NEWS

Site usability / news.

Check periodically for updates, and I'll post in reverse order, newest at the top.

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1.12. 25

This platform continues to drive me bananas as the formatting is wack (I just had to delete all the formatting from a post manually to get one paragraph to quit deviating from the formatting of the rest of the post, despite actually first deleting it all from the html view and pasting it back text only in the compose window anew (it kept the wonked formatting) etc bla whine complain..

Dunno why I'm blabbing on about this since pretty much everything drives me crazy as, if you read this or know me IRL, you're well aware, if I can't set it up myself down to the letter, and a. there's always been bugs in the formatting (like images sometimes extending beyond your text box), but also b. they've added a new Helpful! feature which is a little bubble asking if I want them to auto-insert google search links into my post? (hint: no.) which literally, not joking, obstructs what i'm actually typing in the compose window. You get what you pay for though which in this case is nothing.. in any case, I am still (casually) looking for another place to migrate the blog to (not substack) but it'll be a ton of work and i'm (what's the idiom? sitting on my tail about it?) yeah

(oh, and i'm concerned this whole platform might go poof one day?)

It will be so much work guys. I'll probably have to hire someone to build it. I had a day a few months ago with over 8k views? this is dense, not very accessible stuff and I don't advertise it. seriously who are you? maybe nobody, maybe the sheer volume of posts in the blog now has hit a tipping point of accidental search hits, maybe advertisers are prowling for email addresses to spam, maybe I have a secret cabal of fans, I don't know and unless you start sending fan mail I will never know. For now I proceed as if a couple people read this and relate, and if that's really the case, I love you, whoever you are. I write this for me, my number one fan and audience and companion, but I also write for you and that's really what gets me back here. And it's therapeutic, so thanks.

P.S. drop down menu seems to be working now, but again, I can't retain that if I switch to a template which plays well with a phone, which is a bummer. Losing that menu is a deal breaker for me. I'm aware it's hard to read with the current background and I'll change it soon. It's a photo I took from a booth at Swingers in West Hollywood, one of the first places I went in Los Angeles the week André showed me around in 2001, and also the last place I went in March 2020 before everything closed for covid (and they had announced it was closing, which it didn't), for a work lunch .. before industry work dropped off the map too... so it was a meaningful image for me but it's run its course!

Happy new year, whoever you are. xoxo

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3.21.25

So I think (as of now) the dropdown arrows still work, but not always, and sometimes they work ONLY IF YOU'RE ON A POST PAGE, not from the "home" URL. So if it's not working right, try it: go to any post, and then (maybe) you can peruse the posts by date and name. But I am leery of changing the template and so it's still not a phone experience. pfft.

This stuff will only get buggier and worse over time.

I expect I'll do some experimenting by making bogus blogs to try all the templates & variants, and try other hosts (ala Reply All's Roman Mars Mazda Virus episode, except probably not very funny). Maybe I'll post links to them. Maybe I'll start anew on another platform and retire this elsewhere.

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3.20.25

I'm playing with the blogger templates again and it's been clear for a long time they don't really support this site anymore .. for many many years that has been the case. I'm very good with figuring out workarounds because I've been working with sites that have pre-made templates for a long time now, but I've really hit a wall lately with the functionality of the site. Either I use one of the newer templates - site looks nice but I can't set it up to do what I want, or I use one of the older templates that I can organize more to my liking but has no mobile support and therefore is really hard to read on a phone. And more importantly, I seem to have been previously grandfathered into a certain dropdown archived post list functionality that no longer exists, now I've tried a newer template and then gone back to an old one. It's the one thing that's non-negotiable for me, and it's borked. It's not working the same way it used to. THAT'S THE DEAL BREAKER. (see "borked blog archive" on the left there and how the dropdown arrows don't work anymore) [[2026 EDIT: that post is "no future" from 3/20/25 and all it says now is that updates have been moved here.]]

Listen. I'm not a fucking substack writer. Few of these posts are topical, and the ones that are, I don't care about. I'm not really interested in an audience that's scrolling in the supermarket line and just wants stupid distraction for five minutes and somehow has landed here - I do not want a tiktok audience. I AM NOT A "CONTENT CREATOR." These posts aren't disposable. That's the internet I HATE - the internet of constant distraction (which everything is moving more and more toward). I like the internet of archived information. If I can't have the posts showing up in order, and a functional drop down menu of previous posts by date, where you can really easily browse them by date and title, the blog is done. This is a repository of writing, and mostly it's for me.

At present I have no intention of taking it down, but either I'll have to build it from scratch (have patience, grasshopper; I don't know how to do this yet) or take it to a new host. A ton of work either way. Presently I don't know of an available site that accommodates my desires here but there's no point in moving elsewhere and just leaving this up as an archive if it can't be navigated the way I want. pretty basic stuff.. and I'm scared of losing the posts, quite honestly.

So now what? stay tuned, I guess, and I'll post when I figure it out. 

Thanks for reading, whoever you are.