Wednesday, 2nd March, 2005

Two Questions of Etiquette

I have a tendancy to be a late adopter when it comes to new ahem memes. Perhaps it's because I'm continuosly isolated from the main goings on online (or perhaps it's because I'm slow to catch on) but regardless, I seem to come to things late.

I am, I must confess, a little bit confused by the etiquette involved in adding someone to your contacts list in Flickr.

You see, to me, the idea of adding someone as a 'contact' implies that I think they should already know me — maybe it's the language involved, but I always feel like I'm being a bit cheeky or invasive if I add someone to my contact list.

But then again, the email that Flickr sends me when someone adds me to their list says:

If you don't know , is probably a fan of your photos or wants a bookmark so they can find you again. There is no obligation for you to reciprocate, unless you want to.

which is much more of a relaxed thing than "contact"

I dunno — maybe I'm thinking too hard about the semiotics of emails I get sent , maybe I should just forget my little nerves and my qualms and start making links to the people whose photographs I like There's quite a few...

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I have another question of etiquette, but first, can I just mention that one of the houses up the street has their burgular alarms going off, and it's been going off for ages and it's driving me insane

Thank you

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Other question: Is there anything that you wouldn't blog about?

I've been quite personal about things over these past three years, in particular during the first wee while. It's not unusual to find a post from two years ago where I'm upset, or angry, or stressed. But what's interesting, perhaps, is that I've not been that candid recently. Maybe it's because I'm being a little bit more cavalier about my identity, maybe it's because I know some of the people who read this in Real Life, maybe it's because of my aversion to letting this all slide into a LiveJournal self-obsessed morbid-fest, or maybe it's because that ever since I coded the comments I've been much more aware of writing with other people in mind...

...whichever. It's not really that important I guess. The thing is though, when something bad used to happen to me, the first thing I'd do would be copy-paste angry words into here. But now, it doesn't seem the right place to do it

What I'm trying to say is that something happened today, something not good, something that's been building up for a while. It's going to be OK I think, but I'm not sure just how I feel about it just yet.

And I think, (ignoring the very obvious non-topics for a moment) that I've found a Thing Not To Blog About.

Wait a minute all you other guys have blogs? And there was me thinking I was special

By the way, prompted by Ian's double comment (sorry honey) I've managed to rewrite the code so it doesn't do that again

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not least because it'd be unfair on my wife

That's the thing though isn't it? When you're blogging on your own, then it's OK to talk about pretty much anything — it doesn't necessarily have implications on other people when you talk about personal stuff.

But I'm feeling, that if I haven't talked something through properly with Kathie before I start whinging about it online, then, well, maybe that would be bad?

I dunno I should ask her I guess...

Yeah, it's because all the cues for adding a comment are held in the POSTDATA — so refreshing bungs it all in again.

What I've done is assign a unique ID key to each comment when it gets added — and then I do a preg_match() to check whether the ID key exists before the script updates the database.

If you hit [refresh], then the script can tell if you've already posted a comment with that ID, and it ignores it.

Clever no?