mmmm…blogging

I am declaring May to be the Merry Merry Month of Metablogging.

Over the past few months, I’ve seen a change coming over the blogosphere. Bloggers are dropping out, frittering away. (Or perhaps just twittering away.) For many, the excitement over blogging has died down.

But I still really love blogging. For a couch potato with many interests like me, it’s the ultimate hobby. It’s been more than a hobby, though. It’s been a way of making connections with people, continuing conversations and expanding my horizons.

I know some people find blogging to be the most boring topic for blogging that there is. I’m not one of them. I’ve been quite fascinated by just about all topics bloggy. I like the blogging about the blogging. (I also like to use the word blogging.)

Whereas I know I really need to buckle down and get cracking with my work, I really want to get this out of my system. There have been loads of posts that I’ve wanted to write, but haven’t had the time. (Or when I find the time, I lack the focus and energy.) But the metablogging topics have continued to weigh on my mind.

For instance, I’ve wanted to share my take on, and my experiences with, these aspects of blogging:

• blogroll and linking
• commenting and discussion
• identity and image
• design and themes
• categories and tags
• traffic and readership
• memes and group projects
• popularity and rankings
• personal disclosure

Here are some of the questions I’ve also been thinking about:

• Why did you get started in blogging?
• What do you get out of blogging, and what do you want to get out of it?
• What advice would you give to a new blogger?
• What will be the future of pants posts?

Anyhow, my plan is to cover each of these topics (as many as I can get to) in a series of posts this month.

I’d really love it if other people would like to join in the conversation. If you have posts on blogging that you’d like to share (whether new or from your archives), let me know, and I’ll link them up.

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In other news, the April Just Posts are coming up. If you’ve read or written posts on a topic pertaining to social justice, please send your nominations to me or Holly. Want to learn more? Check out the Just Posts info page.

couldn’t resist

With my recent posting obsession, I couldn’t resist doing a wordle:

When I get on a roll, I get on a roll.

Now I just need to boost my pants frequency to get a new wordle.

socks fiend

Yes, it’s true. I’ve been thinking about socks all the time. I even have friends feeding my socks addiction.

I’m turning into a real socks fiend.

Even more shockingly, I left a number of important sock-related things of last week’s sock-themed ThThTh list:

• Let’s Talk About Socks: a George Michael song
• I Want Your Socks: another George Michael song. That dude was seriously into socks.
• Socks and Candy: A Marcy Playground song. Oh, man…what’s that smell?
• The Socks Pistols: an early British punk band known for such hits as “Knitting in the U.K.”
• Socks in the City: a TV show about some single socks looking for their mates. (Note: contains explicit laundry scenes.)
• Socks, Lies and Videotape: security tapes reviewed after a series of thefts at the laundromat
• The Opposite of Socks: A movie in which Christina Ricci comes of age and explores footwear alternatives
• Socks on the Beach: an unpleasant footwear decision leading to much sand being collected between the toes. Also a fairly obscure and unpopular cocktail.
• A Midsummer Night’s Socks Comedy: a movie about people who wear socks with their sandals
• socks education: high school classes in which kids learn about foot anatomy and the consequences of socks. (Don’t forget the importance of safe socks!)
• socks maniac: one who just can’t get enough socks
• the fairer socks: should be washed separately from the darker socks
• casual socks: shouldn’t be worn to a formal occasion
• socks scandal: what may happen if you choose the wrong socks for the occasion
• The Second Socks: Simone de Beauvoir’s less famous oeuvre on her collection of mismatched footwear
• The Joy of Socks: the definitive volume on the pleasures of socks

the curse of the sock store

Quite a few years ago, long before we had kids, we’d occasionally go on a weekend getaway to stay in a bed and breakfast somewhere in New England. During one such trip, we stopped by a town known for its shopping. I seem to recall that we were heading to a game store. We saw quite a few other specialty stores, though I don’t remember what they were for the most part. What I do remember was seeing a sock store.

John and I had never heard of such a thing before, and we had a laugh about the idea. I mean, really, a whole store devoted to socks? Who really cares that much about socks? How could a store stay in business that really sold just socks?

However, we are nothing if not curious. So we decided to stifle our laughter as best we could and pop into the sock store to see for ourselves. As you might imagine, what we saw were a lot of socks. Seeing as we both had feet, and both used socks, we thought we might as well pick some up. I found a set of 3 pairs of socks in a sale bin, and John got some other socks. We made our little purchase and went our way, continuing to laugh at the supreme silliness of a sock store. We mocked the sock store.

However, it would appear that the socks must not be mocked.

For it turned out that those socks we had bought, the ones we picked up on a whim, they were really good socks. Once we tried them, all of our other socks became instantly inferior. They fell down. They weren’t as comfortable. The sock store socks became the favorite socks, sock favorites to a couple of people who wouldn’t even have believed that one could have favorite socks.

What’s more, suddenly we needed more socks.

We found ourselves seeking out socks, not just buying them willy nilly. Before you knew it, our sock stock had multiplied in size, as did our need to find better and better socks. We lamented that there was no sock store nearby. Our desire for socks could not be sated.

The only reasonable explanation is that we fell victim to the curse of the sock store. Having mocked it, we are now forever doomed to want more socks.

sock it to me

I just can’t get enough of those socks. I figure you can’t either. So, I’ve rifled through my sock drawer to share with you this sock-themed ThThTh list.

• knock your socks off: an idiom meaning “impress” or “surprise in a good way,” as in The excitement of this sock list will knock your socks off.
• put a sock in it: “be quiet.” (Differs somewhat from “put it in a sock.”
• bobby-soxer: a 1940s term for a teenage girl, especially fans of Sinatra
• The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer (1947): a movie with Cary Grant and a teenaged Shirley Temple.
• sock hop: a dance popular in the US in the 1950s in which participants took off their shoes and danced in their socks



• Christmas stockings: socks hung by the fireplace as part of a Christmas tradition. They are then filled with eggs by the Easter Bunny. (Do I have that right?)
• Fox in Socks: A Dr. Seuss book (featuring a fox wearing socks) filled with particularly tricky tonguetwisters:
  

  New socks.
  Two socks.
  Whose socks?
  Sue’s socks.
  Who sews whose socks?
  Sue sews Sue’s socks.
  Who sees who sew whose new socks, sir?
  You see Sue sew Sue’s new socks, sir.



• Pippi Longstocking: A character from a series of children’s books by Astrid Lindgenwho wore socks that were not only long (long stockings) but noteworthy for being mismatched
• Diddle Diddle Dumpling: a Mother Goose rhyme featuring (at least in some versions) stockings:
  

  Diddle diddle dumpling
  My son John
  Went to bed with his stockings on
  One shoe off and one shoe on.

• bluestocking: a term for an “educated, intellectual woman” used commonly in the 18th and 19th centuries. Also Blue Stockings Society.



• Red Sox: a baseball team based in Boston, MA
• White Sox: a baseball team based in Chicago, IL
• Chartreuse Sox: a baseball team based in my imagination



• sock monkeys: stuffed toys traditionally made from socks. (Perhaps less traditional is the sock monkey dress.)
• sock puppets: hand puppets made out of socks.
• sock puppet: a dummy internet account
• The Scottish Falsetto Sock Puppet Theater: a sock puppet duo of YouTube fame

• The Bureau of Missing Socks: “the first organization solely devoted to solving the question of what happens to missing single socks. It explores all aspects of the phenomena including the occult, conspiracy theories, and extraterrestrial.”

red socks fans

Not all of you may know this, but I’m a big fan of the socks. Living close to Boston, you hear a lot of people talking about the socks. People really get excited about socks this time of year. Especially red socks.

You’ll be happy to know that we have our share of red socks in this household. Phoebe and Theo each have at least a couple of pairs each. You can catch them sporting their red socks just about any day of the week. That’s right, plenty of red socks sporting events here!

One of these days, I’m going to have to learn more about the games that people play with their red socks. Or maybe it’s in their red socks. People get so excited about red socks game days. I can just picture everyone hanging out, wearing their red socks, playing boggle and parcheesi. Or maybe people take off their socks and throw them. Either way, what fun it must be.

I do get a little concerned, though, when I hear people talking about getting red socks tickets. I’ve gotten my fair share of parking tickets in and around Boston. I know that there’s always a danger that I’ll get a ticket if I forget to feed the meter. But do they really need to ticket people who forget to wear their red socks?

Well, I’d best get back to my laundry. Those socks aren’t going to wash themselves!

Theo sports the red socks.

turn signal

Turn Signal, March 2009 (click on the photo for a larger image)

I’ve decided to throw my hat in to the Greeblepix photo contest this month. Actually, I thought throwing in a photo would be more effective than a hat. And seeing as I didn’t have any photos of hats that I wanted to throw in, I picked this one. I like it, in spite of its general hatlessness. It’s from our recent trip to Houston, taken from the passenger seat of our rental car. (The windshield wipers were going, but the rain was coming down hard and fast.)

pictures of purple produce (PhotoHunt)

A selection of eggplants, along with some zucchini and bok choi.

A couple of summers ago I participated in a CSA: I paid money to a local farm and each week I got a big selection of marvelously fresh and tasty vegetables grown there on the farm. In addition to scoring the satisfying feeling of supporting a small farmer in her efforts to grow sustainably, I got some pretty amazing produce. Many, many greens. But there were some purples, too. I don’t have any photos of the kohlrabi I got, though it was quite strikingly purple. (Also freaky looking.) Nor did manage to get any striking photos of deep purple beets. (Not even the ones that sprouted fur and came to life in my refrigerator.)

However, I did get some photos of some colorful eggplants, such as the one above, which came in a striking array of colors and shapes. In addition to the dark purple (which I’ve been known to call eggplant purple), there were some lighter, brighter purples, too. (Mind you, those round orange things in the photo above are actually a variety of eggplant call Turkish eggplants.) I was quite amused to select some especially odd-shaped eggplants, including one that looked like a coiled purple serpant, and another that looked strikingly like a seahorse.

I hope I’ll get back to doing the CSA deal again. Maybe next year, when more of the family will have teeth with which to chew vegetables. But for this year, I’m still going to make efforts to buy local produce and support small farms. I hope to be hitting up the farm stands and farmers markets frequently in the coming months. I’m also looking forward to family excursions to local farms and orchards to pick fruit. (Mmmm, blueberries…)

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This week’s PhotoHunt theme is “purple.” For more pictures of purpleness, go pay a visit to tnchick.

still off my feed

I mentioned before that my feed reader¹ has gone all wonky. I use Safari to bookmark my RSS feeds, for blogs and news. I even added my Facebook friends’ status updates. It showed all my unread counts on the bookmark bar of my browser window, organized into folders according to my own nefarious purposes. I could even access the feeds offline.

It was working really well for a long time, maybe even 2 years. Until last month or so when I was travelling. I don’t know if I just overtaxed things with the accumulation of unread items or what. (There seems to be something going on with an application called “PubSubAgent,” which keeps hogging all my CPU.)

Anyhow, largely because of this, I haven’t gotten back in the swing of reading. I’ve been trying to visit people who leave comments, and trying to work my way around the blogroll listed in my sidebar, but my blogroll is actually a bit out of date. Plus I haven’t been doing a good job of keeping track of which blogs I’ve visited recently.

Clearly, I need to update my system (as well as my blogroll²).

Before I go transferring all my 150+ feeds over somewhere else, I’d love to hear how other people go about reading blogs. Do you use a feed reader? If so, which one? Do you like it? I have the impression that Google Reader is the most popular these days. I’ve tried Bloglines, but it didn’t thrill me.

So, here’s a poll:

Beyond that, are there any systems you have tried and hated? Want to try? For that matter, how many blogs do you read regularly?

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¹ In case you don’t know what a feed reader is, it’s a way of consolidating articles and posts so you can read without going directly to the sites that publish them. They have the advantage of helping you keep tabs on which sites have new content.

² If you are not on my blogroll, and would like to be, let me know!³

³ If you are on my blogroll, and would like not to be…bite me. Or, um, let me know, too.

It's RSS, baby!