Eccentric Flower talk:201104/Witness Relocation Program
From Eccentric Flower
Comments on Eccentric Flower:201104/Witness Relocation Program
The idea is certainly not to discourage commenting, but Tumblr's commenting mechanism is sort of bizarre and I haven't quite figured it out. (I don't tend to get a lot of comments on link items anyway.) There's always Twitter for that if need be!
-- 16:44, 12 April 2011 (BST)
I don't understand Tumblr interaction at all ... when you figure it out, let me know. Not just for your site but generally.
-- 16:49, 12 April 2011 (BST)
Iain:
You can't comment on a Tumblr post unless you have a Tumblr of your own. Then you comment by reblogging or "liking", and adding your own text to your rebloggishness or "like"ness. If you've got a lot to say, you have to reblog; there seems to be a tight character limit on what you can say when you just "like" something.
-- 19:05, 12 April 2011 (BST)
If you want comments, you can integrate Disqus and Tumblr: http://disqus.com/admin/tumblr/. I've never bothered doing it myself.
-- 20:56, 12 April 2011 (BST)
Joy:
And here I was thinking that your introduction was leading up to you saying you'd finally joined Facebook! (duckin
-- 21:11, 12 April 2011 (BST)
Robert: Of course, but I confess I'm not following your train of thought on what it has to do with any of this.
Joy: Never. Never never never never never. I didn't like them to begin with, and with every new report that comes out about them I grow more convinced that they are actively evil, hazardous to their users, et cetera. The question really is why the rest of you aren't running away from Facebook in droves.
-- 21:17, 12 April 2011 (BST)
Entities should not be multiplied beyond their necessity. You now have three, separate places one would have to look in order to follow your thoughts and writings. I understand the appeal of Twitter, though I draw the line at that and Facebook, but I see no reason to involve Tumblr when the same result could be achieved here.
-- 22:42, 12 April 2011 (BST)
I think I read the other day that over half the U.S. population has a Facebook account. That, in itself, I find hair-raisingly eerie. I'll pass. I don't have Twitter, either. And now there's this Tumblr thingie? I'll probably bookmark that site, because once a week is too seldom for me. (Can seldom be comparative? I dunno. Maybe I should say infrequent.) At least it's something to read, even if I can't comment.
Robert, I thought Occam's Razor was spot-on.
-- 23:17, 12 April 2011 (BST)
I've told you my solution to the Facebook problem, right?
Lie. Lie about your birthdate. Lie about your email address. Lie about your name. Lie about anything you don't want them to have.
I mean, if you set up a fake profile, and all the data you give them is for a Columbina Principessa della Czarda living in Scranton, PA, you can still interact with your friends and answer all the damn polls you want to. Facebook is happy, and all your precious personal information is still controlled by you.
-- 23:41, 12 April 2011 (BST)
Joy:
Or don't lie, but really, the only information I have on there is stuff that is very publicly available in many other ways.
-- 02:30, 13 April 2011 (BST)
Robert, that still doesn't have anything to do with Occam's Razor, which is not about the path of least resistance but about selecting the most likely among various hypotheses. But I split hairs.
I'm surprised you were able to muster enough annoyance to even comment, since I never figured my links to various fluff 'n' shinies had much appeal to you in the first place.
The Tumblr page is primarily for the people who are already reading and interacting with me daily on Twitter. I've deliberately picked something that's easy for them to add into their existing Twitter feed with very little additional overhead. They were the ones already reading and seeing all the random linkage.
Posting short links/comments here is simply something this software is not suited to do. If I posted each link/blurb in its own entry there would be far too many entries daily, and too much additional overhead on my part; conversely, if I consolidated the day's assortment of links into a single entry, it would be updated at various times in the day and most people would never see most of the updates, since I don't expect you to routinely come back and check the same entry multiple times to see if I've appended new content to it.
Facebook has many other bad habits besides not giving a shit about your privacy and marketing your data to all and sundry. (For example, the fact that they can't be arsed to screen third-party apps for malware; Facebook is an enormous malware vector.) And besides, they want to be a monolith and I don't care to help them with their plan. Or, to paraphrase Bunny, the fact that over half the US population has a Facebook account sounds like a pretty good reason not to in and of itself.
-- 03:26, 13 April 2011 (BST)
I actually find adding the twitter feed so prohibitively annoying that I'm trying to figure out how to follow people on tumblr (clicking on the twitter link, only to land on a slightly longer blurb and have to click again, is driving me nuts). But I'd miss the actual links, and there are a few other things I read on tumblr, so I guess it's time to figure out how to use it properly.
-- 19:34, 13 April 2011 (BST)
"[T]hat still doesn't have anything to do with Occam's Razor, which is not about the path of least resistance but about selecting the most likely among various hypotheses."
See, that's why my reference is funny, because I'm using the literal terms of the Razor in a context not of heuristically evaluating theories, but to complain about you creating multiple outlets for your writing.
-- 21:11, 13 April 2011 (BST)
Platypus: I'm curious, why is adding another Twitter follow prohibitively annoying? Would it spam your feed too much? (I grant it can be spammy, but the number of items I post there in a day would have been the equivalent number of items on my other Twitter account, which you follow.)
I ask that partly because I notice a couple of people apparently got Tumblr accounts just to follow me, which is sweet, but startled me - I did not anticipate that anyone would do it, because the goal was really a place to provide a back end for the new Twitter account, where I could post things longer than 140 chars. In other words, I don't think of it as a weblog with a Twitter announce-feed; I think of it as a new Twitter account that has a weblog backing it up to hold content. I plan to interact with the general Tumblr community as little as possible, frankly; a lot of it gives me hives.
Robert: I think the problem is, the rest of your comment put me not in the mood for funny.
-- 23:06, 13 April 2011 (BST)
You did prompt me to go ahead and register a Tumblr account - I've been meaning for a while to figure out what the point of Tumblr is. I'm not sure I'll actually use mine for anything, though, so for now I'm not following you with it, just using the RSS feed.
Interesting side effect, though, is that links I'd normally have followed right away on Twitter, I am now more likely to wait and look at later in the day, because I know they're queued up in my RSS feed so I'm not worried about forgetting to go back and look at them later. This may wind up meaning you get more delayed comments from me on your random-cool-stuff links, rather than my usual speedy Twitter feedback.
I still don't really know what Tumblr is for, though. Seems like it serves roughly the same purpose that sharing stuff via Google reader does - except only four people follow me there, and I'm unconvinced that if I started a Tumblr, anyone additional would follow it.
-- 23:39, 13 April 2011 (BST)
I bookmarked Impudence. I didn't have to have a Tumblr account, and I can access the links at my leisure. If the links are being mentioned in Twitter, then I lose nothing by not having Twitter. Works for me, but I guess I won't be able to comment there. 8-(
-- 00:40, 14 April 2011 (BST)
What rest of my comment? The entirety of my first comment was the humorously stated objection. Of the second comment, sentence one was a restatement of the Razor. Sentence two was a simple statement of fact. Sentence three, clause one, was actually a validation of part of your approach; clause two was a statement of my own feelings about two social media sites; clause three said in its entirety, "but I see no reason to involve Tumblr when the same result could be achieved here." You can't brook that minute level of criticism without losing your sense of humor??? Sheesh. Man, I'd love for the worst criticism I receive from a friend to be to the effect of, "I love reading what you write, but I strongly prefer to find it in one place rather than clicking on multiple sites."
-- 00:54, 14 April 2011 (BST)
Robert, for the record, I have offered multiple times to build a single web page that would pull in the RSS feed from here, the Twitter feed, and the Tumblr feed, so that people could just bookmark that page instead. Building this page is at most an hour's worth of my time, but I have been told not to bother with it.
-- 16:58, 14 April 2011 (BST)
Joy:
Let her do it! Let her do it! I'm not getting a Twitter account, I have no idea what Tumblr is, and I hate the idea of having to go umpteen different places to hear your thoughts.
-- 17:12, 14 April 2011 (BST)
Please, Sir, may we have another? That website sounds wonderful for those of us Luddites who eschew all this newfangled social networking.
Or, perhaps you are trying to drag us, kicking and screaming, into the Twenty-first Century? Mwahahahaha.... That's evil.
-- 18:06, 14 April 2011 (BST)
Not to dogpile on C, which I know is utterly counterproductive to getting what I want -- easy access to his words and the conversation among us all that they engender -- but did anyone notice the implication (and I have no idea if it was intended or not) of the title of this post? What's the hallmark of the Witness Relocation Program? You never find the subject again. I hope that's not where we're headed.
-- 19:11, 14 April 2011 (BST)
The reason I initially found the Twitter feed annoying was because (at least in the first several links I sampled, a few days ago) you seemed to be using Tumblr almost identically to Twitter. Like http://twitter.com/violetimpudence/status/57790126440464384, http://twitter.com/violetimpudence/status/58155446103572481, http://twitter.com/violetimpudence/status/57479208309506048. I see these, I click them, and... I get the exact same thing on Tumblr. I have to click again to actually follow the link. I did not learn anything at the intermediate landing point; it was just an obstacle between me and whatever it was you were pointing out. I'd rather the Twitter link went straight there, but if this is how it must be, I'll start at Tumblr if I start anywhere at all.
Now that I've looked at more of the Tumblr, I see that you do have extra content there in more cases than I thought (where by 'extra content' I mean more than 'finishing the sentence that got cut off at 140 characters'). But I think I'd only find the Twitter feed useful if the Tumblr mostly contained content that was an end in itself, rather than mostly being links to external content. I like it when the acual picture/video/whatever is right there in the Tumblr post, or when there's a quote from the thing you're talking about. If it's just a 280-character link instead of a 140-character link, I'll get grumpy about having to go through it twice.
The Tumblr does seem to be evolving a bit, or maybe you've just had more to say the last couple of days. But then the Twitter feed is just the first 140 characters of whatever's on Tumblr, rather than an interesting-but-shorter summary of what you're going to say there. I'm not really getting any added value or convenience from it. I didn't mind link spamminess on your regular account, because it was you talking about the links. I do mind announce-spamminess, a bit, I guess.
(I was not going to complain at anything like this length, because you can set up your stuff however you like and I'll try to read it. But you did ask. I do miss the ability to easily *comment* on something you've put up, when I cut Twitter out of the equation.)
-- 19:26, 14 April 2011 (BST)
Platypus: Ah, thank you. That explanation makes sense. Yes, most of the Tumblr items are links, so if I don't add a lot of additional content myself, it feels like a double clickthrough.
(I mostly link to web pages and not bare photos, and anyway one of the things that does bother me about Tumblr is that it seems to be a culture of embedding other people's photos, which I don't like doing. I've only done it once so far, for the Yuri Gagarin illustration, and I was VERY careful to make the photo click through to the source site, even though the source site was useless to me and had no pertinence to the comment I posted along with the photo.)
The comment problem is tricky. Tumblr is not suited for it very well (I may try the add-on Nonelvis mentions); some people absolutely hate the commenting hack here; some people don't like Twitter ... even if I allowed Nonelvis to make that unified RSS feed it wouldn't solve the comment problem. I'm still working on that. Right now Twitter is the best I got.
Joy, Bunny, et al: Here's the thing. For reasons I don't care to re-list here, this particular site is becoming less and less useful to me and less and less about things I'm interested in other people seeing. A unified RSS feed that included this site would be a soon-obsolete thing; the time may well be coming when it would have nothing much from this site to syndicate. I haven't committed one way or another yet, but I suspect I'm approaching the point where 1) I use this journal only for catharsis and 2) those take-a-dump entries are locked only to me.
So, bottom line: that Tumblr (and my personal Twitter account) is where the action is; I realize you may not like the tools there much, but they're the ones that suit the purpose best. The journal you are reading right now is on its way to becoming an artifact, and I realize none of you want to hear that, but that's just the way it is.
If you'd like to read my words (and I'm flattered that you do), then I suggest finding the way that best suits you to follow the other places (each of which has its own RSS tools). Believe me, I'll tell you when/if something interesting happens over here.
-- 20:35, 14 April 2011 (BST)
I don't know anything about RSS feeds, I'll have to ask Sean. But I wonder if I can channel all three feeds to my LJ friends page. That way I'd only have one location to access. As for commenting, I'd miss that. Part of the fun of this journal is the repartee in the comments section. I'll be interested to see what you figure out for that. Meanwhile, if there's anything I'd like to say to you, I'll try email, although I think we had difficulties with that, too, a while ago, didn't we? Something about my bellsouth server blocking your replies? Oh, wait, there's LJ email. Where there's a will...
-- 21:52, 14 April 2011 (BST)
Good idea, Bunny! Since you need a paid account to create custom RSS feeds on LJ, I made one for Col's Tumblr: just friend http://violetimpudence.livejournal.com/ .
I don't recommend doing the same for Twitter, however, because there will be too much spam on your friends page.
-- 23:17, 15 April 2011 (BST)
Eeeeeeeeee!!! Thank you, thank you! Works like a charm. I don't really need the Twitter feed, but thanks for the warning about the spam.
-- 03:10, 16 April 2011 (BST)
I think Nonelvis's solution works for me, too.
Look, I would never presume to say something like, "Give 5000 words a weeks for free, and provide me a place to comment on it." What I do feel comfortable saying is that in the more-than-a-decade that I've read your various sites, I've really enjoyed hearing your thoughts on a variety of subjects (though of course I'm always sorry to hear if you are unhappy about something -- then I try either to be supportive or to argue why things aren't that bad). I also particularly value the community of FASCINATING people you have collected, people whom I never would have met and learned from if you hadn't done all this. I would be very sorry to lose that. I am, very selfishly, hoping that everyone who reads here will add Nonelvis's feed to their LJ friends' list so that we can continue to have the salon, whether or not you choose to participate in it (though of course I hope you do).
-- 19:17, 17 April 2011 (BST)
What he said. Salon is just the right word to describe your following. You don't owe us anything, obviously, but you have a talent for ferreting out interesting and intriguing topics to discuss, and we'll miss the conversation.
I've been following the feed for Impudence, and yeah, it's significantly better than nothing. The LJ format seems to allow for comments, so we'll be able to keep in touch with you. Better than nothing.
-- 03:17, 18 April 2011 (BST)
Anybody know how often LJ polls the RSS feeds? There are a dozen or so articles on Impudence, but, so far, none have showed up on LJ. Just curious.
-- 16:55, 18 April 2011 (BST)
LJ's feed mechanism, like the rest of LJ, is often broken these days. This is why I neither endorse nor support that mechanism.
I added a comment mechanism whereby you can comment directly on Tumblr items in the middle of last week. I haven't worked with it too much but it seems to be working well.
I mostly just don't want people thinking that just because nothing visible happens here for months - and that will increasingly be the case - that I'm not posting things, or that I've died or vanished.
-- 19:49, 18 April 2011 (BST)
Oh. Cool. I'll have to see if a Tumblr account is required in order to comment.
-- 21:17, 18 April 2011 (BST)
Bunny, LJ's syndication tool is a little wonky sometimes, but you can always go to the feed's profile page (http://violetimpudence.livejournal.com/profile) to see when it's next due for an update.
-- 23:13, 18 April 2011 (BST)
Jette:
Is there any way to comment on the Tumblr posts, or is the idea to discourage commenting there?
-- 16:37, 12 April 2011 (BST)