SmartRemarks

A change of pace from all the doom-and-gloom…

As a newcomer to blogging, I’ve been learning a lot on the fly. I chose WordPress as my platform because it’s open-source software, with a reputation for having a large and enthusiastic user community and (thus) being very easy to modify via free third-party plugins.

It’s certainly lived up to that reputation, and I’ve found myself using quite a lot of those plugins to customize and streamline my blogging experience. In particular, I use the following (including the one that automatically generated this handy hotlinked list!), and cheerfully recommend them to others:
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Just a quick note here. I had noticed (to my disappointment) that people were visiting but I wasn’t getting any comments… then someone e-mailed me that even though he registered as a “subscriber” and logged in, nothing happened when he clicked the link to leave a comment. No entry box, no error page, zip.

An hour or so of frustrated troubleshooting, skimming WordPress forums, revealed to me that quite a few bloggers have apparently had similar glitches under WP 2.6.x.  After trying various tips and adjusting settings by trial and-error… I’m happy to say I got this fixed. (For some reason, the security measure of requiring users to register before posting—rather than just entering a name and e-mail on the fly—was preventing anyone from posting.)

Comment away, folks! (Please!)

More than two years ago now, a good friend of mine observed that I seemed to have a lot to say about a lot of topics (or as some other acquaintances might put it, I’m hard to shut up), and that perhaps I ought to start a blog to express myself. I thought this was a terrific idea, and decided I’d get to it right away. I spent a fair chunk of time reading up on the software options (settled on WordPress as clearly the best), blogging technique, and so forth. (And I tried to get the actual domain “SmartRemarks.com” — but despite the fact that the owner has it up on an auction site and isn’t using it for anything, his asking price was a couple orders of magnitude higher than the reasonable offer I made him. Go figure.)

That was, as noted, more than two years ago. A lot of water has passed under the bridge since then, not only in the areas I’m inclined to write about but in my own life (I’ve started and ended an entire job, for instance). Blogs weren’t exactly novel even in 2006, but at this stage of the game, out of the 6.7 billion people on earth, I suspect I’m about number 6.8 billion to start a blog.

So be it. I’m here now, and this is where I’ll say what I have to say.

It’ll be eclectic… I’ve always specialized in being a generalist. People who blog about blogging (there are more than you’d think!) insist that if you’re “serious” about it, if you want to “monetize” your blog, you need to find a single narrow niche or gimmick and market the hell out of it. I’m not going to do that, because I suspect it would drain all the fun out of it as well. My posts will probably fall into quite a few disparate categories. Let the chips fall where they may.

Prominent among those categories, I’m sure, will be two particular enthusiasms: American politics, and comic books. I think we’ll all be better off if I don’t try too hard to connect those two. If I actually pick up any kind of a following here, then, it’ll probably involve groups of people who are interested in one particular category of posts and don’t give two hoots about most of the rest. (But hey, you never know. Maybe I can inspire some crossover.)

I’ll just have to rely on finding interesting things to say.