As the Tide Turns

Oh, this is going to be fun.

No, wait. It really isn't.

I read a long, well-written posting today on an AOL-J UK that existed before the banner mess. Tilly (for it was she) likens AOL to a landlord, and AOL-J refugees to people who had a row with the landlord and left. She makes the point that the ex-roommate is still your friend, even if she no longer lives under your roof. She goes on to say that different people have had different histories with AOL, and different amounts of difficulty, not just over the ads but with technical glitches, TOS and so on. She thinks that those who stay should not condemn those who left, although she is a tad less enthusiastic about people who just jumped ship because their friends did.

Like me.

Back on Black Tuesday, I posted a comment to By the Way, saying that I didn't mind the ads all that much, and was more or less resigned to them. Yet it quickly became clear that many of my closest online friends were much more upset than I was, to the point of feeling they had to leave AOL. Well, I could see their point, and as the day went on, I got sadder and angrier - sadder because friends were closing down journals by taking them private, sadder over the fracturing of a community, and angrier because it was clear that AOL was being totally unresponsive to the situation, preferring to leave John and Joe to take the brunt of the outrage. And the next time I tried to post on Musings, I had problems - the save button problem, the getting-to-my-subject-line problem, and most of all, the inability of the "upgraded" software to display the word Mâvarin in all its fictional language glory.

So here I am on Blogspot. Here are a lot of us.

Meanwhile, people continue to be angry and unhappy. Walking away from 18 months or more of your personal writing is a terrible thing, but moving it elsewhere is a huge undertaking - just ask Becky. And stuff that was easy on AOL just isn't here. How many of you still haven't set up your links, despite my little tutorial? And how do you keep up with where everyone is, and what they've posted? AOL Alerts were buggy, but they were easy. Bloglines requires a bit more effort. And how are you going to regain that readership you have before, when most of the links go to your AOL-J,and some of them were on journals that have been shut down?

Oh, you can do all that, really. You know you can. We all can. But it's a pain in the butt, isn't it?

And at the same time, people who have left are trying to pressure others to do the same, presumably to justify their own actions as much as to increase the pressure on AOL. On the other side of the fence, people are saying mean things about people who chose to leave, calling us crybabies, losers, and worse. It's the old Us and Them mentality all over again, the same mindset I'm always railing against, that seeks to dehumanize, to justify intolerance and hatred. Or maybe it's just people who enjoy being mean. No matter what decision we've made, there's someone who is eager to label us as Them, and tell us why we're wrong and foolish and silly.

So it was predictable that as this terrible week ends, people are having second thoughts. Did we act rashly in leaving our beloved journals, with the easy interface, established readership, and backlog of cherished words and photos? Is it worth of effort of learning HTML and CSS, of trying to get our blogs looking nice, of trying to build our readership all over again? Is it worth all this pain just to protest the ugly ads, and the buggy upgrade, and AOL's blatant disrespect? Is it perhaps better to go "home" to AOL, put up or leave up some kind of protest words or graphic, block our own view iof the animated banners, and boycott Bank of America and other advertisers?

A lot of people are asking these questions, and there is no one answer to them. If we stay away, we have a long road ahead, learning our way around, rebuilding and recovering. If we go back, it feels like defeat, like hypocricy, like AOL being justified in thinking they could get away with this. And in truth, AOL can get away with it. Because if they really don't care about us, then they don't care if thousands of people leave. In their business projections, the lost subscription revenue is more than made up for in ad revenue, and a lot of people won't leave anyway. I personally have no immediate plans to cancel my AOL membership, with all its long-established screen names and web pages. Nor have I any immediate plans, in case you were wondering, to leave the Outpost and resume my Musings.

But it sure would be easier to go back, to the comfort of our beloved, easy-to-use journals.

That is, if we could clear away the bugs.

I'll be back here tonight with another entry. At the very least, I'll let you know when I've posted my Heirs of Mâvarin excerpt over at Messages from Mâvarin. And maybe I'll get to my promised posting about Casa Video (as seen below).

Karen

Heh, heh, heh.

Right now on another tab, I've got The Great Exodus, with a Love@AOL by Match.com banner ad. Our favorite, right? Did you know that in Friday's news there were reports that Match.com has been accused of fraud? According to the lawsuit, they allegedly sent out fake romantic emails.

Karma, baby.

Karen

Pumpkin Anything?

Sometimes my beloved husband of a quarter century likes to prove that he's paying attention. Last night I mentioned that I often claim "pumpkin anything" as a favorite food. Tonight John put me to the test. He stopped at Trader Joe's, and brought me back a couple of edible gifts: three tangelos, and a "spiced pumpkin pie"-flavored Clif Bar. Thanks, John! *Gulp!* That really wasn't quite what I had in mind, but it certainly qualifies as "pumpkin anything" - healthy division.




Sorry this isn't a better picture. I was too close to it with the flash. Doesn't look promising as a foodstuff either, does it?

But it was good. Really, it was. Not pumpkin pie good, but almost pumpkin bread good.


********

A few notes before I go the heck to bed:

1. Jimmy, the Stupidsheet Guy, is now at stupidsheet.com, using the familiar Blogger interface. He explains what happened in a little more detail. Go give him a smile, will you? We owe him at least one or two of those.

2. I'm double-scheduled for 12:15 PM tomorrow. I'm supposed to simultaneously see Harry Potter at the mall and give blood at the Red Cross. Oops! I'd better go to bed, so I can get up early and reschedule the blood-giving part.

3. I've been distracted this week, for obvious reasons, which hasn't helped in the getting-stuff-done-at-work part of my life. I figure I have at least eight hours of work to do at the office between now and Monday morning. Between that and Harry Potter, you may not see too much of me this weekend. Nevertheless...

4. Tomorrow I'll have at least one entry here, and Chapter One, Part Two of Heirs of Mâvarin over on Messages from Mâvarin tomorrow night. Do go check it out, won't you? And over here, I'll be writing about this place, I think:



Good night!

Karen

The (Business) World Takes Notice

The Business Week column Blogspotting has a column this week about the plight of the AOL Journaler. It covers the banner ads situation and the problems inherent in moving, including a link to our own Steven on that subject.

In other news, Jimmy, the "Stupid Sheet Guy," spent part of this week trying to defuse the tension with humor. One night it was a fun, tongue-in-cheek movie equating AOL with the Evil Empire, and the next it was a few pages of parody ads. Apparently a couple of journalers with an axe to grind reported him to TOS for this, and AOL came down on Jimmy, hard. It's a damn shame. You could say that there might be copright infringement involved, but ever since the MAD Magazine vs. Irving Berlin lawsuit decades ago, parody has been considered mostly exempt from such claims. If Jay Leno held Jimmy's creations up to the camera, there would not have been a problem, but Jimmy lacks that kind of clout.

Interesting that AOL (save for sacrificial lambs Joe and John) can't be bothered to say anything to its broken-hearted journaling community, except to make things even worse for someone who tried *not* to leave AOL, and to highlight the situation with satire.

Oh, one more thing. Journals Editor Joe did his own blog picks this week, for obvious reasons. One of them is The History of Theodore Barnes by Nelson Pierce. I've been reading Hannah's journal for a week or two, and it's absolutely the best writing I've seen from someone her age. (She's a high school senior, but only 16, I think.) She won't be leaving AOL because of "parental unit" considerations, and is well worth reading. So read!

I'll probably be back late tonight with another entry. I've got videos to watch and return, and my dinner's long-since grown cold!

Karen

My Obligatory Thanksgiving Meditation

Weekend Assignment #86: Who are you thankful for -- who you won't be able to spend this Thanksgiving with? This is a chance to tell us about the people you care about who will be far away from you this holiday, or who have passed on but remain in your heart.

Extra Credit: Pumpkin pie vs. pecan pie -- which do you choose for Thanksgiving dessert?

First off, let me just say that I will not be boycotting John Scalzi's Weekend Assignments and Monday Photo Shoots. I know that some people disagree - violently - but I think he has been as honest and honorable as possible in an extremely difficult situation. I see no reason to cut myself off from his little exercises that I enjoy so much. Plus - get this! - by participating, we can entice readers to venture away from AOL USA to see what we've posted on Blogspot, AOL UK, or wherever else we've landed.

So. I've told you all before about what my dad did for me on Thanksgiving Day, 2002, how he helped to get me through the worst day of my life - from three thousand miles away. He's the obvious answer to this question. Then there's Ruth, my stepmother, (John calls them "your Dad and your Ruth"), who invited us to Wilmington for Thanksgiving. I took a rain check, because John doesn't like to fly, especially on holiday weekends. We'll do it some other time, as a real vacation. Yeah, I'm grateful for Ruth, who has had a great marriage with Dad for longer than my parents were married (and most of that was not great).



I can tell you I'm grateful for my mom, all she taught me, how she was there for me when I was a kid, and how we were friends and companions for most of the 1990s before her health got so horrendous. But honestly, I still can't think of my mom at Thanksgiving without pain. And Steve, my brother, well, I'm grateful for the times he comforted me as a kid, cheered me up with my stuffed animals, took me to church and maybe to the drugstore afterwards for a newspaper and a paperback book. But I've only seen him once in almost twenty years, so it's hard to be grateful about him at length, here and now.

So let's switch gears a little. We all had a terrible shock this week. Who got us through it? Our online friends, that's who!

Carly and Michael, Becky and Shelly and the rest won't be here in Tucson for Thanksgiving, and I won't be visiting any of them next week, except virtually. I've never seen a single one of them face to face. (Well, I've seen Howard, but he hasn't commented in many a month; and my friend Linda in Phoenix comments only by email.) I can't pass them the rutabagas, and they can't save me a drumstick. But they've been here for me, Carly and Michael, Becky and Shelly, Robbie and Maryanne and others. And I've tried to be here for them.



Here's the main thing I've learned this week. AOL can drive us away by being greedy and short-sighted, but they can't completely dismantle J-Land. True, some people will leave AOL, some will cut back on AOL and blog elsewhere, some will go the AOL International route, and some will stay on AOL US, either happily or with regrets. And yet, against all odds, J-Land still exists! It's more diverse than before, scattered across the blogosphere, and harder to keep track of. AOL Alerts can't help you with Blogger and Bravenet and so on. But we're finding each other, linking to each other, blogrolling each other as we figure out how to do that, and as we find everyone again. People are making discoveries about how to mitigate the badness, and spreading the news from blog to blog, board to board. And if someone comes back from somewhere, and asks what the heck happened, we tell them, and help them figure it out.

Now, it's true that tempers have flared. Here and there, people have said awful things to each other, and especially to John and Joe. There's also been sniping in the other direction, people saying loudly that anyone who is upset about the banner ads is a crybaby who should just shut up and go. But what is a family without the occasional fight? Can you honestly say that before the current crisis, you got along with everyone you ever encountered in J-Land? If you've been here a while, read widely, and written anything remotely controversial, the answer's probably no. And that's okay. You have particular friends in J-Land, people you love, people you like, and people whose words or pictures you view occasionally. Others have a different set of friends and acquaintances, with different tastes and interests and views on all those controversial subjects. And that's okay, too.

But within our circles of friends and acquaintances, we're still there for each other. Sometimes, we're even there for the people we don't like very much. We're a community, and that's how a community works.

That's who I'm grateful for this Thanksgiving. You folks.

Us.

Extra Credit: I often say that my favorite food is "pumpkin anything." I love pumpkin pie, pumpkin cream pie, harvest pie, pumpkin cheesecake, pumpkin ice cream, pumpkin bread, pumpkin chocolate chip cookies, and even pumpkin seeds! Pecan pie's nice, John S., but I can get through a year without it. I can't seem to get through October-through-December without a least one portion of pumpkin something.

Dang. I'm hungry now.

Karen

Oh, Brave New World! A Quick Guide

Okay, guys, I see a lot of links sections in your sidebars with the tell-tale words "Edit-Me." People are asking me how to add links. Okay, a few quick hints:

1. If you actually click where it says Edit Me, it takes you to a help page on how to do it. Mind you, I'm not sure how helpful the help page is. I haven't looked at it.

Alternate method:

2. The links section is part of your template. If you click on the tab labeled Template in your Blogger control panel, you'll see a page of all the coding that tells Blogspot what your blog looks like and where things go in it. Scroll down, almost to the bottom. You'll see something that looks like this:




(If you right click and save these pictures, they should be a bit more readable.)

This is an unordered list (ul), and each line begins with a list item tag (li). Paste the links you want between the quotation marks in each line, and put the name of the blog or whatever where it says Google News or Edit-Me. You can paste in as many lines as you want, as long as they all start with li and end with /li with the /ul at the very end. Now it should look something like this:



Save changes.

Click the Republish button.

Done!

3. For how to keep up with non-AOL blogs: go to http://www.bloglines.com/, sign up, and read through what they do there. Basically, it's a way to look at everything that's been posted to blogs on your subscription list since you last checked. I've been lazy about doing this myself, 'cause it's a little confusing, and I was mostly depending on AOL Alerts instead. You too, huh? But check out the bottom of my sidebar. There's a little button that makes subscribing to Outpost relatively painless. If you want, you can add one of those handy-dandy buttons to yours, too, to help other people find their way back to you. The procedure is similar to adding links - just paste the HTML Bloglines gives you into your sidebar section, with a line break (br) before and after it.

4. People are getting upset because they publish an entry, and then can't see it right away. Been there, done that! This is a problem with the AOL internal browser, and sometimes with Internet Explorer. Emptying your cache and deleting history may or may not help. But if you do your blogging in Netscape, and reload the page, you see the entry right away! Also, IE doesn't seem to retain formatting if you're pasting stuff from elsewhere. Netscape does. I haven't tried Firefox - that might be good too. Somebody please let me know!

Karen

Update: please see the comments to this post for a couple of really good tips from Shelly and Robbie. Also, a thousand thank yous to Shelly for finding the source of my glitch on Messages from Mâvarin. The trick is to keep those photos narrow enough to fit the space alloted. I thought I had, but I missed one! - KFB

Meanwhile, in the World

Remember
Out in the world,
The sun still rises and sets.
Flowers have visitors.
Allocations must be made.
Dogs must be fed.
Spouses must be placated.

Out in the world,
Nobody cares
About banner ads on your blog.
Nobody cares
That J-Land is breaking up
And Blogger is confusing.

But we care.
Even if the sun sets.
Even if the dog is on the mooch.
Even if the spouse thinks
You're online too much anyway.

Just don't forget the rest:
And allocate time
To spouse and dog
And butterfly
And being out...
In the world.



KFB, 11/16/05