Must remember: No pasting from MS Word into WordPress. It’s faster to paste plain text and redo formatting than clean up Word’s mess.
Reclaiming BlogExplosion
I haven’t written much about BlogExplosion in a long time. I participated a lot for a few months, then kind of left it alone for a while, until I came back to it last year when I launched Speed Force.
Sadly, in the last few months its owners seem to have abandoned the site to let it run on autopilot. Most of it is automated, but there are features that require administration: approving new blogs and banners, moderating the forums, etc. The few volunteers with the ability to approve submissions are swamped, the main page promotes features that no longer exist, and the forums are overrun with spam.
In the past two months the community has attempted to take back the forums by out-posting the spammers, and it seems to be helping, but it’s not enough. The next step is a letter-writing campaign to convince BlogExplosion’s owners to at least delegate some authority to community volunteers who are willing to put in the effort to take care of the site.
Rather than send the form letter, I decided to write my own, and sent the following this morning:
Spamisch
Excerpt from weird mixed German/English comment spam: “Dear me, that evil car sensibly stung out of this suspicious slot tipps.”
Snowy San Gabriels above Irvine
Irvine in the foreground, Peter’s Canyon in the middle distance, and far in the distance, the San Gabriel Mountains covered in snow.
Reading Comics on the Phone: Hexed on the G1
There’s been a lot of talk about digital distribution of comics lately, what with declining print sales and shrinking distribution channels. In particular, the idea of comics on the iPhone has produced a lot of discussion, with iVerse Media distributing a number of comics from small publishers like IDW and Boom through the iPhone Marketplace. Not having an iPhone, I haven’t been able to check them out, but they’ve just released their first comic for the Android operating system, which runs my current phone, the T-Mobile G1.
I figured, hey, this one’s free, why not check it out?
Finding and Downloading
The first problem I had was finding it. But that’s mostly the fault of the Android Market, which can only be browsed by hierarchy and sorted by date or popularity. Fortunately, there’s a search function, so I just searched for “Hexed” and it turned up immediately.
It took a while to download even over 3G, so I let it sit and came back to it when I had time to take a break.
The web is still round
La Mancha
Home from seeing Brent Spiner in Man of La Mancha. Very good.
Update: Here’s a friend’s review of the production.
