phil ringnalda

Sam Ruby reports being confused by meeting Dave Shea and Matt Mullenweg, when he wouldn’t have had a problem with meeting The CSS Zen Garden guy and photomatt. I actually wouldn’t have had any problem with either of those names, but although I know I’m subscribed to Dave’s weblog, I wouldn’t have been able to easily find it in my subscriptions until just a few minutes ago, when I changed the name in Bloglines from mezzoblue to Dave Shea.

It’s a drastic step, throwing away the name of someone’s blog that way, but it’s the only thing I get to change in Bloglines. What works best for me are feeds done like Joshua Kaufman’s unraveled, where the feed has the title “unraveled” and the description “Joshua Kaufman’s Personal Website”, so that every time I glance at the header above a post I get reminded whose feed it is.

On the other hand, despite having read and enjoyed Pushing Rectangles (“Speed has always been important otherwise one would not need a computer.”) for going on two years now, it wasn’t until I left my aggregator and went to the webpage the other day while bookmark blogging that I realized/remembered that it was Matthew Ernest’s blog, and thus remembered the whole who/when/why behind my having read him all this time.

Even though I know I’m not getting to know a whole person, just the parts that you choose to publish about you, I still think of you as people, not as publications, and it’s your personal voice that attracts me to your blog. And the way I know people is by their names (even if their name is StavrosTheWonderChicken – I don’t care what’s on your birth certificate, just that it be a name-for-you, not a name-for-a-thing-of-yours). So, would you mind reminding me of your name in your feed?