(Preliminary grumble: WordPress 1.2.1 for iPhone ate a nearly-done draft of this post when I tried to go from local draft to online draft. It also didn’t update to 2.x through the standard App Store update process despite both being free. WTF, WordPress?!?)

Sigh. Another long stretch without posting. It’s not like I have nothing to say. One look at my Twitter feed will tell you that. And I have posts cooking in my brain about favorite topics like Lost and The Best Bands You’ve (Probably) Never Heard Of and a bunch of other things as well. (I mean, I saw MUSE live, ferchrissakes! MUSE!!)

So why no blog posts from me? I’ve been feeling really frozen up inside, my guts knotted by anxiety, for months.

You ever get the feeling that you’re standing at a Rubicon in your life? What’s more, have you ever felt terrified, even though you know that crossing over is The Right Thing To Do™?

I’ve been there for a while now…almost a year, really, since I started the current job. In other respects, I’ve been there a lot longer. Depending on how you prefer to look at it, it could be since I had surgery, since I left home en route to college, or even going back to murky childhood. I’ve definitely written on the subject before, though.

And I’m feeling kind of “reinvented out” after the number of times I’ve done it in my life, so I really want to get this one right in order to not have to do it agin anytime soon. It’s hard work, don’tchaknow!

A few things have me brooding on this topic again:

1. Getting ready to move out of the apartment I moved into shortly after starting at my old job, thereby shedding the very last vestige of the life I led during the Tale of Woe™
2. Watching other friends being or becoming all self-actualized ‘n’ stuff. (There are six links in there, folks!)
3. Feeling like I’m finally about ready to start expressing myself in the world now that I’ve finished the process of creating the “release version” of me.

The hardest things I’m going to have to learn are self-motivation and discipline, my twin bugaboos. Need to turn those dreams into action and all that. Like I’ve said before, inspiration is never my problem. It’s that “perspiration” part that always gets me.

Universe, help me channel the Spirit of Nike®…

It’s just that taking that step and really committing to not procrastinate ad infinitum, to not constantly sedate myself with the modern opiate of the masses, and to stop fearing the risk of failure is just pants-wetting terrifying after a lifetime of the bad patterns.

My rational mind knows that doing is a skill like any other, one that anyone can learn regardless of initial talent for it (which is good because my initial talent level is roughly that of a rhinoceros with a neurological disorder taking up skateboarding). My irrational, software-virus-ridden mind tells me something quite again in the voice of my parents, every teacher I ever let down by not fully realizing my Awesome Potential™, and every friend or lover I ever offended in a moment of thoughtlessness. Unfortunately, that voice has always been so much louder than the voice of reason inside my dense cranium. (‘Sides, nowadays, even the voice of reason is starting to sound a bit suspect…)

So, the emotional pressure has built up inside of me and I feel like something’s gonna give. EIther I’m going to become Super Self-Actuated Sonya™ or I’ll just give in to my couch-tuber tendencies forevermore. Ye gods, that sounds emo! >.<

I just hope that, much like Lane Meyer, all I need is a taste of success, and I’ll find it suits me.

In the meantime I stand, tremulant*.

*10 Scooby Snacks™ to the first commenter to correctly identify the source of this title. And yes, I know it’s not a real word!

If I’ve inspired you to buy any of the stuff I gush about on my blog, please do so using my links. I’m an Amazon and iTunes affiliate and get a bounty on all referred sales. I may be employed again, but every little bit helps. (BTW: Mouse over my links and images for happy happy easter egg fun time yay!) Thanks!
—The Management

I actually have a meditative, revelatory, and hopefully interesting post brewing…but first, some kvetching. In the midst of a perfectly lovely experience, I was given an answer to a question that’s been bugging me since I first launched this blog: Why the hell am I not getting more comments? It was a deeply annoying answer, though not so much annoying about the person providing it as it was in a more general sense.

Here’s some context: I had put a Porcupine Tree album on the stereo as sonic accompaniment to the beginning of an otherwise rewarding experience and, when asked about the band, I was a bit surprised. I had expected that the person asking the question would have read my recent post regarding that band, so I commented to that effect, only to be told, “Oh…TLDR.”

“TLDR?” I replied.

“Too Long, Didn’t Read.”

And I was annoyed. I put it behind me then and went on to have the aforementioned and soon-to-be-cogitated-upon experience, but am still finding that it annoys me now that I’ve had a chance to reflect further.

I get that keeping up with the Internet as a source of information — all the blogs and social networks and news and what-have-you — is very much like the now-clichéd simile of “drinking from a fire hose.” I really do. I know that no one has the time to read every word of every article that clamors for our attention online. But I guess I would have expected better from my friends…especially the ones I’ve known for a long time, as opposed to newer friends like my commenter.

This blog is two things in equal measure…

1. A way to make myself write regularly and develop good habits that will help me in the long term to feel more able to tackle larger writing projects.
2. A way to put myself out there in a way I really hadn’t been outside of my presences on Tribe and Free-Association (which, unfortunately, are vanishingly small corners of the ‘net) so that my existing friends could follow me thanks to the miracles of feed-readers and better-frequented social networks which can be made to re-broadcast these posts.

So, for purposes of reason #1, the lack of feedback isn’t a deal-breaker and I’ll continue doing this regardless. But for reason #2, I find this “TLDR” response somewhat galling. Even in posts that don’t necessarily seem personal on their face, such as my music and politics-related items, I give pieces of myself and do my level best to keep the writing entertaining even when covering heavy subjects. But, hell’s bells, they’re not even all that long!

So, I send my little gripe out over the intertubes in the hopes that my friends will start giving me the feedback that I both need and crave. I need to keep improving my writing, and knowing that I’m worth just a few minutes of time would be rather nice as well. It can be here on the WordPress blog, which is even easier since I set things so that no one needs to have a registered account with me to leave a comment anymore, or for the LJ-inclined among you it can be on the LiveJournal re-broadcast. But it’s better here. If you pop in your Twitter ID and your blog’s RSS feed, you’ll get the returned “back-scratch” of seeing those advertised here on my site for free, perhaps earning your own writings a wider readership. (Thanks, CommentLuv and WP Twitip ID!) Such a deal…

OK, now on to more positive things! Thanks for indulging my wee ‘plaint…if you read this far.

My social media life is currently fractured and I don’t see that break being mended or bridged anytime terribly soon. I’ll explain what I mean by that in a minute. First, some background.

I’m currently on what feels to me like entirely too many social sites and yet, compared to many in this Brave New Digital World™, I’m a dilettante who barely has her toe in. Beside this WordPress blog you’re currently reading, I’m also active on Free-Association, Tribe, Facebook, and Twitter…and now a little on LiveJournal thanks to Live+Press. I have what many would consider to be a modest number of RSS feeds I track in NetNewsWire. I read MacSurfer each day. I haven’t even touched on social photo sites (Flickr, Picasa), social bookmarking sites (StumbleUpon, Technorati, NewsVine, Reddit…I have a Digg account I barely use), or life-streaming sites (FriendFeed, Tumblr, etc.). What kind of member of the digirati am I?

For years, my primary home was Tribe. The reason was simple: unlike the other big players of the time — Friendster, LiveJournal, and MySpace — Tribe had the best many-to-many social interaction I’d seen on any of the general-purpose social networking sites. Its discussion groups, or Tribes, had no equal in terms of either quality or quantity. I’d seen better feature-sets, but much like the iPhone compared to other smartphones in 2007, so was Tribe compared to other social networks in 2003 if what you were interested in was a community based on discussion and collective organizing. It was easy and it tied in very nicely with the other features of the site — events calendar, listings & reviews, profiles, blogs, image galleries, etc. Sure, the others had group discussions, but their focus was elsewhere. MySpace was always about self-promotion, Friendster about network-mapping, LJ about journaling. So, naturally, those sites were geared around those things while Tribe geared itself specifically around group discussions. And when Tribe went to shit under Jan Gullett and a bunch of us revolted to start Free-Association after finding nowhere else in late 2005 that suited our sensibilities, Tribe was our template.

But in the last three years, Tribe has stagnated. It never fully recovered from the Gullett regime and is basically on life support, despite Mark Pincus’ half-hearted protestations to the contrary. It’s become technologically insular, with few ways to get out, none to get data in, and no developer support among the other sites, services, and apps I use to enable me to do things like automatically have my blog posts re-published there.

And Free-Ass? Our lead developer, Scott, is one smart and talented man. But a) he’s got a demanding day job, and b) his whole experience of developing in PHP and for Joomla + Community Builder (along with other modules and home-grown hacks, our CMS code-base) has been for Free-Ass. He hadn’t been a coder for many years when he joined up. What he’s accomplished given that is nothing short of breathtaking, but he’s not a guru in the ways of RSS, the Facebook API, OpenSocial, and so on to enable him to bring us into the present either. We’re evaluating a change in code-base thanks to a new volunteer which might make interconnectedness with other services easier, but even so it’d take a while to implement on our budget, which wishes it even had a shoestring to call its own.

But by contrast, Facebook, the emerging juggernaut, is great for one-to-one and one-to-many communication. Its mini-feed proved to be revolutionary as a way to keep easy tabs on your friends, loved ones, and contacts, for example. And hey, I’ve rediscovered people on it or because of it that I hadn’t seen in nearly two decades in some cases. But it really sucks for many-to-many. Group discussions were clearly an afterthought…an adjunct to life-streams, announcements, and (shudder) “throwing sheep,” and nothing more. They’re practically unusable and even if you try, the signal-to-noise ration is miniscule. I can bring almost anything and everything from my digital life around the web (even odd bits from Tribe and Free-Ass thanks to the “glue” technology that is RSS), even if I can’t get much of anything out. It’s kind of like a Roach Motel™ in that way. A walled garden, to use the omnipresent metaphor.

Twitter (and its workalikes like Pownce), by its very nature precludes any kind of deep back-and-forth. It has two strengths: immediacy and brevity. And don’t get me wrong, what else does it need, especially when it plays so well with others? I can make my Facebook status my latest tweet or vice-versa and my blog automatically tweets post announcements for me. Digital nirvana in that respect!

Blogs and journaling sites — LJ is the 800-lb gorilla here — are great for writing whatever’s on your mind and have the most advanced content-handling features for those journal-style posts and response comments. But features like LJ’s Communities are lacking. Good luck figuring out how to find a Community you’d want to join on LJ from a standing start if you’re new to the site. Blogging engines like WordPress, TypePad, and Blogger are great at sharing content bi-directionally with a massive array or services, but you’re never going to develop the critical mass for anything worthy of the name “community” unless you’re already famous or utterly tireless like, say, Kos.

And Ning? I honestly can’t think of anything Ning does well. It’s the worst of all possible worlds…the Windows Mobile “smart”-phone of social networking. It does innumerable things, and all of them badly.

And that’s why I stay on Tribe and keep hope alive that Free-Ass will get growing again, because nothing else has really appeared to scratch that itch for group discussion and debate that I first acquired on the yam-based forums on ucscb, that was the Well’s raison d’etre, and which made me feel like I’d found an online home on Tribe back in 2003 or so. When someone comes up with a group-discussion-focused social networking site that really and truly works and plays well with other sites and data I/O standards — and I don’t mean this half-hearted OpenID/Facebook Connect crap, either, but real interoperability — I’ll be so there. In the meantime, that wonderful middle-ground between blogs/journals and messaging is laying fallow, I’m stuck with either tools that don’t work with my other tools or tools that aren’t very good, and that’s just sad.

Am I wrong? Comment and tell me! Believe me…I want to be wrong on this.

Thanks to ingenious WordPress Plugin developers, my posts on this blog from now on will be automatically tweeted on Twitter and re-posted to my previously-useless LiveJournal account I maintained only to view my friends’ friends-only posts. Facebook is already importing my posts as “Notes” items via RSS without any need to install anything into my WordPress setup. Now, if I can only get my post re-posted on my Tribe blog and my Free-Association blog so I can truly “write once, publish everywhere”, I’ll be in techno-nirvana. Of course, being an admin on Free-Ass and having the lead developer as a personal friend kinda helps there.

Well, well, well…

I have to actually take back a bit of my earlier vitriol toward Microsoft. I re-did the layout in a much more “standards-compliant” way, applying what I learned from my first stab at it, and suddenly the site renders dandily in IE7 along with Safari 3.x (and other Webkit-based browsers) and Firefox 3.x (and other Gecko-based browsers). Hurray!

IE6 is still a mess, though, and that’s not getting fixed. Update your browsers, people!

And Opera people, I know the Twitter box is positioning itself up at the top, but I really just don’t have the time to track that one down for a browser that idiosyncratic. Please, for the love of all that’s holy, go with one of the many other fine Webkit or Gecko browsers available if you don’t want to use Firefox or Safari. 

Here’s a partial list:

• Chrome (Windows-only for now, Webkit-based)
• Flock (Windows & Mac, Gecko-based)
• Camino (Mac, Gecko-based)
• SeaMonkey (Windows & Mac, Gecko-based)
• OmniWeb (Mac, Webkit-based)
• Shiira (Mac, Webkit-based)
• Cruz (Mac, Webkit-based)

If you can’t find something on that list that’s better than Opera in every conceivable respect, I’ll eat my hat. Flock, in particular, is probably of interest to all you social browsers out there, what with its very clever integration with many commonly-used web services. If I used more of them than I do, I’d probably switch.

OK. Now, on to more writing of content!

OK. Safari 3.1.2 and Firefox 3.0.3 are both rendering the site nicely. It took some doing, but I managed to eliminate the “seams” and fix a few other visual glitches as well. My site should now be positively beeyooteefull on the two major standards-compliant browsers. That just leaves the evil that is IE7. I have a feeling that one’s just plain not going to be easy and I’m going to have to consult with CSS gurus on making that one work anything resembling the way I want it to.

Oh yeah…I added some nice sidebar widgets to enable collapsing of various groupings and the gratuitous Flash-enhanced tag-cloud. Yay.

I sleep now!

I have things working really well in Safari/WebKit, pretty well in Firefox/Gecko, and not so much in IE. I’m going to work on getting an IE7-specific stylesheet going, though. I’m just not bothering with the CSS-rendering nightmare that is IE6. If you have IE6, why haven’t you upgraded? Or, better yet, switch to Firefox already. (Have I mentioned I hate IE? Standards, M$…you’re doing it wrong!)