Last Post, for now...

So the Blogger deadline is upon me, and, as usual, I have no idea what to do. Should I just live with the blog being hosted on Blogger, install WordPress on my server and generate the blog from there, or find some free PHP script that allows me to customize the blog's appearance while still maintaining some form of independence?

Whatever the answer, I now that this will probably be the last update for a moment or two. Who knows, when you see me next I may be new and improved.

Or I could really look crappy. It's a toss up.

Bye, for now...

Wordpress and the Blogger FTP debacle

So I have to move and I hate to move. Don't we all?

I mean, sometimes moving can be cool. A new house, new apartment, new car, new spouse: all examples of movement. But this is a different type of moving. I have to move my blog, and it's causing me all kinds of anxiety. I've been with blogger for nearly four years (the first post hit the web in August 2006), and I've either used their site to host my blog or have used the Blogger FTP service to post my stuff to my own web site (now nearly two years old). So I haven't really had to do too much differently at all.

But now Blogger is doing away with FTP services and so I won't be able to use the service to populate my website. I could use the migration tool provided by Blogger that will move my posts to a new custom domain URL, a process that has its limitations, or I could jump ship and do what I figured I would do eventually anyway: try WordPress.

So I'm embarking on installing WordPress on this site and moving all Sharper Thesis over to the new platform. Since Blogger is making me either change or leave by May 1st, I have little time. If the blog is down for awhile, I apologize now. I'll figure it out, but it may take time.

Change is scary, but usually good. Let's hope.

Blogs and the Problem with Writing

Blogging and "Jaws" have a lot more in common than we think.

But this isn't a post about sharks; it is a post about blogging, or e-writing, or web logging, or whatever you call this thing that I'm doing right now. So, to get right to it, I think I've figured out why my students don't want to blog. Not like it's a great mystery, after all, but bear with me. First, they don't like to write. No-brainer. If a person doesn't like to swim, don't give them a high tech bathing suit and tell them that it will make swimming anything other than the terrifying activity it can be. Or, to tie in a bit closer to the image on the left, don't tell a person who is deathly afraid of sharks (*ahem*- who could that be?) that he or she will be safe from the beast sitting in a twelve and a half foot sea kayak that is shaped unmistakably like a seal, the shark's meal of preference. Just because blogging is glitzy and shiny because it's online- which, in all truth, only appeals to us older digital immigrants, not to the younger natives- doesn't mean it will make the endeavor any easier.

Second: they don't see the point. Much like I don't see the point in doing what the suicidal bloke in the picture is doing, my students don't see the point in writing long posts that resemble, gasp, real writing, when they can fire off rapid fire Facebook status updates that hit closer to the audience they are looking to reach: their friends. Blogs are for the long winded. Text messages and Facebook and Twitter all force brevity, a more natural state of being for them.

So why should I force them if they really are scared or can't see the point? Because, unlike sea kayaking, real writing- be it technical writing, or memo writing, or penning the great American novel- is a life skill they will need to survive. Real job related writing will not be done in 140 character outbursts, but in thought out, logically structured, clear paragraphs. Not that shorter forms aren't valuable and will arguably take on a more prominent role in our collective communication (already have, really; look at the rise of Twitter in journalism), but to abandon the longer forms of discourse would be like giving in to the shorthand of the day, and, inevitably, would be doing my young thinkers a disservice. So blog we must. And write essays we must, and research papers, and position papers, and abstracts, and all of the things that made our high school and college writing classes torture.

But, hey, no matter how bad they got, they had to have felt better than that guy in the kayak feels. OMG!

Spring Break

I love Wallace Stevens (sooooooo applicable right now)...

Light the first light of evening, as in a room
In which we rest and, for a small reason, think
The world imagined is the ultimate good.

This is, therefore, the intensest rendezvous.
It is in that thought that we collect ourselves,
Out of all the indifferences, into one thing:

Within a single thing, a single shawl
Wrapped tightly around us, since we are poor, a warmth,
A light, a power, the miraculous influence.

Here, now, we forget each other and ourselves.
We feel the obscurity of an order, a whole,
A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous,

Within its vital boundary, in the mind.
We say God and the imagination are one...
How high that highest candle lights the dark.

Out of this same light, out of the central mind,
We make a dwelling in the evening air,
In which being there together is enough.

Wallace Stevens, Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour