WHY NOT BLOG ON OUR FR HOMEPAGES? [...has anyone else thought of this?]

FR homepage of paulklenk ^ | Thursday, September 30, 2004 | Paul Klenk

[paulklenk]

WHY NOT BLOG ON OUR FR HOMEPAGES? [Posted Thursday, Sept. 30, 2004]

Has it occurred to anyone else that our homepages here at FreeRepublic are the perfect places to blog? They are relatively easy to edit, they have unique URLs which are easy to share and remember, and they are not dependent on being pinged by others. They depend only on what other blogs depend -- the ability to post regularly and stand out from the crowd.

I would like to encourage my fellow Freepers, especially the more prolific and well-known one, to give this a try. Perhaps one day we can start a daily thread featuring commentary on the daily FR blogs.

[paulklenk]

Click on my homepage link for a look at an FR blog:

http://www.freerepublic.com/~paulklenk/

[paulklenk]

Your thoughts?

[Conspiracy Guy]

I like keeping my Profile Page irrelevant.

[paulklenk]

More pings...

[paulklenk]

Then perhaps you could limit your blogging to Kerry's foreign policy...

[Alberta's Child]

Good idea, but FR might start having some bandwidth problems if a lot of people did that.

Heck, FR is really one giant, loosely-organized blog site, when you think about it!

[Dead Corpse]

If you are gonna do something like that, consider becoming a monthly donor to FR. It'll help defray the cost of support the webspace/bandwidth costs.

This stuff ain't free.

[paulklenk]

That's a good question. We could ask the staff what they think about it.

The nice thing is, it's already set up perfectly to blog.

[paulklenk]

Another great suggestion!

[Conspiracy Guy]

Hows this?

Kerry on Foreign Policy

We should not concern ourselves with foreign policy. Foreigners can get their own insurance or get in on the UN Group policy.

[paulklenk]

Say, why would it use more bandwidth to post on a homepage than to post on a thread? I would think a thread would be more bandwidth...

[paulklenk]

Sounds irrelevant to me!! Keep it up!!

[spodefly]

The interface to the Freeper home pages would have to be changed to make it easier to edit and update. The interface is fine for a page that doesn't change very often, but it would be sucky to try to update that page very often, especially on a daily basis. Also, the links to those pages are not entirely obvious. I'm not sure how much traffic they would see.

Also, many people don't put anything on those pages. I understand why. They wish to remain anonymous, or maybe even mysterious ...

I would not necessarily want to say that my screen name, spodefly, truly represents ME, the person typing this response. I, as spodefly, am free to say things that I as (insert real name here) would probably never say. I sometimes troll, I am sometimes deliberately extreme to try to get a response, I sometimes post without carefully considering what I am saying (Shut up, Petronski ... you do it too!) No doubt, my true genius shines through in everything I post, but in this forum, with the audience we have, I don't necessarily want my soft white underbelly exposed.

Blogs, as I have come to know them, are more personal, at least the most valuable ones seem to be. They should be about the real person, or at least a reasonable facsimile of the real person delivered through a web page. I'm not sure that I necessarily want to be completely real and open in everything I post on FR. I do want to communicate a message or information, but that message may or may not have an true correspondence to ME the actual person.

Anyway, it might be an idea, but not sure how workable and ultimately how valuable it might be.

[bert]

Check out Ragtime cowgirl.....

[Conspiracy Guy]

I am a master of irrelevance.

[paulklenk]

Well, I just found it extremely easy to put up a new article on my homepage -- oops, I mean my FR blog. We needn't change the software at all.

As for as identity, my FR and my real identities are pretty much the same, and both are transparent.

Now, for the question of URLs: I think 'paulklenk.blogspot.com' and 'freerepublic.com/~paulklenk' are equally easy to remember.

Anyway, thanks for your points, and keep throwing them out, because they may prove useful in my experiment.

Regards,

[paulklenk]

Just did. Thanks. It's a nice homepage, but it's not really in blog-format -- which, actually, is just a reverse chronological diary.

[TexasCajun]

From what I've been hearing and reading in the MSM, FreeRepublic is already just one big Blog?

[paulklenk]

No, not really -- although it has its similarities.

FR threads are really message boards relating to a certain new articles. Blogs are personal diaries and commentaries from an individual writer, on one page, updated frequently, in reverse chronological order. As a writer become more prolific, well-known, and respected, his blog page becomes a destination in itself for his readers.

It might be interesting to archive one's own blog each month, let's say, by posting the entire blog in a thread, then deleting the home page, posting a link to the archive, and starting from scratch.

[spodefly]

The interface is easy for an initial posting, but would be ponderous for cumulative postings and archiving. Have you seen a blog interface from say blogspot? They handle new content well, and also manage archival and previous content. The FR homepage interface doesn't. It would certainly be workable, but not necesarily too much fun to work with.

As for the personal side, this particular post does represent me, but that other one over there on that other thread ... well, that wasn't me. That was spodefly.