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

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

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.

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.

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?

While you’re here, let me know if there’s something that’s not working the way you think it should (internal permalinks are definitely one of those things, I know — I’m investigating my options there). Perpetual Beta, Baby!

The blog template portion of my reflections probably isn’t very interesting. Little by little I’m tweaking small things like line spacing, distribution of white space, and figuring out how to keep the sidebar from competing for eye-time with the body text. (Just as a side note, I’ve realized that for the kind of writing I do, the sidebar and the navigational function it represents isn’t the most important piece of the site, and therefore shouldn’t have the coveted left side.) I know just enough CSS to mess up a good template, and I use it so rarely that every time I do, I have to relearn it. But little by little I’m tweaking the site to allow for easier reading. And this challenge is enough fun that I’m ignoring the little voice in my head that screams, “But everyone’s reading this in their feed readers anyway! Who cares what the site looks like!!”

The article’s respect for the reader, though, has much farther reaching implications. It stretches into the far corners of my experience to touch everything from interpersonal relations to prose. For example, my co-workers and I were talking over dinner about how the best managers are those that assume that their employees have good intentions and want to do well. This assumption helps them approach difficult situations in constructive ways, and goes a long way toward helping employees to actually do well. I realized that this was analogous to the epiphany I had in graduate school when I realized that the best articles and essays assumed that those who did or would disagree with them had arrived at their conclusions in perfectly reasonable ways. Up until that point, I’d thought the best “argue against those who disagree with you” portions of my papers should be point by point deconstructions of my opponent’s arguments with the goal of showing how much smarter I was than they were. But as it turns out, in the real world this just makes people think you’re arrogant and a bit of a rhetorical show-off.

No, what I like about Mandy Brown’s writing is that she didn’t take the easy attacks on either side of the debate about reading online vs reading in glorious everyone-knows-this-is-aesthetically-more-pleasing print. Her writing could be appreciated by those who think books are the only way to go and those who rarely curl up with anything other than a laptop. It embodied the kind of attitude toward potentially disagreeing readers that I’ve always hoped I could pull off, if I tried very hard. And by pulling this off, Brown’s writing was not only “In Defense of Readers,” but it also defended its readers from the gratuitous barbs that might have prevented them from hearing her underlying arguments.

Two years ago, I mentioned that participating in the biblioblogosphere was like attending a conference every day. A year ago, a good portion of my evenings were spent reading, thinking about, and responding to other librarians’ blogs. This was what kept me feeling connected to the larger world of librarianship. This was what made me feel useful beyond my own patron community. And this was a major source of contact with librarians whom I had come to regard as friends.

But lately, I wake up to find that my RSS aggregator has very few new posts from this once-prolific core of librarian bloggers, and I certainly haven’t been contributing to anyone’s aggregator overload recently. Not by a long stretch.

In my darker moments, I worry that we’re a little bit burned out, or that we’ve given up trying to change the world by weighing in on issues large and small. But while there may be some of this at work, I think it has more to do with a shift in communication patterns. Two years ago, blogs provided a venue for people’s carefully thought-out ideas as well as for their off-the-cuff thoughts, gut reactions, and general banter. In this way, they were like the sessions and the between- and after-session banter at a conference. Today I think that blogs have begun to take on the more focused character of the actual sessions at a conference while places like Twitter and FriendFeed have become the venue for the between-and after-session banter. We pass each other in the micro-blogging hallway, have conversations about everything from OCLC’s latest craziness to weekend entertainment plans, shout hello to other passers-by, and show each other our pictures or the latest new gaget we’re playing with. Then, when we have something more formal to say, we take the time to sit down and compose a blog post to present to our peers.

Then again, maybe this is just a very long justification for the decline and fall of a small portion of the librarian blogosphere.

It’s not for lack of things happening or anything like that. As far as I can tell, it started with a sudden surge in readership (which made me suddenly quite shy), coupled with extra-crazy-busy schedules, all of which coincided with my starting to work on projects with people that I didn’t think would be comfortable with their work being blogged. I also had a 6-month slump in energy, which didn’t help any of this stuff.

But I don’t think that’s all of what’s changed for me. I think that fundamentally, this space has changed. For one thing, I’m not a brand new librarian any more, no matter how much I know that I still have a world of expertise to acquire. I’m not constantly figuring out what my place is in this profession like I was when I started writing here. But more than that, like Dorothea I’m finding that changing context is changing everything, and that I’m trying to figure out either how to make this back into my living room or how to come to terms with the fact that it’s not my living room. All of which means that I’m kind of inventing a new purpose and context for this space as I go along. It’s turned far more essay-ish than it was before, with far fewer links, and I’ve felt more compelled to have “complete thoughts” than I used to. And I’m not sure if that’s good or bad or just different, or if I like it or not, but that’s what’s happened.

I’m hoping to step back into this blog and fit it to myself again. I really do miss the burning desire to get home every night and write something. And while I’ll probably never write every day, I think there’s hope that I’ll figure out my contexts, especially now that I’ve taken some time off this summer and have started to feel a little more energetic.

Of course, then came hours and hours of fighting with Blogger to make it sit right on the page (I’m sorry, Tim. I didn’t know it’d be such a hassle). But now each time I look at my blog I think about how talented and generous Tim is.