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Sratim Mei’eretz Yisrael
I’ve never been to the New York Public Library before, and clearly that was a mistake. Especially considering that I have hung out in the British Library a few times. This building is gorgeous.
Of course, the fact that I’m here doing research for a college research assignment isn’t a big deal. The fact that I am doing research in Hebrew, though, is not only a big deal but also HILARIOUS. Because my Hebrew is mostly verbal and not exactly fantastic. And here I am. Waiting for four (FOUR) books in Hebrew. Which I will attempt to read. And take notes on. And possibly photocopy for later.
This project on the Israeli Audiovisual Industry is getting more hilarious by the day.
Blogging Platforms
I have a friend who hates WordPress.
I’m not sure WordPress deserves it. Sure, it’s a little bit restrictive, and the controls feel almost outdated now like the whole thing could use a reboot. But as a blogging platform, it gives so many options, even if most of the default ones sort of scream “WORDPRESS” when you look at them. (I think her anger comes more from the fact that a lot of people take a WordPress base and build real looking websites. They look slick to the end user, but have you tried to use one? It’s incredibly counter-intuitive.)
So, on the one hand, as a non-programmer with limited HTML knowledge at best, I’m awfully fond of WordPress.
But shhhhh — don’t tell — I dislike it a little too.
It’s undeserved. WordPress is still good at what it does. But what it does is pretty limited.
I’m a blogger, yeah. This isn’t my first blog under my real name, I made a Blogger blog a few years ago, because I was in Israel and it was easier to update there than email everyone about my activities. I was pretty horrible at updating that blog as well.
On the other hand, I’m a whiz at updating facebook. Which is, in a micro sense, a blog! A little blog, snippets of thoughts for just your friends, but the status updates are basically blog posts, And they invite conversation and debate. They also invite useless idiocy and insults for some people. The length is limited and I can’t control anything about the appearance, yeah. But while WordPress is a great blogging platform and Facebooks is a pretty terrible one (I think) the social interaction is happening on Facebook, not on WordPress. And I think that’s the problem.
The only two blogging platforms that I can think of that actually combine the social aspects with the blogging aspects are Livejournal and Tumblr. (And Twitter, possibly, but Twitter is the epitome of micro-blogging and has more limitations than Facebook, which is saying something.)
Livejournal has a somewhat negative reputation online for being full of whiny teenagers who write emo poetry and wear black. It’s an undeserved reputation, especially when you realize that it’s a highly respected blogging site in Russia, used by Russian politicians.
It’s a stagnated site in many ways. The ultimate design hasn’t changed in years, and typically that’s a bad thing. But it’s brilliant in it’s simplicity. You make a blog/username, and you can use it anywhere on the site. Comment on other blogs, sure. But the Community feature is key. Do you like crafts? Join a community and talk about it with people! Live in New York? There’s probably a community for you. Where you can post, and other people will respond. You can choose communities or journals to follow, and your friends page is an automatically generated RSS feed of all of those choices.
There are forks of Livejournal (Ultimatejournal, Insanejournal, Dreamwidth) but the most people are on the main site. And in social networking, people are key.
Now, Tumblr is new and it’s still figuring itself out. I like to call it “twitter for pictures” which is shortchanging the site, but not by much. People mostly use it to post images, and links and gifs. Mostly a “look how cool this is everybody!” sort of place. Now, you can do full text posts, but they don’t look as interesting, and the way commenting works is a mess. Really, the comments get horribly stacked and it can be hard to track who said what and when the screen is too narrow the comments get narrower and narrower…it’s just messy. I have seen a few truly clever Tumblrs that utilize the format well (We are the 99 Percent is a good example) but overall, it’s not my type of site.
But again, it has the people, and it supports the social networking structure very, very well.
Back to WordPress. I’m not expecting people to read my blog just because it exists, obviously. But if I want to put up a post about how I’ve been making bentos, there’s no way to network with other WordPress users who make bentos. If I want to put up a post about fun things to do in New York City, I can’t network with people about that. It’s like I’m operating in Web 2.0 and on all my other platforms I’m already on Web 3.0. I want to blog. I have a lot to say. But the structure I’m working with means that I can’t necessarily find other people to talk to.
It’s one of the reasons I have at least a dozen drafted posts scattered around my hard drive. I want to write, sure, but I want to discourse even more. And even when I cross-post to Facebook, I can’t blame people for not responding here. It’s just not as accommodating.
(This is where Google+ could have just been amazing. If you combine a real social networking site with a blogging platform? I would have been far more over that. Circles are nice. I want a blog that all my friends can see and comment and argue about.)
The year turns over at a different time for students.
I have been intending for this blog to be something more. It started as a Macaulalay College requirement, to post about my doings while studying abroad in the United Kingdom, and I think I’ve had mixed success. Certainly I got the blogging done, but I never managed a consistent pattern of posting.
But I’m trying to structure my life more this semester, at the beginning of my last year of Queens College. I have long-term plans that I need to sort out for myself, like what I’m doing next year, where I want to go from here.
For now I’m focusing on more short-term goals. Setting up my weekly gym schedule around my classes this semester. Study groups for BALA 303 and physics classes. Planning and cooking meals for the week. Cleaning up the apartment and keeping it that way. Making and arranging shabbos.
And working on my Macaulay thesis, because that’s something I want to try and get as close to finished as possible in a single semester, despite my lack of a firm idea.
I’ve been quietly recording a lot of my media habits on this on some of the pages. At this point, I’d like to just be able to keep track of the various books, movies and films I watch and read. As a media studies major, I want to work on the types of media I’m absorbing, as well as the “quality.”
With all of this, I’m hoping to set up a rhythm of posting at least once a week. Thoughts, musings, ideas. I could write about an episode of 30 Rock or my adventures in bug-catching, as the official bug-catcher of my apartment. This blog is going to turn into more disjointed rambling and thoughts on myself. At some point I hope to do a more thorough wrap-up of my study abroad experience, perhaps when comparing it to my time back at Queens.
And, of course, lots of experimenting with the layout of this blog!
The header right now is Caerphilly Castle, an enormous castle a short bus ride from the center of Cardiff. The background is another shot of the same castle, not that you can really tell from the way the current layout.
Early Blog Musings
I’m still experimenting on the format for this blog, but I doubt I’m going to keep it for only study abroad stuff. Although I might. Who knows? I’m probably also going to change the color scheme. I like this format better than the old one – the text is larger, and the format seems cleaner to me, but I tend to favor more color.
While I’m rambling about the structure, I thought it might be nice to explain the header and title. The header picture is a screencap from my current favorite TV series, Doctor Who. It’s a British show, about an alien called the Doctor who travels through space and time with human friends. The reason I love it so much is that it’s such a family show – no excessive sex or violence, but it’s still fun for adults as well as children.
Anyway, the picture is from an episode in the fifth series of the relaunch, and the two actors are Matt Smith (the eleventh actor to play the alien Doctor) and Karen Gillan, who plays Amy, one of the humans to travel with the Doctor. On the other side of the screen is the TARDIS, the time/space ship that the Doctor travels in. It resembles a 1960’s-era blue Police Box on the outside, but it’s far bigger on the inside.
The title of the blog, (which I’ve just changed from, “he said I was brilliant and I could change the world,” to, “there is so much more to see,” and will probably change on a whim) is taken from a song called “An Awful Lot of Running” by Chameleon Circuit. The band is the first of a self-made genre called, “Time Lord Rock,” which is a direct reference to Wizard Rock. Wizard Rock was started by fans of Harry Potter, and basically refers to music and bands that write and perform songs based on the Harry Potter books and movies and fandom. Time Lord Rock (Trock) is the exact same idea, but for Doctor Who fans.
Also, for posterity, here is a screencap of my blog as it looks as I write this post.
