Metablogging

How's that for thorough, KP?

Not having anything else weighing on my mind with which to fill the following eighteen inches of your screen, I'm going to attempt to blog about blogging. Surely no one has ever done this before.

Point the First: The Exodus of an Exemplar

So the reigning queen of blogging, at least within the Solomon's Porch community, seems to be resolute in her foolish insistence upon retiring from the blogsphere. She has fixed the date of her departure as September 25, so at least we can all quell our sorrow with the season premiere of West Wing. Anyway, in the post linked above, she cited my "thorough" blogroll as a source of security regarding her decision. For contributing in even the smallest aspect to KP's blogging cessation I or at least my blogroll should be "thoroughly" flogged, but I figure if you're going to be thorough about something, it's best to be thoroughly thorough. So to your right you now see every reasonably active Solomon's Porch blog I'm aware of. Please let me know if I missed anybody, and take the opportunity to visit someone you don't know!

Not yet, though, I'm not finished with you.

While I'm blogging about blogging, there are a couple topics about which I've been seeing some grief expressed on other blogs recently. (Pause for grammar check...yeah, that sentence makes sense. Sorry if you have to read it a couple times to get it.) They are:

Point the Second: Blogger's Voracious Appetite for Posts in Progress

Here. Here. Here. The best and brightest among us, as well as David, have lost posts in composition. This has never happened to me. None of the victimized have included details as to exactly what happened, so I'm not sure what I'm doing right. If I knew I'd share. Or perhaps my time is coming. But one trick I've made a habit of (comes from ten years of using hotmail) is to hit Ctrl+A (select all) then Ctrl+C (copy) before posting/sending. If your inestimable exposition is then extinguished, a quick Ctrl+V will bring it all back. I'm not sure if Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V work on Macs, but there must be an iQuivalent.

Point the Third: Comment Spam

Here and here. Yes, it's annoying, but on a scale of 1 to Barney I would put it somewhere between unfunny bumper stickers and hard butter, far below mosquito bites, parking tickets or Tom Bernard. Unwanted comments are extremely easy to delete (see the little trash can right under them?), so I prefer to just remove them rather than make people transcribe something like this in order to furnish me with the comments which I so deperately crave.

Which brings me to Point the Fourth: My Ego

Let's not be obtuse here. This the whole point of my blog; indeed, of the very concept of blogging. (Not an entirely correct usage of the semicolon, perhaps.) Last night at church someone told me she'd been reading my blog. I apologized, but apparently she's actually been enjoying it. Who knew? The point is, we bloggers like to know our audience. We aim to please. We want praise when you like what we're doing, so we can do more of it. We want criticism when we churn out 390 words of utter crap, so we know not to write about the State Fair again. We want you to correct our math, dispute our politics and mock our mispellings. In short, we just want to know you're out there.

Okay, I'm finished. You can go check out the blogroll now. After you leave your comment, of course.