That’s it exactly

Whoof. Dusty around here.

My ol’ pal Burningbird just said two of the healthiest things I’ve seen her, or most any of us, say in some time:

I lay there at the foot of the hill for some time calling out for help because I had thought I had broken the ankle, but no one was around. Finally, I just picked up my butt and limped out of the park

Exactly. And speaking of gaps between posts (ahem):

A friend wrote that rather than do any kind of formal break, just write when I feel like it, don’t when I don’t or don’t have the time. Good advice.

I suppose I should give up on quoting cheesy lines from Dirty Dancing, but… “This is my dance space. This is your dance space.” If she wants to write, she should. If I don’t, I shouldn’t. If you haven’t gotten over that “I don’t want to post anything right now, but my readers…” yet, well, now’s as good a time as any. There’s more writing out there than thousands of people could read already. When you want to add a couple of blockquotes and some vague philosophy to it, dive right in, but if it’s a chore, we’ll wait until you actually want to say something.

One thing that’s probably a good idea, though: if you build yourself a posting bookmarklet in XUL, you probably shouldn’t take a break of several months immediately afterward, since when you come back you’ll probably have forgotten entirely whether you left it in working order, or horribly broken. Let’s see, what does this “Post” button do?

23 Comments

Comment by Phil Ringnalda #
2004-01-15 19:23:41

It appears that what it does is builds everything except the main page. Um. What did I break?

Comment by Anonymous #
2004-02-05 01:03:03

You’re right.. you should stop quoting stuff from dirty dancing.. that movie was terrible.. and patrick swazyee (sp?) is a shitty shitty actor..

Comment by Phil Ringnalda #
2004-02-05 01:28:01

Well, your comment is certainly an excellent example of why I should allow anonymouse commenting. You certainly wouldn’t want to say that while admitting who you are. Particularly when you can’t even be bothered to google up the spelling for Patrick Swayze’s name. You’ve heard of Google, right? Fairly popular search engine, offers spelling suggestions? That’s how you got here (and how on earth did you need a spelling suggestion for ”that’s it”?), in case you’ve forgotten.

And nobody puts Dirty Dancing in a corner.

 
 
 
Comment by Jim Kloss #
2004-01-15 19:57:19

It’s *your* sandbox. We’ll come over whenever you want to come out and play again…

 
Comment by Phil Ringnalda #
2004-01-15 20:01:05

Someone seems to have filled my sandbox with broken toys, and rusty nails, while I wasn’t watching. This should be fun, figuring out which of dozens of hacked up and modded files in a language I don’t really understand are causing things to not work right. Luckily, I’m home with the flu, which ought to put me in the perfect state for debugging. Or, maybe not ;)

 
Comment by patricia #
2004-01-15 20:34:33

i go through periods where i feel guilty for not posting. those are the precise moments when i know i need to take a break. i take a week or twoo off, work the guilt out of the system, and wait for the desire to come back. i’m thinking one of these days the desire won’t be back, and that will be okay.

”I carried a watermelon.”

Comment by Phil Ringnalda #
2004-01-15 21:20:43

:) Didn’t we all, one time or another.

 
 
Comment by Michel Valdrighir #
2004-01-15 21:59:55

Oh my God, Zorgluzord finally freed you from the alien spaceship!
I’m set to be free soon too, you have my URL in your referrer logs if you want to take a peek. :P

Comment by Phil Ringnalda #
2004-01-15 22:24:05

He did. No more jokes about an… about prob… well, you know, ”the things” from me.

And I do, I do, and I like, both the looks and the contents. It’s good to have us back, isn’t it?

 
 
Comment by Jacques Distler #
2004-01-15 22:09:52

Welcome back, Phil! Lot’s happened while you’ve been away.

Personally, I’ve been amazed at your assiduousness at cleaning up after the comment spammers, even though you weren’t posting anything new.

I took it as a sure sign you would eventually return…

Comment by Phil Ringnalda #
2004-01-15 22:30:41

One thing my college education actually taught me (really, and literally), is that you don’t leave graffiti, and you don’t leave bathrooms dirty. Let one pass, on the wall or, shall we say, on the floor, and the next person by will be even worse.

Seems to work, sort of, with comment spammers, too. At least, judging by the numbers piling on certain entries I know of on abandoned blogs, spam breeds spam.

 
 
Comment by pixelkitty #
2004-01-15 22:55:50

ITS ALIVE!

Welcome back. I missed you.

Comment by Phil Ringnalda #
2004-01-15 23:05:59

PK! I’ve been missing you, too. The last few days, I’ve been thinking back on our salad days, and wanting that same sense of fun and wonder back. It’s still there, waiting for us, I’m sure it is.

 
 
Comment by Roger Benningfield #
2004-01-16 00:16:16

What a nice surprise! I’m taking a last scroll through FeedDemon’s subscription list, and whaddaya know… Phil is back in black. Er, bold. With two new entries, even.

Don’t realize Christmas was last month?

Comment by Phil Ringnalda #
2004-01-16 00:41:48

I thought I was only 15 days late, for a New Years comeback. I was supposed to return on Christmas? Oops.

Damn, it’s nice to be back. I better find some nasty already three year old argument to get in the middle of, before I get too blissed out.

Comment by Shelley #
2004-01-16 08:17:06

”I better find some nasty already three year old argument to get in the middle of, before I get too blissed out”

Two words: Atom and RSS

Welcome back Phil. Very very good to have you back.

Comment by Phil Ringnalda #
2004-01-16 10:41:00

Well, Atom and RSS certainly bring me back to my original title/subject. That’s it exactly. I have a few things to say about the Postel’s law thing, but it feels like telling them to the Israelis and Palestinians. The Atom-RSS scrum stumbled into the Syndication Yahoo! Group the other week, and I thought for a bit that I was going to have to unsubscribe from my final syndication-related list.

 
 
 
 
Comment by Donna #
2004-01-16 05:44:11

What Jacques said; I am unreasonably excited that you’re posting at all – I don’t really care how often (well, yes, I would prefer ”more”, but I’ll take quality over quantity every day.

Comment by Phil Ringnalda #
2004-01-16 11:01:35

Thank Ghu for that! I suspect that I still have a few eight or ten post days left in me, but right now I’m having my usual hard time not thinking that just writing it in the textarea’s enough, without feeling any need to actually post after that. I *am* my own editor ;)

 
 
Comment by l.m. orchard #
2004-01-16 08:20:46

Good post! I’ve been thinking a lot along the same lines lately with decafbad.com, especially since all I seem to manage these days are Quick Link posts :)

But I want to come back. It’s just going to take a little bit.

Comment by Phil Ringnalda #
2004-01-16 10:59:05

I really want to say that just Quick Linking until you have the time and voice to say more is fine too, we’ll wait that out as well, but the fact is, I really like your link lists: there’s almost never anything that I can actually use, and almost always something that will stretch my mind in some new direction. So I can’t really put you in the same class as people who just don’t want to say anything ;)

It does make me want to revive the idea I had, last time I started coding on blogging software, to have a single input screen, that would let you decide after you got done writing whether what you just wrote was a regular blog post, or a wiki page that should have an announcement posted in the blog, or a thing like Radio’s stories that should have a summary and link posted in the blog, or a sidebar quick link. Throw in an automatic link list post to the blog when you’ve added enough sidebar posts to make it worthwhile pinging, and pushing them out into the RSS feed, and I still think it would make a nice way to publish.

 
 
Comment by Ethan #
2004-01-16 11:50:03

It’s been said already, but welcome back. Great to see you’re posting once again.

 
Comment by Luke Hutteman #
2004-01-17 22:10:34

Still too many unread items in my aggregator so it looks like I’m the last one to notice your return to blogging, but hey – who are YOU to complain my welcome-back-comment is a few days late? ;-)

Anyway, glad to see you’re back. The blogsphere wasn’t the same without ya…

 
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