Friday, 4th February, 2005

An Uncohesive Jumble of Thoughts

Ack, I don't know what it is about today, but I just can't seem to get my head in a happy, productive space. I think it's just a little overloaded at the moment. Yesterday morning, as I was getting ready to go over to Leeds, I read Tom Coates talking about issues in the way that blogs are evolving — in particular, the difficulties of combining different aspects of a blog, link-lists, photoblogs, writings, into a cohesive structure.

And ever since, I've been mulling things over in my mind. In particular, what the exact purpose of a blog is.

But before I get into that, I just wanted to pick up on something that Kelly said yesterday...

Of course, my theory doesn't apply to those TVs for whom the whole point is to look as convincing as possible.

OK, I have a question: Why do we do that?

I mean, well, let's face it. Surely Transvestism is all about clothing isn't it? You read stories all over the place about how it's the feel of the underwear, or the swish of a skirt that gives us the pleasure from it. So why extend it to make-up and hair and stuff?

I find it really odd, and I can't quite put my finger on why. There seems to be an unofficial competition — a friendly rivalry if you like — within the TV community of who can take the best photograph, or who can 'pass' the most.

I'm just curious why that's important

Is it about the transformation of male into female? Is it about trying not to look ridiculous? What?

The other little thing of interest, I find at least, is what criteria we use to judge whether or not a photograph is 'good'.

The other night, I stuck that picture that I posted here in my little Photos section of Roses Forum. Now, I'm not entirely sure why I did that — I mean, it's not like there aren't enough picture of me on the internet already or anything, and it's not like I don't have any webspace or stuff — maybe it was just to fill a space, everyone else seems to have pictures so why not me? Or maybe it was some vain attempt to get a bit of flattery. Who knows?

The thing is, I'm looking at that picture now, and I can't help feeling that — if you compare it to a picture of an actual woman — it's not that great.

But yet, I get all sorts of "great photo!" comments...

...oh, I dunno where this is going As I said, my head isn't working properly today.

What's Wrong with this blog

OK, what I actually wanted to ramble about. See, I've noticed a little bit of a debate going on as to what the whole point of blogging is. Like I said at the top, Tom Coates is wondering how to combine the different aspects of his site into something coherent.

Personally, I stumbled on the whole blogging thing by accident. I never really intended all this to happen. I started out just writing a few pages of a diary — cos I'd seen every other trannie online had one (at some point, I must write something about why all trannies seem to have website in the first place). But as it evolved, I started adding scripts and things to make my life easier. And then I stuck in a comments thing.

Now, as Troubled Diva notes, my comments work differently to most. They're not stored in a seperate database (I did try that technique initially, but decided against it), what happens is that the form embeds a little bit of code in the diary entry itself — and then the script parses that code and turns it into a comment. The two websites, incidently, parse the code differently, because of the different ways they're displayed.

The thing is, I find that approach works for me, for two reasons: (1) It allows me to hold a conversation on here, turns it into a bit of a forum-thread kinda thing I suppose. It also keeps things I say in response to comments seperate — if you look through blogs where comments are all at the end, then the author gets kinda lost amoungst everyone else. Rather egotistically, I like being special

(2) It works for me because I knwo what the code is. If this was a system that I'd installed from somewhere else, then I'd wonder what all that gumpf was in what I'd written.

I dunno — it's not perfect, but like I said it works for me

So, going back to what Tom was talking about, I kinda think it's important to work out why we all do this to start with.

There are lots and lots of cunning back-end add-ons that you can attach to your blog — flickr, del.icio.us (PS, well done Mr Jon Hicks dunno if it was anything to do with my email, but thanks — it was bugging me), stuff like that — but because they're all add-ons, they tend to be uncohesive.

Does that make sense?

What I think I'm trying to say, is that tacking on bits to blogs doesn't seem to me to be the way to go. The important thing, I think, is to integrate tools into blogs, to make our lives easier. Not the other way around.

OK, I'm confusing myself here — so an example is probably a good idea:

Suppose I'm on the train, and I take a picture of something interesting. What I want to be able to do, is — very simply — get that picture on my blog, and say a little something about it.

Up until recently, for me that would involve transferring the picture onto my laptop, resizing it, scping it onto my server, then jumping onto the page I've set up to edit my blog and typing some stuff.

Pain in the ass.

What woould be much simpler, is to be able to email the picture from my phone to flickr, and then a few minutes later, a cron job or something would notice that my photostream had been updated, and would pull the information from it directly into the database entry for the day.

(Hey, that's quite cool — I might try and do that...)

I suppose (for me anyway, YMMV) that the utopian blog is one that's fluid — it doesn't have sperate sections, it doesn't have blocks of links, it's just one long continuos creative output of what I'm thinking and what's important to me.

But now the problem with this blog:

Because it started as a diary, everything is spilt into days, rather than ideas. Now, I find this works pretty well for me, but as NRT pointed out a while back, perhaps it would be better to organise things by topic.

Well, yes and no.

Because of the focus on days, I do sometimes finding myself sat here, mouse poised over the 'submit' button, waiting for the clock to hit midnight so that what I'm writing appears as a new day.

But equally, I find that I like writing in this way — splitting things up into topics isn't how my head works, and I kinda feel that it would force me into writing a way that I'm not comfortable with — it would perhaps stop me from linking a whole load of things together on a day.

Anyway. Time to stop rambling and go back and add all the links that I lazily left out whilst writing. There is one thing that annoys me about flickr BTW — not their fault, obviously — when I did then redesign at the start of February, I made this column 450 pixels wide, cos that was the size that I seemed to make all my photos (don't ask me why ). But the standard medium size in flickr is 500 pixels — so I can't quite use it the way I want to.

I might have to change that...

(Oh, and I must also get into the habit of using a spell-checker )

Speaking of tits...

I promised a while back that I would post a picture of my naked breasts in an effort to get more votes on the Bloggies. Well, voting is over, but I found a better use for the picture...

As I mentioned a couple of days ago, I seem to rate rather highly on msn.com's search rankings for "boobs" — number one until today, down to number two as I type. [edit] — back to number 1 for some strange reason

So I thought it would be rather amusing to post the picture at the top of the page that everyone who comes searching for titties seems to access.

That'll teach them

Incidently, I've been having fun noticing how many things I turn up on msn.com for: transvestite, crossdressing, 7 ()... It would seem that either their bot is obsessed with me, or it's not very good.

Oh, and also, I don't know if this expected or not, but there's a surprising number of ".ac.uk" people who have found me via "boobs" — what that says about students is left up to yous to ponder