The Formal Absences of Precious Things

The title of this post is a William Gibson image from All Tomorrow's Parties (he gets genuine hipster bonus points for naming a novel after a Velvet Underground song). It refers to the empty windows of closed jewelry shops--the dramatically lit black velvet drapes are still in place, but the gems have been removed. (To blog is to write, to write is to try to do so well, and this Gibson phrase is good writing: descriptive, evocative, resonant. While you may not achieve Gibsonian perfection, as a blogger, it's something you should aspire to.)

But great writing or not, what's that cyberpunk scene-setter doing at the top of this post? Well, formal absences of precious things is nothing any blogger wants to contemplate with regard to his or her weblog. Let's be honest here--if you're doing it right; if you're actually breaking an intellectual sweat when it comes to posting to your blog, you're spending a great deal of time and effort making it smart and--paradoxically--seem effortless. But what if all that work went away in the space of a computing cycle?

We're not talking doomsday scenarios here. In case you missed it, wrap your mind around this recent item about Weblogs.com. The word that immediately sprang to my mind was Yikes! Blog today, as it were, gone tomorrow . . . The formal absence in this instance is the rigorous syntax of your former blog's URL--and, well, you're in a better position to tell me about the missing precious things.

And yeah, the whole Weblogs.com thing will sort itself out; Dave Winer may relent. Or maybe there's a point being made here--who knows? After all, Bruce Sterling has noted that all effective blogging is performance art. So perhaps the Incredible Disappearing Weblog Site is the the equivalent of Laurie Anderson laced into skates, the blades of which are frozen in a block of ice, playing her violin on a street corner until the summer sun frees her. Or maybe not. But it is a cool theory.

The patented Sheridan Roundabout Point ® that's being made is simply that shit happens--even in cyberspace. If it's not the seemingly petulant actions of a founding father of blogs, then it might be a virus unleashed by a blog-hating hacker that takes down weblog servers. (If that ever happens, and only diary sites are targeted, I'm really, really gonna need an alibi--so, preemptively, I was with you, okay?) Or, far less X-Files, it may simply be the error of Fly-By-Nite Blogs--a provider that offers low fees because, among other things, it is casual in its approach to backups.

Thinking about all this got me wondering about the added security that's afforded by blogging with a NoteTaker notebook. It made me revisit the structure of the notebook that manages the contents of this blog. And, with the grim pride of any prognosticator whose Armageddon predictions prove to be more true than not, I noted that because I had anticipated a similar disaster, my blogging notebook contained all the constituent parts needed to reassemble my destroyed weblog. But I also realized that reconstructing a blog in this fashion--while much, much better than nothing--was little more than the lead-in to the Six Million Dollar Man: "We have the technology to rebuild him." It's little noted that dramatic license allowed the next thing said to be edited out: "But it's gonna be a bitch!" However, the resurrection of my blog won'thave the advantage of TV shorthand: It really will be a bitch.

Then it hit me--there was a major flaw in my notebook structure. In the face of catastrophe, I would be hobbled not by a lack of technology, but by a failure to think imaginatively about NoteTaker's powerful, built-in capabilities. To be fair, this site and the blogging notebook that drives it are just four weeks old today. (Evidently, time really does fly when you're having fun.) Everything being done here is basically improvisation: Getting jiggy with the tech and seeing where it leads. Because no one had blogged from a NoteTaker notebook before this, I pretty much made it up as I went along--in truth, I still do. But four weeks wiser, I've decided to revisit first assumptions and refine the improvisations.

When I first created this blog's notebook, I thought atomistically about it structure. My fail-safe provisions not only included saving the notebook entry versions of the postings, but also all of the artwork for the site in a special alphabetical section. That's thinking ahead, I remember saying, with a satisfied smile. Well, yeah, it was--but not far enough ahead.

I also created a section that contained clippings from any site that refers to this blog, cleverly using NoteTaker's immensely useful clipping service technology to easily whack the design and content of other websites that loved or hated my weblog into an appendix of my blogging notebook. That's thinking ahead, I also remember saying with an equally satisfied smile.

Well, duh. If I could easily preserve the design and content of other websites for my own egotistical-cum-scrapbook purposes, er, why wasn't I doing this with my own weblog? Why indeed? Seemingly, my pride at surviving the 'Sixities with brain cells intact was premature and overly optimistic.

Here's the big implication I didn't see--the huge implication: A NoteTaker blogging notebook is (or should be) a roundtrip solution. First, you send entries from the notebook to the weblog and then you clip the posted entry--artwork, design, live links and all--and send it back to an archival section of the same notebook. It's a cyber mandella, a virtual snake biting its own tail, Om and probably a lot of other metaphoric things. Should disaster strike, not only are you rebuilding from a point a couple levels above "constituent parts," you also have an automatic interim solution: As you're rebuilding your weblog, you can save all of the entries--complete with their blog-esque art direction--as a NoteTaker web notebook and published the blog's content as a potentially temporary website while you're busy suturing the real weblog back together again. True, the web notebook iteration won't have the content-management capabilities of the blog. But given the choice between Total Blog Oblivion and an instant republishing of its full content --even as a fully functional duplicate blog is being constructed, well, the grounds for quibbling are pretty much nonexistent.

The screen capture below gives you a glimpse of what this blog looks like as archival clippings in the NoteTaker notebook that gave rise to it in the first place. Somehow, this idea sounds like it should involve disrupting the time-space continuum, but this time we'll let it go. (As always, double-clicking the thumbnail art creates a larger version in a pop-up window.)

While a Phoenix-like rise from weblog ashes is the biggest implication of an archival section, it is not the only one. In my last posting, I noted that I don't treat pressing of the Send button as the locking down of my blog thoughts. I freely admit that my initial posting is Beta Content--there for courageous early adopters (or, rather, visitors). If you watch closely over the following days, typos decrease, split infinitives disappear and sometimes the pop cultural references get more less arcane with a little distance from the piece. Idiosyncratic as this process may be, I am comfortable with it. However, I tend to go about saving me from myself using either Ecto or with the TypePad editing panels. This means that often the final-draft version of a posting is not precisely its notebook entry. Thus, the concept of a final-draft archival section of the notebook neatly resolves any editorial discrepancies.

Here's the basics of creating and feeding a blog archives section in your notebook. (As always, consult your NoteTaker documentation for the Deep Geek fine points.) On the contents page of your blogging notebook, create a new section. I've called mine "Blog Archives" and I've made it the second "appendix" section in the notebook, after "Draft Entries." Creating a new NoteTaker section will automatically create an untitled page for the section. I've called this page "Blog Archival Clippings." The next step is critical: Turn to the new page in the newly created section and, using the Tools Menu>NoteTaker Services, create a clipping service for it. Now go to your blog and select the entire contents of the first posting--from headline right through the permalink footer. Cmd-clicking on this selection will trigger a contextual menu that features (among other things) all of the NoteTaker clipping services. Chose the service associated with the archival page of your notebook. The selection is then automatically copied and pasted into that page of your notebook. (If you've activated the option, you are also given the chance to annotate the clipping before it's a done deal.)

As you can see from the screen capture below, NoteTaker did a good job retaining the design of this blog--with the exception of the word-wrap around the initial artwork. But the whole idea of archiving postings is so useful, I'm okay about the word-wrap not making the transition. In a truly catastrophic situation, I'm just going to be very grateful I have these backup postings. By the way, the links in these archival clippings are all live, so this archiving strategy also preserves all of the target sites you've so lovingly searched for and pointed to.

Okay, let's review: (1) Go out of your way to explore NoteTaker, taking pains to understand not just what it can do, but how its capabilities can be leveraged in terms of you blog. (2) NoteTaker's clipping service gives you the unique ability to preserve copies of the actual postings to a blog. (3) Laurie Anderson's ice-skate piece was very cool, but you probably had to be there. (4) William Gibson has evolved into a first-class prose stylist.

I've one last interval of concentrated travel. After that, the postings to this blog will be more regular and--now--archived.

This post was made possible in part by: "Here He Comes" from the album Before And After Science (1977) by Brian Eno

Friday, June 25, 2004 2:07:26 PM

Comments

[Kevin Sheridan]

Hi Lola:

I just checked it--it seems to be working. It should send you to a page where all of the weekly archives are arrayed by by date.

Please let me know if you continue to be able to access it.

Thanks.

[Lola]

Err . . . link to nt_blog_archives is broken.