Doubting to shuō

I’ve decided to start recycling older entries on this site. I don’t know too many people doing that, but there are a few reasons I find the idea appealing.

When I started writing on this site, I had a lot of things I wanted to write about, many of them already written in paper journals. There was a steady supply of things to write about, and I had a fair amount of time in which to write it. Now, though, things are different.

This blog already has nearly five hundred entries, some of which have been useful to me or interesting to my friends, but others which haven’t. Still other entries were very useful, but have limited shelf-life. It only makes sense to update them. I may be able to improve them, too.

Several months ago, Glen Clifford interviewed me over the phone for a piece on blogging in Taiwan for Centered on Taipei. It has appeared in the September 2008 issue. It’s also online in PDF form, and an expanded HTML version.

The article includes quotations from Michael Turton, Scott Sommers, David Reid and myself. For the most part, it talks about Taiwanese politics and the contrasts between traditional media and blogs.
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I’m no fan of posts about the Top 5 thisses or Top 10 thats, but even I can hold out against the tide for so long.

The Top 5 Top 5 Blog Posts EVAR!

1. The Recycled – this list will be comprised of only of points that you’ve seen in other lists, almost definitely in the same order. Under no circumstances will credit be given.
2. The Obvious – One mind-numbingly obvious point after another, with an “ooh aren’t I so helpful” attitude suffused throughout.
3. The Infuriating – makes claims of being “The definitive top five ____ ever!”, while replacing several absolutely crucial entries with whatever the uninformed author sees fit.
4. The Anti-funny – not only is this list not funny, but it’s trying so desperately that reading it is like losing a piece of your soul… to Carrot Top.
5. The Repetitive – a rundown of slightly different wordings of the same point that even a ward of OCD patients would disregard as just too damned repetitive. In other words, each item is pretty much the same, but worded slightly differently. Or you could say they’re repetitive.

+1!!!

6. The Neverending – has useless extra items tacked on at the end, prolonging the suffering even further.

Related Post: Good God are There a Lot of Morons on Digg

For the first time in a few weeks, I have a little bit of free-time, and I don’t feel like going outside, either. Typhoons have that effect on me.

I’ve been thinking about pruning my blog. This blog is a mish-mash of personal entries, ideas I’ve been thinking about, news, and other things. Some posts are more transient than others. Posts such as NY Teacher of the Year Against School or Geeky, but Efficient: Firefox Tweaks are just as relevant now as they were when I wrote them. Others, such as iDrone isn’t dead, are completely useless (especially considering that iDrone is dead).

A part of me resists the idea of deleting anything, but a louder voice tells me that sometimes more is less. I’m not sure how extensive it will be, but the pruning begins soon!

Writing online for the past year and a half or so has introduced me to a lot of new friends. But beyond that, it’s also had a certain way of dredging up the past.
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A while back, I noticed that Forumosa, the largest community site for foreigners in Taiwan, had a new guide for Taiwan. It’s called Taiwanease: The Knowledge, and it’s a wiki, which means that anybody can add articles to it and edit it. This sort of site usually takes a lot of work to get going, but once it’s big enough there will probably be quite a few people volunteering their time and knowledge to make it a better site. The most famous wiki is Wikipedia, which has grown into an absolutely gigantic, non-commercial online encyclopedia.
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Tonight, I was chatting with one of my friends, and he pointed out that my posting frequency has declined. It’s true. I used to have all kinds of things I wanted to write about, and I thought they would be useful for other people. I wrote a lot. Recently, there have been things I’ve wanted write about, but I haven’t felt like they’ve been too appropriate.

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WordPress 2.1 is out, and I’ve just installed it. It’s actually a much bigger update than I had realized. Here are the biggest changes I’ve noticed:

• The visual editor is far better than it was before. You can also tab back and forth between the WYSIWYG editor and the code very easily.
• There’s a spell checker built into the editor. For users of Firefox 2.0, this is superfluous, but for those living in the dark ages and still using IE, it’s a useful feature.
• WP 2.1 autosaves drafts regularly.
• Users can now arbitrarily chose any page to be their home page, and display a list of their posts on any other page. I personally spent hours figuring out how to code around the lack of this feature several months ago. Now, it’s easy.

This upgrade is a “must have”.  With it, WP is now more useful as a CMS than ever before. The full list of features is at wordpress.org.

Just as happened earlier this year, I’ve been chain-blogged again! Chain blog posts are like chain emails, except more social and not so annoying. This time, Range tagged me. The topic of this one is “Five things that you didn’t know about me”. Here goes:
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Recently, I’ve seen a huge increase in the number of complimentary comments from Chinese people in my comment moderation queue. About 95% of these comments start with

写的不错，

and then go on to talk about something else. At first glance I felt pretty good, until I realized that they are ALL spam! They invariably compliment my writing, and then link to some site either full of ads or trying to sell something. Basically, instead of comments saying “Diet pills, diet pills! Follow this link”, I’m getting comments that say “Well written. I agree with nearly all of your analysis. Get some diet pills here.” Be wary of clicking that “approve” button too quickly.