Anarchoblogs

In my aim to get into regular blogging again (i have ridiculous numbers of unfinished drafts in dark corners of my hard drive that inertia (with a little help from a life that has been considerably busier - for good reasons - in the last few months than in the previous few years, and from various temporary computer problems) has prevented me from turning into finished blog posts...) i have decided to go through my blogroll and weed out dead links, blogs that no longer exist or have changed URL, etc - and have discovered in the process that quite a lot (possibly even the majority) of my blogroll is at least somewhat out of date - so, this is going to be an ongoing process...

As quite a few bloggers that were on my blogroll have stopped actively posting, but their blogs still exist online and still contain some very valuable writing, i've created a new blogroll section called "No longer updated, but still worth reading", into which i've moved the likes of FWD/Forward, Here Be Dragons and HackAbility. (As an aside, i was quite upset by FWD's very abrupt and un-warned-of ending, and in particular by their decision to permanently remove the ability of commenting on all their existing blog posts. Comment threads are actually the thing i value the most highly about the whole internet... but i will get round to writing about that properly at some point...)

(There are also quite a few blogs which haven't updated for a long time but - like this one in the last year or so - are or have been very infrequent anyway, and thus it hasn't quite felt fair to move them into that category. If there are any remaining in other sections of my blogroll that anyone reading knows are permanently inactive, let me know and i'll move them.)

A few blogs also seem to have disappeared from public view altogether: SexAbility and The Rett Devil both seem to have changed status to "invited readers only" (which is a shame, as both were great blogs containing some awesome and powerful writing, but of course is the prerogative of their owners), while Joel Smith's blog "NTs are Weird" (aka "This Way of Life", former URL http://thiswayoflife.org/blog/) seems to have disappeared altogether and its address taken over by an (interestingly autism-themed) advertising site.

A few others, notably Questioning Transphobia and Bird of Paradox, have changed URL, and i've updated those both here and on my RSS feed.

Anyway, aside from being an acknowledgement of changes, this is also a call for anyone reading (if anyone is still reading!) to recommend me other active blogs that cover similar ground to me and/or those i already link to - as i'm aware that, having been mostly out of the blogosphere for a while, there are likely to be excellent blogs i haven't discovered that have started up while i have been away...

Comment here if you'd like me to link to you, or if you spot a broken link/log that has changed URL/etc that i haven't!

While checking whether i'd already posted anything about a subject peripheral to a "proper" post i'm working on, i realised just now that i now don't have the "search blog" option that most Blogger-hosted blogs have, which might make it more difficult for people to find anything particular that i've written about any given subject (um, that is, if anyone wants to).

(Yes, i'm aware that if i want to search for posts containing a particular word or phrase on this blog, i can simply go to Google and type in site:biodiverseresistance.blogspot.com [whatever i want to search for], but not everyone knows about things like Google's "site:" option, and having a visible search box makes it simpler and more intuitive IMO...)

So, does anyone know the HTML code for the Google/Blogger search box, and where i would need to insert it in my template?

(Apologies for probably embarrassing HTML-cluelessness...)

I got a lovely email from the equally lovely Kowalski of Here Be Dragons (formerly Turner & Kowalski, and a blog which i keep forgetting to add to my blogroll, so before i forget i'll do so now) the other day, informing me of a better "recent comments" sidebar widget than the default Blogger "feed" option, which gives a link to the post that each recent comment was on, rather than simply to the comment itself: the code for the widget is here, and an example of a blog which uses it is this one.

However, when i pasted the code into my blog's HTML, replacing the code for the existing "most recent comments" feed (and, as per the instructions, replacing "YourOwnB1og.blogspot.com" with "biodiverseresistance,blogspot.com"), and attempted to preview the changes, i get the following error message:

Your template could not be parsed as it is not well-formed. Please make sure all XML elements are closed properly.
XML error message: Open quote is expected for attribute "{1}" associated with an element type "style".

I'm not sure why this is happening, as when i saved the code as a .txt file and then opened it with Firefox, it showed exactly what it was supposed to, with the actual most recent comments on my blog. So, does anyone know what i'm doing wrong here?

In response to the spam commenting issues i've been having, and thanks to Lindsay for telling me that the relevant settings exist, i have now changed my comment settings to moderate all comments on posts over the (fairly arbitrary) limit of 50 days old (as it only seems to be posts over approximately that age which recieve spam comments).

I'm also working on writing a better comments policy than the minimal one i've got up at the moment (although it certainly won't be anywhere near as restrictive as those that many, especially feminist, blogs seem to have, as i have major ethical problems with the level of (what i can't think of any better word for than) censorship of comments exercised on many blogs [and not the simplistic "free speech" ones either; i'm going to write about this when i can verbalise more coherently about it] - it's more an exercise for myself in working out what exactly falls into the category of "spam" and what doesn't, after i recieved some short and to-me-incomprehensible-and-irrelevant-but-possibly-not-actually-spam comments on a recent post, which i deleted, but then felt a bit unsure if i was right to do so when they didn't strictly fit into my existing deletion criteria. (If the anonymous person who posted them is reading this, isn't a spammer, and is able to explain in greater detail what ze was trying to say, i apologise, and i welcome hir to respond here.)).

There are also two pieces of functionality that i'd like, if possible, to put on this blog, but which i've only seen on non-Blogspot blogs so far: the first is the sidebar widget which lists and links to the N most recent comments (as opposed to most recent posts), as seen on blogs hosted at ScienceBlogs (e.g. Tetrapod Zoology or Respectful Ignorance, on both of which it can be seen on the left sidebar just below the "recent posts" widget. I think i've also seen WordPress blogs use that feature; IIRC, Ballastexistenz had it before the most recent theme change. [EDIT: Questioning Transphobia also has it.]) The second is a rather nice feature which FWD/Forward has, where commenters can choose to include a link to their most recent blog post at the bottom of their comments; i think this is a really good way of enabling networking and outreach between blogs, considerably better than the Blogger profile system. I suspect neither of these is possible to put in a Blogspot blog, but i am going to investigate to see if it can be done; if anyone reading this knows a way it can be done, i'd appreciate telling me. (Yes, i know i'll get replies saying "switch to Wordpress", but there are also good reasons why i'm keeping this blog, at least for now, on Blogspot: i like the way tags work on this platform, and really don't like the way they seem to work on Wordpress, for example.)

At some point, i'm going to start work on the header image i've got planned, too (thanks to Urocyon for letting me know how to do that), but that may not be particularly soon.

Anyway. Off to respond to comments on my last post now (apologies for not responding sooner, it was due to being away for Christmas and having only intermittent internet access making thinking about responses somewhat difficult. One of my new year's resolutions this year is to try to reply to blog comments more promptly...). May do a "proper" post tonight or tomorrow if i have the energy...

I've closed comments on a few old posts on this blog because, for some reason i can't work out, they've been attracting *huge* amounts of spam (like several spam comments a day). The majority of them are probably ones that no one is likely to want to post a "genuine" comment on anyway (they're either reposts of now-long-gone calls for papers, or my embarrassing ramblings about my emotions at the time), but there are a couple which people might concievably want to comment on if they newly discover them, so, for now, if you find a post you want to comment on, but comments appear to be closed, email me and i'll turn commenting back on for that post.

(I can't think of any other viable way to do it, to be honest: using word verification to prevent spam is inaccessible for people with a lot of impairments, and i don't really want to require moderation for all comments, because it puts me in a position of having to approve every single comment, which i might not be able to do immediately, and as i would like commenters to be able to debate and respond to each other, i'd like comments to appear straight away when people post them. Also, if i disagree with something someone says, i want to debate them publicly, not just delete it (blatant trolls being the only exception, but i haven't really had many of them, with the possible exception of the anonymous person who just repeatedly posted "please tell me where can i buy a unicorn?" as a response to several posts... i can't quite work out if that was an ineffective troll or an even more ineffective spammer...) and moderating comments feels uncomfortably like censorship, which i feel angry enough about at other blogs to feel it would be totally inappropriate to do on mine.)

I have no idea why those particular posts have been attracting spam. There aren't any obvious words in the titles that spammers might be looking for (and some others that do have words, like "sex", that you would expect spammers to look for in their titles haven't attracted anywhere near so much spam), nor do they have many backlinks. (A couple of the "call for papers" ones have email addresses in them, which could be why, but other posts that have been getting it don't.) Any suggestions, please let me know...

As you may have noticed, i've changed the layout of this blog (some may have seen several changes). This is essentially phase 1 of the regeneration i was talking about.

I've been wanting a 3-column blog layout (with all the stuff about me, such as my profile, tags and blog archives, in one sidebar and all my links to other blogs and websites in the other) for a long time, so i am very, very pleased that Anne (of Existence is Wonderful) sent me the HTML for this one. :) (If you read her blog as well as mine - and if you don't, you should - you will probably already have noticed the resemblance.) I'm possibly going to tweak a few things so that it doesn't look like too much of a blatant clone of Anne's blog, as i think that's a little unfair on her - maybe some slight changes to some of the colours, and/or the little "arrow/bullet point" images (if and when i can work out how to do that), but i'm very happy with the basics of this layout - which means i'm happy enough with the appearance of this blog to start properly writing posts again.

(That's not necessarily to say that i will start posting regularly very soon, as aspects of my life are still in a significant state of upheaval - i'm potentially moving to another city either before or very soon after Xmas, which might leave me without internet access for a (hopefully short) period of time, and there is family stuff going on which is probably going to make Xmas itself... interesting. But my intent for January 2010, if not sooner, is to try to write more (and probably, much of the time, shorter) posts, and to cover at least some of the topics i've been meaning to, but not getting round to, blogging about for a long time - in some cases, since i started this blog, which is, unbelievably, almost 2 and a half years ago. What the hell happened to all that time?)

There's still more stuff i want to do - the link lists aren't quite finished yet (and here would be a good time to say - if you're reading this, and have a blog that i don't (yet) link to, but that you would like me to link to, and that fits into my general link categories, tell me about it! Or, for that matter, if you have a blog or website to recommend that isn't yours...), and at some point, i'd like to put together a custom header image, made up of a collage of a number of existing images (most of which i already have). For that, i need to learn how to use some image-manipulation software to do that, tho (i have GIMP, and am sure that that can be done with it, but for some reason how to do it doesn't seem to be in any of the easily findable online tutorials, so if you know how to do it and can explain it easily, then i'd like to hear from you...)

Also, i'd like feedback on the accessibility of this blog layout - does it work OK with screenreaders? How are the fonts and colours for people with things like Irlen's, colourblindness, or dyslexia? Are there any other accessibility issues that i have no idea about?

Anyway. Lots of posts planned. Hopefully will post some of them soon. I'll probably next do a link post to advertise some of the new-to-me blogs that i've discovered and been reading while i've not been actively blogging.

Coming briefly out of blogging hiatus to post this callout from Dinah Murray of AutreachIT:AutreachIT exists for the purpose of employing digitally skilled autistic people to bring ICT to digitally excluded autistic people.To be included, empowered, an…

Continue reading at Biodiverse Resistance …

I know i haven't blogged in quite some time. There have been some major upheavals in my life, and are probably going to continue to be for at least the next several weeks, if not months. Therefore, although i have things i want to write about, i am unlikely to feel up to any coherent sort of blogging for a while. (I probably ought to have said this a while ago, but... well, i'm really not doing well in terms of executive function at the moment.)

However, i've also been dissatisfied with this blog (in terms of the look, layout, etc) for quite some time, so i think i am going to try to take the opportunity of this blogging hiatus to reinvent it. Quite what this reinvention will involve, at this stage i'm not quite sure; it might be as simple as finding a different Blogger template, or it might involve moving to a different platform (such as Wordpress) and maybe even changing my username and/or the title of the blog. (Don't worry if you have been following the current incarnation, if i abandon biodiverseresistance.blogspot.com i will post here to redirect people to the new name/URL.)

I also haven't decided how much to conserve of the content; there are things i have written here that i am proud of, but possibly more that makes me cringe on re-reading it. I might go through and have a cull of the more trivial or less successful posts. (Then again, i might not.)

I have always wished that, like Time Lords in the "Doctor Who" universe, i could regenerate, creating a new incarnation of myself to take over when the life of the existing "me" has fallen apart. Well, if i can't do it in real life, at least i sort of can in my online existence. See you on the other side.

Sorry for not responding to the comments on recent posts - I have had a lot going on in offline life, including several friends in different parts of the country having major life crises all at once, and as a consequence haven't had many verbal-communication spoons left over for blogging.

I will try to get back to them (and to the various posts on other people's blogs that i have felt the need to respond to) within the next couple of days.

Normal blogging service (hopefully) resumed soon...

This is just a warning for people who don't like sudden changes to the appearance of blogs they read (which includes me): During the next few days, i will be testing different colours, fonts and layouts on this blog. Not yet sure what i will settle on (although i have some ideas - i'm vaguely thinking black text on a light-but-not-white background, and a layout with a greater width of text than the current one), but i might change it a few times before i find a look i am satisfied with.

I will post to let people know when i have settled on a "final" (or at least reasonably long-term) colour/font/layout combination for the blog. (And i will probably be more upset and disoriented than anyone else by the change... however, i will get used to it...)