for a walk, to step away from my cyclopean friend here and think about the possibly brilliant thing poet May Swenson said about poetry. Then I’ll decide if there is some annotation or explication I would like to contribute to it. In the mean time, I’m going to instantly publish this, to let you all know that process is taking place:

A bit of psychic Top Kill, if you will.

Ha! I got you. You thought I was going to forego instant publishing for a few minutes, did you? I’m sorry, Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that. It’s 2010, we are fleeing through space. And in space, no one can hear you think.

hal2

the eyes have it

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The lost poems, or the space of blogging – Sina Queyras – at Poetry Foundation:

But on a deep level I believe that no writing is wasted.  Cheesy it may be, but I believe in writing the way a runner believes in running: you do it daily, you take it seriously; you get your mileage in no matter where that “material” ends up, which often means the recycle bin. No matter though, even the discarded writing lives on in the shadows or textures of the writing to come…

I don't post my actual creative product very often, because there seems little interest in it. But I believe in writing the way a carver believes in rare wood. So for me blogging amounts to something more like draining the swamp so I can get across it to the old and haunted trees. Once I get there, every branch I cut is some small creature's home. I have to meet their eyes and show I'm keeping faith. Then writing becomes a kind of prayer.

A Blessing.

That being said, here's a shaving from the chapter I'm working on tonight.

            It was a squat brick building surrounded by greenery. We parked Mama’s Mercury behind it and sat while Dad took a long moment to open his door. He got Papa’s coat from the trunk. Bo and I flanked him as we walked, just a little behind him. It was ceremonial, the way we moved.        

            We approached the back door by a cement ramp lined with bloomless potted amaryllis and ferns. The door was recessed, indented, intended to be discreet, a passage where the dead could enter gliding on gurneys, without being seen from the road. So we stood shoulder to shoulder, side to side, surrounded by brick. I noticed our breathing. It was like being in church, when everyone stands to sing the Doxology. The organ plays and there is a pause, a hush, and an intake of breath as the organist lets her hands float up from the keys and brings them down again.*

In the Zen work Tenzo Kyokun, Dogen wrote:

When washing the rice, remove any sand you find. In doing so, do not lose even one grain of rice. When you look at the rice, see the sand at the same time; when you look at the sand, see also the rice. Examine both carefully.

Back in college, somebody told us something like this: A sentence is like a dog sled. Every dog in the team has to pull his share of the weight. 
 

*(c) 2010 by J. Kyle Kimberlin
all rights reserved

blogger got cooler

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Is cooler the right word in that context, meaning more cool? … Dudn’t matter.

I got an e-mail from Blogger a couple of days ago, and I just got around to reading it. They have a new template designer for Blogger blogs like this, with a vast shipload of new templates, layouts, and designs. I’m trying it out. You may see Metaphor adopt a few different designs in the coming days. Or not. It depends on how funny the commercials are, since that’s when I redesign the blog.

When these guys are on, forget about it.

Trouble seeing the video? Click here.

If you’re a Blogger blogger and you want to check out the new toys, go to draft.blogger.com/home, select Layout then click Template Designer and you’re good to go.

Yep, your e-mail subscriptions – and there are 3 times as many of you as the last time I checked [woohoo!] – are still good.

E-mail subscribers are reminded that the e-mail is a simplified samplification of the blog. Click the links in the e-mail to get Metaphor in full color blogovision.

Starting tonight, one can also follow Metaphor on Twitter, though I can’t say why you’d necessarily want to. The option was there, it’s free, I clicked it. Besides, President Barak Obama is following my tweets, so I must be all that, right?
 

bloody vikings

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I’ve been getting too much spam in Metaphor’s comments lately. To me, too much is any at all. It shall not stand.

I have 3 choices: limit who can post comments, moderate comments before they appear, or ask commenters to fill out one of those word verification forms.

I’ve tried blocking anonymous posts, but that confronts some real people. I’m already moderating older posts.
Before I go to moderating all posts, let’s try the word verification thing. I know, I don’t like them either. So let me know if it’s really annoying, OK?  You can send me an e-mail if that’s easier.

Hope everyone is having a peaceful, if not sunny, weekend.

Update: On second thought, I’m going with moderated comments. I visited some of my favorite blogspot-hosted blogs today and that’s what many of you are doing.

So fire when ready. 


get me stats, stat!

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This is very cool. As of last night, Metaphor has received 14000 visitors and counting. The blog had 450 visitors in February, and readership has climbed dramatically over the past few months. 125 visitors this week, and people are spending longer here to pause and read.

Thank you all very much!  I know there's an almost infinite selection out there, and I appreciate you making Metaphor one of the places where you alight.

design changed, again

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Metaphor has metamorphosed, new colors, new header, and it’s much wider on your screen. Hopefully this makes it more readable. Feel free to comment on the changes.

Also, there is a Follow Me button for Twitter. Maybe I’ll tweet a little, maybe not. I read an article that said Twitter is used now for serious news gathering and adult professional networking. I checked out the public timeline, and if that’s serious about anything but caffeine and teenage hormones, I’m a gold medal speed skater. But what do I know.

Update: Nope, Twitter is still at waste of time for me. Do not follow me, for I shall not lead. 

first thoughts on posterous

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I started using Posterous yesterday to post stuff. It’s a blogging site. I like it.

Wikipedia explains: Posterous is a simple blogging platform  started in May, 2009 funded by Y Combinator. It boasts integrated and automatic posting to other social media tools such as Flickr, Twitter, and Facebook, a built-in Google Analytics package, and custom themes.

Right. So I can post stuff to Metaphor, Flickr, YouTube, Facebook, etc. all by e-mail. I can post to one or some or all with one e-mail.

This is useful because I don’t have to hobble all over the place, launching text editors, tweaking fonts and paragraph breaks, etc. It’s really easy, and it works great. Plus it creates an additional blog called Kimberlin’s Posterous, which combines all those things I’ve shared.

I have hit a few snags. First, when I post to Facebook, it creates a simple post and puts it right where it should be. But if I have included a link, such as http://kimberlin.posterous.com, that link is not an active hyperlink. You cant click it and go. I guess you’d have to type or paste it into your browser. I sent an e-mail to their Help desk about this, so we’ll see.

I thought I would have a problem with the tags I use on Metaphor to create groups of posts with the same general topic, such as poems. There’s no way to specify a tag in the e-mail I use to post. And if I open the post on Blogger to add tags, it would create a lot of formatting work. But I learned that when I go to the list of posts on Blogger to edit, I can add tags any time, without opening the posts. Cool.

Lastly, there’s no way to add the “read more” break I like to put in long posts. That was something I really wanted, and Blogger finally added it. So that will get some thought.

So far, so good. 

oh blog me

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Today I tried out a little piece of software. It’s an add-on for Microsoft Word called Blogger for Word. Don’t’ bother clicking the link, the thing doesn’t work. It installed a toolbar in Word, but … you know … FAIL. 🙂

If it had worked as advertised, I would have been able to:

“…use Blogger right within Microsoft® Word. Just download and install the Blogger for Word add-in and a Blogger toolbar will be added to Word …”

This would be extremely cool. I like to use Word to write stuff, but whenever I want to write for Metaphor I have to use something less robust.

I wrote this post in Word, then pasted it into Windows Live Writer. It works great. Nice Preview feature. I can publish from here, but if for some reason I need to edit the post in Blogger, I’ll have to reformat the paragraphs. Why can’t we all just get along?

What I learned is that the product was never completed. It came out several years ago, then was discontinued. It was supposedly, “no longer available for download.” But obviously Google never took down the download site; it’s still sitting there, like something moldy and smelly in the back of the fridge.

Come to think of it, I seem to remember trying Blogger for Word several years ago, and it didn’t work then.

It’s not that it’s a big deal, it’s just indicative of the fact that we need the companies that are providing our tech goods and services to cooperate on some level. The people who make aftermarket stuff for cars make stuff to work in certain cars. Otherwise, their stuff wouldn’t sell, right?

Why are we tolerating so many disparities in our computing lives?

a quick note to e-mail subscribers

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The e-mail version is not the full presentation. It’s basically just the text, nicely presented by Feedburner, and links to the original content.

I sometimes post YouTube videos, photos, etc., and those will not show up in the e-mail you receive.

If the topic in the e-mail looks interesting, you might want to click the post title or the word Metaphor at the top of the e-mail. This will take you to the original blog.