Fall Blog Updates
Happy Belated Fall! Usually I just make updates to this site without telling anyone or drawing attention to them, but I’ve accumulated a few things that need changing, and these might go better if people knew about them.
I’ve added a separate Contact page to my site. As always, you are welcome to email me. (Or talk to me in person or over the phone for people who already know me). I cannot express enough how much I appreciate everyone who’s already done this.
But I also understand if we’re total strangers or distant acquaintances, and you want to tell me your thoughts but not your identity. For you, I’m trying out admonymous, an anonymous feedback form. (You can obviously also use this if we know each other well).
I’m tremendously grateful to everyone who has already contacted me about the blog. I’d also like to address the 2 most common questions I get, “Is there a way to follow the blog?” and “How is Office Hours going?”
Mailing List
I’m finally caving and creating a mailing list. I held out for a while because (a) It would take a lot of effort to host my own and I don’t want to pay for a service, and (b) I really wanted everyone to use RSS.
For (a) I realized that, at the scale I’m working at, I can just add people to a Gmail Contact list. You do have to tell me when you’d like to subscribe or unsubscribe.
For (b), I would still prefer people use RSS for their own benefit. I don’t like to go on about how great RSS is or how to use it because there are so many other people on the internet who’ve said it better than I could. I’ve decided to simply share my own RSS, both here and in the Directory. It’s very convenient, instead of checking 30 different sites for updates, I can check this one place. It’s also nice because there are plenty of people who don’t make updates frequently but who I don’t want to miss if they start up again.
Office Hours
Office Hours is going really well, all thanks to a few very good friends. Usually it’s quite small, and there’s more socializing than parallel play. But judging by how much more I’ve seen my friends than I otherwise would have, it’s been a success.
It hasn’t happened the past couple weeks due to different things, but I’m hoping it continues through the Winter with the minor change of starting at 7pm on Tuesdays.
It’s most shocking to me that I’ve had this blog for 3 years and that I’ve written more than 60 posts in that time. My pace has slowed since I’ve picked up other hobbies and friends, but I still try to post at least once a month.
Now that I do have so many, I’m running into interesting, unforeseen problems. Like people who find my blog seem overwhelmed and don’t know where to start or someone references a blog post I don’t remember writing, and I can’t find which one they’re talking about.
I’m trying to add more tags to posts. If you noticed the archive grouped by year, I’m expanding that to groups based on topic or format.
For now, I’ve just thrown most things into a “thoughts” tag, but I’m sure I can get more granular, and new tags will emerge as I go.
As a way to introduce new people to the blog more gently, I’ve thought about adding a “best of” or “start here” tag as well. The only problem is, there are only a couple posts that I am confident in calling my favorites. If you’re itching to try out the new contact form, please let me know what other posts you like.