Links that wouldn’t go away

So how do I deal with those links that won‘t die? In a word: bullet lists.

Blogging style

My workflow for blogging has changed with NetNewsWire. With 264 subscriptions, I can’t read everything in detail. I scan headlines, pick out the ones I want to pay attention to, and open them in browser tab windows in NetNewsWire. Then I’ll read the tabs that are open, and close the ones that I’m done thinking about. There will always be one or two that I want to blog immediately; I’ll switch to MarsEdit and write about those (though since my style is to combine two or three different links in a post, I don’t generally take as much advantage of the MarsEdit integration with NNW as I might).

But there are always tabs left over after that. I like that NNW saves my open browser tabs. If I find one or two that persist across sessions, I’ll come back and blog those later.

So what makes me blog something? Generally, these days, I don’t point to things unless I have something to say about them. They could make me mad; make me laugh (not as often as I’d like); make me say “This is really cool”; or tickle a connection with something else I’ve read, said, or thought. The last is my favorite category of blogging material—it’s where I can actually add value as a blogger.

The return of William Gibson

William Gibson’s blog, silent since the end of the author’s tour for Pattern Recognition, crackled back to life yesterday. The natural question, “Why?”, is the first word of the posting. I excerpt the rest of the post in its entirety here, because it’s short, sweet, and right on point:

Because the United States currently has, as Jack Womack so succintly puts it, a president who makes Richard Nixon look like Abraham Lincoln.

And because, as the Spanish philospher Unamuno said, “At times, to be silent is to lie.”

Nice.

Special off-topic bonus: Pattern Recognition is one of Gibson’s works or concepts to inspire a Sonic Youth song. The other, of course, was the Neuromancer trilogy, which is linkable directly to “The Sprawl” on Daydream Nation. So which Yoot is a Gibson fan?

Blocking comment spam, and other fun stuff

Very long time readers of this site (and you two know who you are) will remember it used to live at another domain, on Userland’s free servers. When I switched over, even though all the content migrated, the Google index didn’t pick things up right away so I left everything in place, put a note at the top of each page with the new site address, and forgot about it.

Until this morning, when I woke up and found two pieces of comment spam on the site. I promptly deleted them and blocked the member who left the comments, but now I’m wondering if it’s time to take more drastic action on that site.

Manila gurus: is it possible to do page-level redirects on a Manila site such that someone coming to http://jarretthousenorth.editthispage.com/faq ends up at http://www.www.jarretthousenorth.com/faq instead?

Or should I just blow the content away? I hate that it’s attracting comment spam.