Every so often, people in online communities turn their attention toward one thing and argue heatedly. Here’s how it generally goes.

1. Initial controversial statement (This is usually something that can be interpreted as “You and everything you value? It all sucks.”)
2. Initial “Hey, who do you think you are anyway? And by the way, you suck” response.
3. Mass internet pile on
4. Later, in no particular order
   • Sporadic “That controversial statement wasn’t controversial. It’s been said/done/thought since the beginning of time” interjections
   • Sporadic “That initial statement was spot on” interjections (mostly ignored or decried)
   • Summary blog posts for newcomers to the argument
   • Meta blog posts talking about the experience of the argument (ahem, You Are Here)
5. Argument is named something catchy (usually a catchy acronym or some reference to Watergate)
6. People wax nostalgic about the argument, getting all heated up about it in short bursts
7. Argument becomes point of comparison in the next mass internet argument

Dear Blog,

On this, your 5th birthday, I’d like to thank you for introducing me to some of the people who are now my best friends in the world, for never backfiring on me too badly when I stuck my toes in the crazy, for never attracting the real crazy that exists out there on the internet, for helping me learn to be a librarian, and for helping me learn to be an adult. I started you on a whim and on another platform. I’ve fallen out of love with you and then realized that it wasn’t you, it was me, and this realization led me back to appreciating you again. And through it all, you’re still here, bursting with drafts that I may never flesh out, but here nonetheless. Happy birthday.

Yours,
Iris

… to bring you news about the Thematic WordPress Theme (which I use as my theme base, and which I know is pretty popular). Something’s wonky with the update they just released a few days ago. Not being a very techy sort, I can’t get much more specific than that, but here’s what happened.

I updated the theme yesterday morning and noticed that doing so got rid of the “Home” tab up there next to “About Me.” Poking around on the theme’s website I was reminded that all I need to do is go into the functions.php file and un-comment a few lines of code that the developers put there for those of us that want the Home tab. So I did. And my blog went blank.

Now, some other wonky stuff happened (my browser seemed to hang when I pressed “save” so I didn’t think that had worked at all, and I was in the middle of feeding my cat and eating breakfast and going to work and stuff) so I’m still not 100% sure that that commented-out portion of code is the culpret, but that’s the order of events. Anyway, I had a post set to auto-publish and it didn’t show up in FriendFeed, so I clicked over to the blog only to discover that it was completely blank.

I emailed Blake at LIShost (who is awesome, by the way), and he said there was a bad line of code that he fixed, and wonder of wonders, my blog came back.

Then I got home from work, fired up my computer, which reloaded all my tabs (one of which was the hung functions.php “save” page), and my blog went blank again. All I can think is that the tab reloaded and saved the morning’s actions again, overwriting Blake’s fix. Though who knows, maybe I’m attributing cause where there is none. Anyway, the wonderful Blake fixed it again.

So the moral of the story is that if you use Thematic, don’t try to get the Home tab back unless you know more about this stuff than I do. Admittedly, knowing more than I do wouldn’t take a whole lot of knowledge, but at the very least you’ll want to edit this stuff NOT in the WordPress interface because as soon as you mess it up, you can’t do anything to fix it because your site goes blank (including the back end). Me? I’m waiting for the next update to the theme before trying any funny business.

I haven’t written as much here in the last two years as I did in the years before that. Part of that is because most of the conversation happens on FriendFeed these days, part of that is because I’ve been sick the whole time. I have all kinds of post stubs in my drafts that I just didn’t have the energy to flesh out into real posts with, you know, full sentences and maybe a paragraph break.

In that time many of my favorite blogs have petered out, a few have blown up, and a couple people whose opinions I respect a lot have told me that blogging just isn’t worth it any more, that they kind of wish people wouldn’t keep throwing posts into the void. And for a while I was inclined to agree and acknowledge that it’s perfectly likely that people see Pegasus Librarian pop up in their aggregators or on FriendFeed and think “Aw man, her again? Doesn’t she know she’s boring? *mark as read*”

But lately I’ve felt more and more like posting mundane little things here again, and maybe soon I’ll start working through a few of the more promising post stubs from the dark period of the last two years. For me, worrying about the death of blogging and worrying about whether anyone cared that I post here seems to have been more tied to my feelings about other things in my personal life than it was to the actual act of posting here. For me, realizing that I care again that I own and archive my thoughts, that I’m ok with this not being a conversation space if conversation doesn’t happen, and that it matters more that I have a thinky space for me than that I have one for anyone else — these things are all making me feel less like I’m clinging to nostalgia or that I’m in denial whenever I post. When FriendFeed dies, I still want to have access to some of my thoughts.

Of course, I say this just as Fall Term is about to start, so there’s no telling when I’ll have time to write much. But you never know.

I think I need two blogs, but I only want one. What I really want are nested blogs.

Here’s the thing, I have some longer-form things I may want to actually *write* rather than just think about writing, but long-form doesn’t really go over well in Blog World. So I’d like to have a place to put those that’s a little separate from my main blog, and then I’d like to use this blog to just gloss those a little and point to the longer essays in case anyone’s interest gets whetted. So I guess what I want is an “essays” page here that’s really another blog to house the essays.

I could use the “more” tag, but that would still dump the long essay in people’s RSS aggregators (I think), which seems a little inconsiderate of those who really don’t want to slog through more than a few paragraphs of my writing at a time.

I could use “pages” that are just not included in the navigation, but that would rely pretty heavily on a plugin. And besides, true masochists who might want to subscribe to those essays would be out of luck.

I could simply upload completely separate files and link to them, but I’d really like to avoid that scenario. For one thing, I doubt I’d ever actually do it if it required too many different types of composition platforms and upload steps. That starts to seem like work!

And if any of you suggest I go in for formal publication… but no, you wouldn’t do that to me, would you? I’m allergic to formal publication.

So I don’t know quite what to do, or if this is even a good idea. Any ideas?