Ah, crap. My Movable Type installation has decided to “stop working”:http://www.movabletype.org/support/index.php?act=ST&f=10&t=36622&s=4fd53020f9a6073951da6e25ae637b67, and refuses to accept my username or even recognise the existence of my “blog”:http://www.kieranhealy.org/blog. A more detailed description follows below. Suggestions gratefully received.
From the category archives:
Blogging
Thanks, Henry. I am delighted to be here – and … and I’d just like to thank all the little people who made it possible, such as myself, and everyone else, and God.
I guess – since you’ve got a back button – I’ll say a few words about John & Belle’s place in the history of the blogosphere, the true meaning of blogging, etc.
We’re going to have two new guestbloggers with us over the next week; John Holbo and Belle Waring from “John and Belle Have a Blog”:http://examinedlife.typepad.com/johnbelle/. Most CT readers will know them well already; I reckon that JABHAB and the Volokhs are the two main contenders for the coveted blog-most-linked-to-by-Timberites award. John is a philosopher at the National University of Singapore; he also blogs about literature, politics and academia. Belle covers all of the above, as well as cooking (including tasty “rat anecdotes”:http://examinedlife.typepad.com/johnbelle/2004/02/dangerous_but_w.html) and popular culture. She’s ABD (or AWOL) at the Classics Department at Berkeley, and is currently writing a rather good detective novel with surreal elements. Enjoy …
So I started blogging a year ago today. At first, it took me awhile to get a template together at my old “blog”:www.politicaltheory.blogspot.com. Then, after a couple days of toying around with links to other blogs, I recall receiving an email from a current member of this blog saying: “I’ve seen you show up in my referrer logs a couple of times now. Time for you to get blogging I’d say!” Well, he’d probably say the same thing today, but, at the time, it was great to have some encouragement. I don’t know about others, but my first ventures out into the blogosphere were certainly apprehensive. Did I really want to be putting my name on this half-baked stuff? Is anyone really going to read this? (Welcome to “Sitemeter”:http://www.sitemeter.com.) Then there was: note to self, this is rather addictive; and, from whence the pressure to post everyday?
If current trends continue, “‘John Quiggin'”:http://www.johnquiggin.com may begin to challenge “‘Kieran Healy'”:http://www.kieranhealy.org/blog as the most frequently misspelled name on Crooked Timber, with “‘Eszter Hargittai'”:http://www.eszter.com a surprisingly distant third. In terms of sheer variety, however, “Kieran Healy” looks set to retain its dominance, as virtually all Quiggin-related mistakes are accounted for by “‘Quiggan'”:http://www.notfrisco2.com/webzine/Lynn/004318.html#004318, whereas both the first and last parts of “Kieran Healy” offer multiple opportunities for error. Transposing the “i” and “e” or moving the “e” after the “r” are universally popular choices[1], while others show interesting cross-national variation. English readers find it hard to to resist converting “Healy” to “Healey,” while Americans love to change “Kieran” to “Kiernan.” This latter variant is linguistically interesting because Americans usually choose to misspell words by removing letters rather than by adding them. These errors are sometimes compounded with another common mistake. Beginning an email with the words
bq. Dear Ms. Healey,
does not encourage a sympathetic reading of your comments, for instance.
A subsequent post will give some handy tips on more advanced CT-related topics, such as how to tell “John”:http://www.johnquiggin.com from “Jon”:http://www.albany.edu/philosophy/Faculty.html#mandle, “Henry”:http://www.henryfarrell.net/ from “Harry”:http://philosophy.wisc.edu/people/#brighouse and “Ted”:http://tedbarlow.blogspot.com/ from “Tom”:http://trunnacl.org/blog.
fn1. Though their simultaneous use has yet to be observed in the field.
Inspired by “Michael Brooke’s post”:http://www.michaelbrooke.com/archive/2004_02_15_index.html#107714320022442574 on “The Gender Genie”:http://www.bookblog.net/gender/genie.html , a site that analyses text and guesses whether the author is male or female, I’ve just run samples of the Crooked Timber team’s writings though the test. It turns out that Ted is probably a woman and that all the rest of us (including Eszter and Maria) are men! Harry, whom I had down as a caring-sharing type, turns out to have gallons of testosterone coursing through his sentences. Who’d uv thunk it?
It’s quiztime, courtesy of Mike Rappaport at “The Right Coast”:http://therightcoast.blogspot.com/2004_02_01_therightcoast_archive.html#107665099925278362, who does not like us. He turns his keen critical eye on four of our recent posts. The goal of the quiz is to match each of Mike’s devastating indictments to its target:
table(fig). {font-weight:bold;center}_|Accusation|Target|
|(. 1. Attacked conservatives when they were down. |((. A. John. |
|(. 2. Failed to discuss something on our blog. |((. B. Harry. |
|(. 3. Relies on news sources other than Fox. |((. C. Chris. |
|(. 4. Knows about the history of socialism. |((. D. Kieran. |
Answers are at “The Right Coast”:http://therightcoast.blogspot.com/2004_02_01_therightcoast_archive.html#107665099925278362. The accuracy of these criticisms, and their effect on our credibility here at CT, will be the subject of a later quiz.
(UPDATE: Glenn has taken down the link to the post in question. We all make mistakes. Original post below the fold, edited somewhat.)
Gotta _love_ “Brad Choate”:google and his “Textile 2”:http://www.bradchoate.com/mt/docs/mtmanual_textile2.html plugin[1], which makes it a breeze to write nicely formatted XHTML for your blog.[2] Now we just need an automated _content_ generator, and *CT* will run itself. (“Some bloggers”:http://www.instapundit.com show evidence of such a system already.)
fn1. Even footnotes. So now even ephemera can be annotated. Brad developed Textile for Movable Type from “Dean Allen’s”:http://www.textism.com original implementation.
fn2. The dangers of giving footnote functionality to a blog staffed mainly by academics should immediately be obvious.
Someone needs to explain to me why I haven’t been reading The Decembrist for the last six months.
I just noticed that John Quiggin’s post below was the thousandth post on Crooked Timber.
At this rate, we’ll catch up with Instapundit thirty years after he quits blogging. Go us.
“Hell on Earth would be a World Government run by Crooked Timber”:http://www.catallarchy.net/blog/cgi-bin/archives/000885.html
Do you agree with this proposition? Do you disagree? Discuss, with reference to the “assigned readings”:https://www.crookedtimber.org.
I’ve been heavily involved in work production related activities, but I should point to Daniel Drezner, who is blogging about a potentially huge story.
The Bush administration, deeply concerned about recent assassination attempts against Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf and a resurgence of Taliban forces in neighboring Afghanistan, is preparing a U.S. military offensive that would reach inside Pakistan with the goal of destroying Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda network, military sources said.
U.S. Central Command is assembling a team of military intelligence officers that would be posted in Pakistan ahead of the operation, according to sources familiar with details of the plan and internal military communications. The sources spoke on the condition they not be identified.
As part of our never-ending “quest”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/000727.html to increase shareholder value, I’ve munged up a stripped down version of Crooked Timber for people with mobile devices of one sort or another; it’s available at “https://www.crookedtimber.org/mobile/”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/mobile/ (there’s a link in our left sidebar too). Comments from people who actually live in the 21st century and have mobile devices with Internet access would be appreciated. Thanks to “Dive Into Mark”:http://diveintomark.org/ for the basic templates.
Kaye Trammell and James Russell have noted that Blogger now has an inbuilt RSS feed – details here. Third-party RSS feeds for Blogger blogs have been pretty bad in the past, so hopefully this will be better. If you don’t know why RSS is good for you, read Kaye and Dave Winer. Let me add another reason – I (and I think many others) don’t read blogs without RSS feeds. Anyone who is running a Blogger blog should turn on this feature and display the feed link prominently.