July 29, 2002
Friday Five
1. How long have you had a weblog?
I've had a personal site with blog-like updates and links since 1994. I found the Internet during my second year of college when my class (Politics of Black America) assignment was to learn more about Louis Farrakhan's newspaper, The Final Call. I was too chicken to approach one of the bow-tied men in the street, so I decided to try out this new-fangled Internet thing. I'm glad I went online because it directly led to the career path I'm on today, but I'm not afraid to talk to the bow-tied men anymore. They're generally quite nice.
Anyway, I digress... Dave and I created what is commonly known as a blog in March of 2001. It was here at Liloia.com, but it had four categories of posts that fed into four boxes on the front page. You could choose from Read (journals and essays), See (images), Books (books and other products that we reviewed), and Links (reviewed sites). It all got consolidated into one running line of posts, but behind the scenes, we still classify the posts into those four categories just in case we ever decide to separate them again.
2. What was your first post about?
I could have sworn it was about the proliferation of square plates. By prediction that they were an up and coming trend has proven true as most home stores now sell at least one line of tableware with four corners. But if you look at the first entry in our latest setup, it's a review by Dave of the book, "One to One Future".
3. How many changes (name, location, etc.) of your weblog have there been, if more than one?
There was the one on GeoCities that I created in 1994 and it stayed there until 2001. I can no longer access the GeoCities site, because Netaddress became a paid service that I wasn't willing to pay for and I can't get my new GeoCities password. So it's there, but several years outdated.
4. What CMS (content management system) do you use? Do you like it or do you want to try something else?
We started out with a homegrown PHP/MySQL system because that was the best way to get the complex 4-blogs-in-one setup to work. But when we changed our content categorization last year, we gave MovableType a try. Dave is the primary administrator so I can't say much more about it than it's easy to use.
5. Do you read people who have both a journal and a weblog? Or do you prefer to read people who have all of their writing in one central place?
I'm not sure what the point of having a journal and a weblog is. I guess that's because I expand the definition of weblog to include more personal, journal-like entries. My least favorite weblogs are those that just list links. My second-least favorites are those who list links with little explanations. My almost favorite are those that tackle politics, world issues and abstract theories. And my most favorite are those that delve into the nitty gritty personal lives of those who write them. I don't watch soaps, so this is my drama fix. If I found a site with a journal and a weblog, I would probably just read the journal.
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