PhD Blog (dot) Net

My blogroll in the side column is not just for show. These are all the blogs that I actually read regularly through my feed/RSS reader. I choose to use a desktop reader (Vienna), simply because I find it better than any browser-based or online platforms I’ve tried. However, in doing so, I feel obliged to publicly replicate my blog list here. So, whenever I add a blog to my reader, I also add the link to my blogroll.

There is a significant overlap in my blogging and Twitter networks, and I’m increasingly finding when I access the reader (which I tend to do every two or three days), that I’ve already viewed many of the blog posts through following links on Twitter (which I typically access several times a day). This resonates with the duplicity of networks, differing frequencies of use, and transference of tasks that I’ve observed in studying the social media practices of doctoral students.

To date, according to my stats plug-in, the five most viewed posts on this blog are:

• Visitors and Residents (7 November 2009)
• Zotero or Bust (22 November 2009)
• Visualizing Social Bookmarks (11 January 2009)
• Future Minds (20 October 2009)
• The (Mis)Education of Lennie Godber: ‘Stir’ as a Community of Practice – or – Situation Comedy meets Situated Learning (9 December 2009)

My blog is one year old today! Despite a few early teething problems and the occasional mishap, it’s been erm… a piece of cake.

Thanks to everyone who’s contributed.

I’ve started a private war on web pages and blogs with white / pale text on black / dark backgrounds. I’m sure the temporary blindness you get from jumping back to a ‘normal’ web page (i.e. one with a light background) is not healthy. Most times I come across one, I click straight out again, no matter how good the content is. I’d like a browser that forewarns me when I’m opening such a page, or better still one that automatically inverts the colours (wouldn’t that be cool!). In the right context, ‘light-on-dark’ design can be great – particularly on visual sites with little text – but in most cases, it is used indiscriminately and unnecessarily. Unless you’re a goth, I can’t think of many reasons why you should even consider it – it’s not good design, it does not promote web accessibility, and it’s not good for my health.

To verify a WordPress blog with Google Webmaster Tools do the following:

• Sign into Google Webmaster Tools with your Google Account
• In the Home Page click Add a site… and type the full URL of the site you want to add
• Click Continue to go to the Site Verification page
• In the Name box, type a name for your site (e.g. My Blog) (optional)
• Select “Upload an HTML file” as the verification method
• Google will provide you with a long code (for example: googlec5a889453be1474d.html)
• In a new browser window / tab go to your WordPress Dashboard and create a new page
• Copy the Google code into the title bar and publish the page (no need to add content)
• Go back to the Site Verification page and click “Verify’

If you are are using the page menu widget your new page will have appeared in the menu. To delete this from the menu:

• Go to the Widgets page and open up the Pages drop down menu
• Type in the Page ID of the new page in the Exclude bar and click save
• (To find the Page ID go to edit the page and copy the last 3 digits of the URL)

I’m frequently surprised at the quick response rates on some blogs, and on occasions, I’ve been reluctant to submit a comment just because I happen to have taken several days getting round to reading a post. Is a comment devalued because it may be a few days or weeks ‘too late’? Do bloggers give up responding to comments after a given period? I regularly read about 100 blogs through RSS (with my recent switch to using a Mac, I now use Vienna). I try to do this every day, but hey, we all have other things to do in our lives.

Whilst I recognize the affordances of currency and informality which blogging provides over other forms of academic discourse, has the emphasis on immediacy gone too far? Jane Knight’s useful weekly round-up of blog posts and bookmarks (her latest is here) reminds me that, by default, many blogging architectures enable weekly, monthly and yearly summaries, whilst tagging systems provide effective archive retrieval through subject matter. I sometimes come across blog posts several years old that are still of profound interest and relevance. As blog posts are increasingly cited in formal academic literature, how do we best negotiate the vast cultural and temporal inconsistencies which exist between them?