Well, at least on my end there is.

I went ahead and installed WPTouch, a plugin that enables mobile-friendly views and navigation. The thing is I don’t have a smartphone so if you could take a moment, pay a visit and let me know if you see any problems. If you do, you can leave a comment or send me an email from the About page. Many thanks in advance.

Update: Just upgraded to a new version of WPTouch and now things should be working correctly.

I remember watching…I think it was Dennis Miller’s old show on CNBC, back when he had on cool guests like “Virginia Postrel”:http://www.dynamist.com/ and back when I got extended cable.

On this particular episode, he had on a panel of bloggers, one of who was Xeni Jardin, of Boing Boing fame. Something Xeni said has stuck with me for a while now. She said, “Blogs are the voice of the people!”

I knew right away that there was something wrong with her statement. “Yeah, it’s easy to say that when you’re blog gets a gajillion hits a day,” I thought to myself. At that point I was pretty sure that a lot of the blog hype was just that. Hype.

But it’s easy to be bitter and complain. The problem is that many bloggers, sick and tired of never being heard, start complaining, start ratcheting up the bitterness to 11. Those folks slowly devolve into a caricature of themselves, a one-dimensional homunculus that, ultimately, isn’t very interesting.

Having to decide between that and toil in obscurity, I’ll take the obscurity, thank you very much. I just wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I spent all my blogging time trying to pick fights with people or take radically different stances, just to get a rise out of someone here in the comments or through a link from another blog. Sure, okay, I’ve done it in the past (if you think I’m going to link to an example, dream on ;).

Besides, there is a very real freedom that comes from being one of the Great Unread. If you become popular, you acquire an audience…one that expects something out of you every day. I can’t do that. Some days, I’m just spent. Because I make my living as a copywriter, putting pixel to ethernet is the last thing I want to do when I come home sometimes. Maybe I would just like to have a beer and watch Mythbusters or 24.

Also, I would have to play the same tune over and over. I can throw down a political post, follow it up with something technical, then go for the jugular with a hockey rant. I’ve got no one to alienate.

Would I like more readers and more comments? Sure. But blogging is fun and if I have to start kissing up to A-listers or sending mass emails through the underground blogosphere every time I post something new, it would stop being fun and start being more like work.

I need less of that, don’cha know.

*Update:* Some criticism from “Stowe Boyd”:http://www.stoweboyd.com/message/2006/08/a_house_divided.html.

~np. Atomic Opera – Freak Show~

And since I am, I need y’all to take a look at it and make sure nothing’s completely bonkers. The layout should work in all the major browsers (with little extra flourishes for the non-IE crowd). If you see something out of whack, drop me an email or a comment.

And with that, I’m spent. Good night.

It would seem that among us that publish on the Web, the wise and reserved voices are few and far between (though I can think of “one”:http://evelynrodriguez.typepad.com/). Quite often and sadly, it seems that the price of entry that one must pay as a blogger is to be a keening and overzealous creature that easily succumbs to fits of passion.

Specifically, I’m referring to “this post”:http://weblogs.macromedia.com/jd/archives/2006/01/bloggers_myths.cfm by Mr. John Dowdell in which he was forced to comment on a couple of items that bloggers have missed the boat on. I had a feeling that most of the online publishers would get the DOJ/Google legal battle wrong on their scorecards, whether by sheer ignorance or simply a lever by which to generate traffic (BTW, “this post from Danny Sullivan”:http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/blog/060120-105609 over at Search Engine Watch lays out why this request isn’t a big deal, though there is always room for precedent).

But what really got me going was the response to the story about the Washington Post. Deborah Howell, the WaPo Ombudsman, “got quite a bit of impolite email”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/21/AR2006012100907.html in her inbox over a column she wrote on Jack Abramoff. A couple of choice excerpts:

bq. Michael Crowley of the New Republic said in his blog that “while for all practical purposes this is indisputably a Republican scandal, the narrow liberal-blogger definition of whether any Democrats took money ‘from Abramoff’ — which neatly excludes contributions he directed his clients to make — amounts to foolish semantics.”

bq. These facts have been reported many times in The Post and elsewhere. So why would it cause me to be called a “right-wing whore” and much worse?

…and…

bq. But it is profoundly distressing if political discourse has sunk to a level where abusive name-calling and the crudest of sexual language are the norm, where facts have no place in an argument. This unbounded, unreasoning rage is not going to help this newspaper, this country or democracy.

Also, consider this: one item on the WaPo blog was singled out by Kossacks, resulting in off-topic comments and personal assaults. Because of this, the Post had to close comments on their blog, which was rewarded with further derision.

I once “felt ashamed to be a blogger”:http://blog.shawnborton.info/tribute/86/ashamed-to-be-a-blogger. Now? I understand that something has to be said.

It doesn’t get any plainer than this: *if you expect this form of communication to grow and to thrive, you MUST accept the responsibility that comes with having a blog.*

It’s not just from the perspective of Google et.al. (fact: I’ve seen posts that I made *ten years ago* on the Bruce Campbell Usenet group still show up in searches). Words have a lasting effect. They can be used to easily convince someone of something that may not be true, they can slander, and they can cut, sometimes very deeply. When you have a large audience (as I do not…yet), it is especially imperative that you practice restraint and exercise caution in what you say. In the case of Kos and Charles Johnson (just to name two), there are those among their regular audience that will take what they say and play out it to the extreme.

Well, you might be asking, what can an online journalist/blogger do? Fact check, for one. Maybe write that rough draft when you’re feeling that need to shake the pillars of Heaven with your righteous anger, but save it and look it over when you’ve cooled down. Why? Well, I reckon getting “hit with a libel suit”:http://www.boingboing.net/2006/01/05/gop_blogger_hit_with.html is no fun. You can save yourself a lot of hassle when you choose your words carefully.

Yeah, it’s all common sense stuff, but if common sense were common, I wouldn’t be posting this, now would I?

Now…how’s that for a first post to “TextPlanet”:http://textplanet.net/?

“Joyent”:http://www.joyent.com/ is a software development company that provides small business teams with simple, powerful, minty fresh, web-based software. In other words, they’ve got programmers with mad web dev skills that can take that whole Web 2.0 thing by the horns and deliver something so perfectly awesome you’d need sunglasses to look upon it.

“TextDrive”:http://www.textdrive.com is a hosting company that caters to advanced web users; the kind of folks that crave SSH, get their jollies messing with “alternative web servers”:http://www.lighttpd.net/, and posting inane ramblings for public consumption. ;) In other words, they’ve got space for hosting some cool stuff…like web-based software.

So there’s the rub. TextDrive hosts Joyent software and what not and Joyent helps out with developing projects for TextDrive. Sounds pretty good and I’m hoping it lasts for a long, long time. There’s some hand wringing going on in the forum. Some people, in fact, are getting quite emotional. But the thing is this: deciding to pay for a year’s hosting is an investment and there is always risk with investing.

So congrats to David, Dean, Jason, and the rest of the gang. Now where’s my phatastic web stats package?