Category Archives: Blogs and Blogging

Reviews of blogs, posts about blogging culture, tips on using WordPress — it’s all here.

You need a thneed

Posted on November 30, 2011 by Dave Bonta

This year, I will pay more than $400 for web hosting, domain registration, photo hosting at Flickr, and video hosting at Vimeo, to say nothing of the occasional gadget and software purchases… all for Via Negativa and its sister sites (The Morning Porch, Moving Poems, Woodrat photohaiku, Shadow Cabinet, Spoil, etc.). And I live on an extremely limited income. How limited? Let’s just say that I haven’t made enough to pay income tax in years.

Direct begging is one approach, and I haven’t ruled that out yet. But I like giving people something for their money. So may I introduce to you (drumroll please) the Via Negativa swag store at CafePress.com.

All wu, no woo doggy t-shirt

The Chinese character wu (Japanese mu) has been the sort-of logo for Via Negativa and the Via Negativa blog cluster for some time now. (I grabbed a public-domain image from the Wikimedia Commons; that’s not my calligraphy.) This is the wu of the Daoist ideal, wu wei, and in Chan/Zen Buddhist circles, it was Zhaozhou’s famously ambiguous answer to a koan: Does a dog have buddha-nature or not?

Long before The Morning Porch, in the early years of this blog I had an almost daily cartoon — possibly the world’s least action-packed comic — called Words on the Street. Today I dug out the original drawing, rescanned it, and re-created a number of the cartoons at high enough resolution to reproduce on shirts and mugs.

Some of my best friends are invisible

I’ve made nine of my personal favorite WotS cartoons available on items at the new storefront. I was fairly conservative about what I put them on, but if you want them on other CafePress offerings, just let me know. The fuller range of items for the wu/woo design will give you an idea of what’s possible. (I’m hoping to pull together a print-on-demand book from the new/old Words on the Street cartoons, too, but I’m not sure I’ll be able to finish it in time for holiday shopping.)

I’ve added a mark-up of just 10% to everything at the store, so I’m probably not going to get rich, unless this blog has a lot more fans than I think. But it was blast working on these designs, and if all that happens is a few Via Negativa readers get a good chuckle, that’s still a good outcome as far as I’m concerned.

Insulated beer can holder

In slightly less-commercial Via Negativa-related news, I guess I should mention, for the benefit of anyone who didn’t see my link on Facebook, that my collection Breakdown: Banjo Poems will be coming out from my favorite chapbook publisher, Seven Kitchens Press, in May. First drafts of all those poems originally appeared right here, so thanks to everyone who left comments and offered encouragement.

Posted in Blogs and Blogging | 12 Comments

Do poetry videos reach larger audiences than poems on the page?

Posted on November 28, 2011 by Dave Bonta

In her most recent Friday Video/Filmpoem post at Rubies in Crystal, featuring Glenn-emlyn Richards’ animation of a poem by Eleanor Rees called “Saltwater,” Brenda Clews describes a recent attempt to turn an audience on to videopoetry:

I treated a group to a series of video/film poems, only a few, because they tired very quickly — poetry is demanding enough on the page, let alone strung at you in a video where you can’t slow down, re-read, consider before moving on – but someone said, the one with the woman, the drawing, the ocean, that one was my favourite. In unison, they all agreed.

I commented that I was struck by her claim that video/filmpoems are actually more demanding than poems on the page. So many people make the opposite claim, especially about animated poems. Here, for example, is how the folks at Motion Poems promote their efforts to potential donors at Razoo.com:

Contemporary poetry is a mystery to most casual readers: they rarely read it, and would have a hard time discovering great new poetry on their own. We think that’s a shame! So…

MOTIONPOEMS subverts that paradigm by giving casual readers a new way to discover poetry … as short films! That way, they can be distributed virally and on YouTube, in social networks, in classrooms, and in broadcast and film media. [ellipses original]

In close to three years of sharing videos, animated and otherwise, at Moving Poems, I’ve seen steady traffic but nothing to suggest I’m reaching very far beyond the existing fan base for poetry. The most popular videos tend to be those for Latin American poets, in particular Vicente Huidobro and Julia de Burgos. This makes sense: poetry is actually fairly popular in the Spanish-speaking world.

Of course, I do suck at promotion. With the names of poets included in the post titles at Moving Poems, and a reasonably good PageRank, the site is practically guaranteed to land in the first page of Google results for most poets I include. So O.K., I’m drawing in people who are already interested in poetry. But since I don’t use tags to describe the contents of the poems — something I’m reluctant to do on the grounds that it reduces a poem to the sum of its ostensible subjects — it’s very unlikely that, for example, someone interested in the Liverpudlian waterfront would land on my post of “Saltwater” (or Brenda’s, or Glenn-emlyn’s original upload at Vimeo), unless they did some very creative Google video search.

So yeah, doing things like using more descriptive tags could bring more traffic… but would that really enlarge the audience for poetry, or just disappoint more people looking for, you know, information? The question remains: Is mere conversion to the film or video medium enough to overcome the general reluctance of English-language readers to challenge themselves?

On YouTube and Vimeo, the most popular poetry videos in English tend to be either those for poets who are already popular (relatively speaking), such as Billy Collins and Rumi, or for videos that make a simple point extremely well and go viral as a result, such as a kinetic text animation for a spoken-word piece by Taylor Mali about people’s reluctance to express firm opinions, or Tanya Davis and Andrea Dorfman’s powerful statement on “How to Be Alone.”

I do think there’s an extent to which online poems in whatever form are helping to create a larger audience for poetry among those who have always kind of liked poems and/or enjoy an intellectual challenge, but may not be in the habit of sitting down to read poetry books and journals. That’s been my experience over the years with a number of sites, most notably this one, where I think one key to success has been my pattern of interspersing poems with other, more popular kinds of content (photos, personal or nature essays, brief polemics, etc.). This is the kind of thing blogs are good at: People come for the other stuff, develop an interest in the author, and eventually start reading the poems, too.

But if I ever thought that making and posting videopoems would enlarge the fan base for poetry here, I lost that illusion a long time ago. My videopoems usually average around 100 views — one quarter of what a poem in text form gets. That’s not as skewed as it sounds, since Vimeo only logs views from people who watch all the way to the end, and I don’t of course have comparable statistics for people who read a poem all the way through. The actual number of thorough readers may not be much more than 100 per poem. But the evidence so far does not suggest that Via Negativa visitors are more likely to take in a poem just because I’ve envideoed it.

So while I fervently hope that the animators at Motion Poems and similar projects are successful in bringing new audiences to poetry, I do tend to agree with Brenda that more elliptical or experimental film/videopoets will have to work at least as hard as traditional page-poets to reach an audience in the Anglophone world.

Posted in Blogs and Blogging, Poets and poetry | Tagged , , , | 11 Comments

A word about email subscriptions

Posted on November 17, 2011 by Dave Bonta

A couple days ago I switched delivery systems for the daily email version of Via Negativa’s feed from Feedblitz to MailChimp. I imported the list of subscribers and then stopped delivery of the former. My reason was simple: the free version of Feedblitz has too many ads, and they sometimes cross the line from distracting to offensive (an ad for the men’s magazine Maxim featuring a photo of a woman’s butt in a bikini right after one of Luisa’s poems?!). I was already using MailChimp for a couple other lists, including the popular weekly digest of posts at Moving Poems and it seems to work out. They allow 10,000 free emails a month through their system, so I think it’ll be a while before I exceed that.

I believe all active daily Via Negativa subscribers should now be on the new system, but if not, use the link in the black bar under the header here to sign up. You’ll notice a drop-down link to the weekly digest — which now includes full text of all posts — if you prefer that. One thing to note is that MailChimp isn’t as good as Feedblitz in inserting spaces for paragraph and stanza breaks in all email systems, but each post has a link you can click on to see it as it’s supposed to look on the web.

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I keep telling myself I’m going to do a proper post comparing the different free follow-by-email options for bloggers, but who knows if I’ll get around to that. Another ad-free option I’ve used in the past is Feedburner, and it was also pretty good. If you’re using Feedburner for your main feed anyway, I’d advise trying it. If your site is hosted by WordPress.com, though, I strongly advise just using their own email subscription service, available as a widget. It’s gotten better and better with formatting, and as a result we’re about to switch to it at qarrtsiluni. As an added bonus, when people sign up through that form, they get to choose their delivery option: instantaneous, daily, or weekly.

Posted in Blogs and Blogging | 2 Comments

About the new look

Posted on November 13, 2011 by Dave Bonta

Visitors to Via Negativa in the last few hours may have noticed some differences. I’m experimenting with a new theme (that’s the design template, for you non-WordPressers) which, though very similar to the old theme in looks, differs substantially under the hood. If you use an iPad, netbook, Kindle, iPhone, Android, or other small-screened computer-like thing, you should find that the site scales down without making you scroll horizontally. I can only simulate the effect by shrinking the window on my desktop, but here’s what happens: the sidebar content shifts down below the main content, and more impressively, the header image and all other images and videos shrink proportionally. Impressive, eh? This is called responsive design, and it is a step beyond the flexible designs of yesteryear, which tended to result in overlapping or squashed images (which is why I always went for fixed-width themes). I’d be interested in any and all feedback on this from those of you who actually browse the web on these newfangled mobile devices.

In other news, for those who missed my note on Facebook this morning, the photoblog is back at the old address with a new name, Woodrat photohaiku, and a new photo to celebrate. I decided to move it to WordPress.com, which means that the four main sites on the Via Negativa network are all back online, split between three different webhosts. Never again will I put all my eggs in one basket.

I also feel I’m a lot closer to diagnosing and thus solving the problems that caused me to get shut down repeatedly at my old hosting company, thanks to the excellent documentation at Dreamhost, where Via Negativa now resides. Turns out that even with top-of-the-line page-caching and spam-stopping plugins, a blizzard of comment and trackback spam can still cause CPU usage to go through the roof, because every time someone (or some bot) enters a comment, it refreshes the cache. I don’t know if this was the whole of my problem, but it certainly might explain those mysterious CPU spikes at 2:00 in the morning. So I’ve turned off all trackbacks, turned off comments on posts older than one month (which really pains me), and am experimenting with new plugins that cache things differently.

The funny thing is, I almost miss those 1.8 million spam comments that had accumulated in Via Negativa’s old database. I had always felt a perverse sense of accomplishment seeing the numbers mount on my dashboard, figuring that since Aksimet caught 99.9% of them, they were a harmless, occasionally amusing annoyance. If only I’d known.

Sorry for all the WordPress-related stuff here lately, by the way, but I don’t want you all to think that I’ve been idle! The truth is, I was mulling over switching to a responsive design a week ago, just before disaster struck, so making these changes makes me feel as if a week of poor sleeping and flailing around like a weak swimmer in a sea of code has been redeemed.

Posted in Blogs and Blogging | Tagged | 26 Comments

Back

Posted on November 10, 2011 by Dave Bonta

watch on YouTube

Yes, Via Negativa is back, thanks to these folks. Man, I love the WordPress community. Splitting my WordPress export file into small enough pieces to import allows me to start anew with a fresh installation, which is what I most wanted to do.

Not all functionality is back yet. For example, I’m trying a new audio player for the podcast which should display on mobile devices (it uses HTML5 with fallback to Flash in browsers that don’t support it), and I need to go through and stick the code in each episode. I need to rebuild a links page, and decide how to do Smorgasblog. I seem to have lost all those posts in the move, so this would be a good time to start over with a new system, maybe. I am still not ruling out a move to the reservation, but so far this web host seems considerably less Wild West than my last one. I’m impressed by their extensive documentation on everything, and their apparently more flexible and tolerant attitude toward sites that run too hot. Well, we’ll see about that.

I have lost the last three weeks of comments, which included, among other things, this gem by Clive Hicks-Jenkins, in response to my post “After Dark“:

I’d arrive at rehearsals bearing my cicada-moulted shell in a tissue-lined matchbox. (Who needs a Stradivarius? I travel light!) There would be but a single note got from it before it crumpled in exhaustion, but that would be a note of such supernatural perfection coming at the climax of the concert, that thereafter audiences would just file silently away, knowing that there would never be anything as beautiful in their lives again. Sigh.

(Fortunately, I subscribe to the comments feed, so I still have the texts of all your lovely comments. But I’m not quite dedicated enough to go import them all by hand, which would include putting in the proper email and web address for each.)

Posted in Blogs and Blogging | Tagged | 8 Comments

Holding pattern

Posted on November 9, 2011 by Dave Bonta

A wise blogging friend advised me today to stop running myself ragged trying to restore everything at once, and take as much time as I need to think through the gnarly problem of what to do with Via Negativa long-term. Moving Poems and The Morning Porch are back up on a new host, Luisa is continuing her daily poems in response to my porch posts (scroll down to see her three most recent), and I have this beachhead here until I sort things out.

Another blogger I admire recently migrated her site off of cheap shared web hosting and onto WordPress.com (which is about the same annual cost once you get the necessary upgrades), and has urged me to do the same. I’m very tempted. Via Negativa’s database is so bloated, I can’t even upload it here without trying to learn something called SSH. But even if I manage that, I have no guarantee that I won’t get kicked off this server, too, for exceeding CPU limits. This is a problem on all shared web hosting arrangements, from what I gather. Via Negativa has simply gotten too big for this environment, I think, and it’s time to either pay hundreds of dollars a year for VPS (a virtual private server — the next step up), or learn Drupal and attempt to export this beast to that more sturdily built content management system. Both options are way beyond my current technical abilites. At WordPess.com, by contrast, I’d never again have to worry about getting shut down for excessive CPU usage or crashing because of a traffic spike. Through some minor miracle I managed to import almost all VN posts to a nonce site there today, which almost made up my mind for me. But it would mean significant changes and sacrifices: most incoming links will be broken because of a slightly different permalink structure; the series will no longer work as such since they don’t support that taxonomy there (I would probably just use tags); I won’t have a fancy podcasting plugin and will have to content myself with a simple audio player for the Woodrat podcast; etc. And I will miss tinkering with the controls and pretending I really understand what makes it all fly.

Posted in Blogs and Blogging | Tagged | 9 Comments

May I have your attention please.

Posted on November 9, 2011 by Dave Bonta

This is your captain speaking. We have begun final descent from limbo and expect to be landing in Via Negativa soon. Please remain seated and turn off the overhead lights.

Posted in Blogs and Blogging | Tagged | 9 Comments

Lines from August 2005

Posted on August 25, 2011 by Dave Bonta

The song of the katydids always takes me back to previous Augusts… and in August 2005, when I was 39, I began a prolonged backward look with a series of poems in response to the searing and painfully honest poetry of Paul Zweig. At the same time, I was looking forward: getting ready to launch a new webzine, qarrtsiluni, with a small group of blogger-friends. I took a rare trip through the Via Negativa archives just now and found a few lines that still resonate, six years later. It’s sad to read scattered references to comments that are now lost (curse you, Haloscan and Blogger!). But at least the posts remain in all their sincerity, awkwardness, wince-worthy moments and occasionally graceful turns of phrase.

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I watch water flowing around a large rock, its translucent body a net of shadows as it folds back against itself. After ten minutes or so, I think I might understand something fundamental about water, its impetus to condense, to fall, to plumb the depths. But then I glance just a few feet to the left & am completely flummoxed by a large drift of foam. I had forgotten about tannins.
Two ways at once

Buy my silence: free samples
Words on the Street

Strip. Lay down your overburden, bare your black seam of heat where the shovels can reach it. Let rains tease your acids from the rock.

Strip, stripe of concrete between gas stations & inconvenience stores, chain restaurants, big box stores, motels, each marooned on its own island of tarmac. We are all strangers here, even the natives.

Strip: supposedly comic, unmoving pictures starring the same faces, day after day. We grimace at the punchlines: Neighborhood Grill and Bar, says the Applebee’s sign. Oh, do let’s take a stroll ’round the Village Square!
Blogging from the ninth circle

Late summer of my 40th year, I catch
an echo of my childhood in the nightly
chorus of katydids, their camouflaged
leaf-bodies falling out of & back into unison
like a concert audience that continues its rhythmic
clapping during a break in the music.
The pure distance

Ten-thirty in the small reception area at Scotty’s Discount Tire and Muffler in downtown Summersville, West Virginia (population 3,900). I return from a walk with my umbrella in the on-again, off-again drizzle and find my brother reading a history of India as he waits for news about the car. A small, white-haired lady in the next seat over is singing about Jesus.
They call it Stormy Monday

In the meantime, I have settled
into my body like a stone
at the bottom of a pond.
Written by the vanquished

I dreamed I drove a sprayer truck
slowly along the berm of a road
in prayerful silence.
Green plague

Sky-blue petals in
the wet grass. I crouch down,
my mind blank as a cloud.

Back home, I look it up, chagrined:
forget-me-not.
That great invention

Since I stopped following the news,
my dreams supply all the missing details
of earthquake, torture, & mass starvation.
Ask me anything.
Advancing into sleepless woods

I have planted myself here like
a yellow birch sapling on top of a hemlock stump
that rots away even as the birch encircles it
with an apron of roots, & a hundred
years later it still preserves, unseen,
the hollow shape of the corpse
that gave it life.
What remains

Posted in Blogs and Blogging, Poems & poem-like things | Comments Off

Ghost poems

Posted on August 4, 2011 by Dave Bonta

If you read this blog via RSS or email, don’t miss the comment thread to yesterday’s poem about ghosts. Luisa Igloria and Dale Favier responded with some ghost poetry of their own, so I put out a call on Facebook and Google+ for more, and as a result we have a growing and varied collection of ghost poems. Feel free to add your own to the mix. If you’re a blogger yourself, you could make it your post of the day and duplicate your poem at your own site.

Thinking about the intersection between this world and the world of the dead really seems to put the imagination into overdrive. It occurs to me that ghost stories have a lot in common with the telling of dreams: they are one kind of narrative where surrealism is not only tolerated but actively welcomed by non-literary folks. For this reason, I think they are excellent Trojan horses for smuggling a bit more poetry into everyday life. Lyric poetry proper, though, can do something a straight narrative generally will not: make us pay close attention to the sound and flavor of our thoughts. What would ghosts be like? What could it mean to be in the world but not of it? And have we modern humans so cut ourselves off from the natural world now that we are closer to the realm of ghosts than to embodied reality?

Posted in Blogs and Blogging, Poets and poetry | 3 Comments

At play in the fields of Google

Posted on July 15, 2011 by Dave Bonta
This entry is part 22 of 23 in the series Poetics and technology

UPDATE (9/1/11): I’ve decided to end my use of Google+ due to Google’s intransigence over its identity policy. One Facebook is enough! See you over at the other corporate soul-stealer.

Cory Doctorow sums up the issues better than I could.

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So I’ve joined Google+, the fantastic new social network for talking about Google+. (It’s still in private beta, but I have invitations if anyone wants one.) Enthusiasm for the still-developing service has been balanced by skepticism that we actually need another general-purpose social network — see for example what Lorianne DiSabato and Beth Adams have blogged about it. Here are my initial reactions.

1) Facebook has had a “lists” feature for quite some time, supposedly allowing one to keep up with subsets of one’s contacts — family, close friends, blogger buddies, etc. Unfortunately, it never shows me more than the most recent day or two of posts from the lists I’ve set up, and even then doesn’t seem to include everything. Facebook is good at suggesting people I should add to each semi-functional list, which makes me suspect it’s really all about data-mining with advertisers in mind: figure out how specifically we network so they can better target us in coordinated advertising campaigns. Now, there’s no guarantee that Google+’s ballyhooed “circles” won’t have the same ultimate purpose. But the interface for screening one’s data-stream by subset of contacts is much smoother, it’s not three clicks away, and (so far at least) it works.

2) Data portability is a critical issue for me. Google+ lets you download and save all your posts at any time. I like that. Despite my very liberal views on copyright and content-sharing, I don’t like the feeling I get over at Facebook that my content isn’t really my own.

3) Much as I like the 140-character limit at Twitter and Identi.ca as an enforcer of concision and spur to creativity for my microblogging at The Morning Porch, I don’t otherwise see the point, and I resent Facebook limiting the length of status updates. Google+ lets you go on as long as you like. It’s bloggish.

4) While it would be nice to have a “Facebook for grown-ups,” and I’ll be happy if Google+ becomes that and gets mass adoption, at this point I’m most interested in social networking around specific interests or for specific purposes. (Just look at the success of Goodreads among book-readers and Ravelry among knitters.) It’s not clear to me yet whether Google+, with its circles and video-chat “hangouts,” represents a major step forward in this regard. I am considering getting a webcam, though — the possibilities for small-group readings and workshops are very tantalizing. I’ve always hesitated to organize conference calls on Skype due to the sometimes intermittent nature of our internet connection here; far better if it were hosted in the cloud, as Google+ hangouts are. Also, spontaneous get-togethers are often the best kind, and creative types in particular are hard to herd, as would be necessary if I ever tried the Skype approach.

5) Like Beth and Lorianne, I’m a blogger first and foremost. I think that anyone who really has anything to say on a regular basis should have their own blog, and that we should preferentially leave comments about blog posts at the point of origin and stop letting discussions fragment and dissipate at a half-dozen different places where the link might be shared.

6) A link-sharing culture, regardless of its host (Google+, Reddit, Tumblr, StumbleUpon, etc.) is fundamentally about enthusiasm for things that others have written, captured or made. This is both good and bad. I like the enthusiasm (and the frequent displays of wit), but I get frustrated after a while and want to say, O.K., but what have you made? Where are your poems? Hang out too much with professional writers or artists, though, and you’ll notice that we tend to go in the opposite direction, rarely sharing anything we didn’t make ourselves. Is it possible that our participation in social networks has helped mitigate this tendency a little? Or for those of us who were already blogging before Facebook and Twitter got big, has it actually shrunk our blogs, diminishing the emphasis we once placed on linking out, assembling sidebar linkrolls, and being social, because hey, we’re doing enough of that elsewhere? Self-centered and often anti-social as I am, I do try to strike a balance between self-promotion and other-promotion, but it’s not always easy. I like to think my use of Facebook has forced me to at least stay focused on the problem.

7) Email is still the “killer app” for me and I think for almost everyone over the age of 30. Unlike phone calls or (god help us) instant messaging, it doesn’t interrupt whatever I’m doing and destroy my concentration. We need less distraction, not more. What keeps me involved in online social interactions are email notifications, and the more customizable those notifications are, the happier I am. Facebook has recently gotten pretty good in this regard, letting me decide on a page-by-page and group-by-group basis how I want to be notified. It would be nice if I could do this for each comment thread as well, because some discussions you really want to follow and others, not so much. (I’ve seen participants in Facebook conversations go back and delete their comments just to stop the flood of notifications when the conversation goes on too long!)

It is in this regard that the older blogging platforms are really falling behind WordPress. I’m much less likely to leave a comment anymore if can’t keep track of follow-up discussion via email. I’ll actually be surprised if Blogger doesn’t overhaul its archaic commenting system soon, and introduce a “subscribe to other comments in this thread” feature when it does so. Typepad is probably a lost cause. (Incidentally, for self-hosted WordPress bloggers, I recommend the plugin I’m using, Subscribe to Comments Reloaded, rather than the original Subscribe to Comments, which hasn’t been updated since 2007. Previously I used a different plugin with a double opt-in feature — in other words, the subscriber had to not only check a box, but reply to an email in order to confirm each and every subscription. That’s too many hoops to jump through, I think.)

The point is that for me and I presume most other email-oriented people who want to participate in online conversations, it’s important that we have the option to follow discussions via email — and that we have fine-grained controls, including the option to unsubscribe from any discussion at any time. WordPress.com currently leads the social media field in this regard, which may seem ironic, since WordPress is all about traditional, long-form blogging and website creation rather than social networking. The highlight of the latest version of the software is a distraction-free writing option, which shows what the developers prioritize. At the same time, they have more — and, I gather, better — mobile phone applications than any other blogging platform. But I think it only makes sense that those who most value thoughtful communication would build the best tools for discussion and response.

Posted in Blogs and Blogging | Tagged , | 26 Comments
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