About this Weblog
This is an archive
of blog entries
from 2002 to July 2009.
Newer blog items are at stepno.com/blog
See this July 27, 2009,
post for details. The transition to the new site began a year earlier.
See the July 2008 calendar here and the August archive at my Blogger blog
(Boblog.blogspot.com), which
I used for quick posts during the school year. Blogger was more useable when working from
more than one campus computer, while Radio Userland was more powerful at creating multiple
sites and a mixture of blog posts and longer essays. So was WordPress, which I eventually made my main blogging platform.
To avoid confusing students in preparation
for the shift to WordPress, I
made http://stepno.com/blog a shortcut to the blog I was using most.
Back to the old description of all my blog spaces...
This weblog is color-coded into several incarnations or subcategories:
- The Other Journalism
Weblog with the leafy green border
is my main blog.
For a few years it also was reachable as Couranteer.com, an address I eventually let go. That had been a tip-of-the-hat to
The Hartford Courant, where I began my journalism career, and the term was once a synonym for "newspaperman." But that was long ago.
The blog is where I collect thoughts, notes and headlines about
the changing world of "other" journalism, including
personal
and community news reporting, especially online. This wasn't my only or most-active weblog at first (hence the "other"), but it gradually became the main place I put news and
notes for my journalism students, among other things.
- The
AEJMC
Newspaper Division weblog, in shades of blue,
includes newspaper-related material from my main blog, plus material
intended primarily for members of that organization, especially notices of
updates to the newspaper
division home page, which I have managed since
2003.
- After a few trials, I set up my vinyl-LP-black Podfolk
Podcast blog in 2005, but found I didn't have time to create the audio I wanted. My "podcast"
topic was to be traditional, old time, folk and folkish music available on the Web, something I've been writing and thinking about for 10 years. I've kept the site as an infrequent blog on that theme, and as a place to post photos I've taken at concerts and festivals over the years. I may digress into the folklore of the Internet, or of journalism, as in the test
post. For the true podcast experience, optimistic users of Radio Userland, Juice,
Apple's iTunes, or other
podcast-catching software can subscribe to this Podfolk
RSS feed, just in case I get back on the roll-your-own-radio bandwagon.
- Other subcategories of the main blog
are mostly for my own organizational purposes, such as a page for posts
about Knoxville,
while others are tests of different layout templates, or
tongue-in-cheek experiments
Links in a side column of each blog go to
longer essay pages and my other websites. The
main one, stepno.com, is a combination "about me" file (the left column), shortcut to my pages for students (the top line), and useful-bookmark page (the right column). The newest site, my UT
Knoxville Page,
came when I started teaching in the UT School of Journalism
& Electronic Media, which has its own bio page about me.
The orange XML symbol provides the RSS feed
for
whichever blog category you are viewing; the orange coffee mug is a
subscription shortcut for other Userland Radio bloggers. The
Rocky Top Brigade
flag links to a "blogroll" of other Tennessee webloggers.
How I blog
I don't promise myself (or you) that I'll write every day. Frankly, I
don't know how some daily bloggers find the time or
the confidence that they have enough interesting things to say. Unlike
some bloggers, I do go back and edit, both to fix errors and to simply
improve the way I said something. (The date or time of a major change is usually
noted at the end of the post.) Radio Userland does not
include a spelling checker, but it does include news feeds from
The New York Times
and other sources, which I draw on frequently.
I've gradually allowed
myself to drift out of the journalistic third person into the bloggish
first person. It's an interesting mental shift for a former daily
newspaper reporter. I still wish I had an editor there to rescue me
from my mistakes and an employer willing to pay for the time I
spend obsessively fiddling with my own prose. It was a lot
easier to say "that item's done" when I could hear printing presses rolling
in the basement!
On days when I do fire up the blogging software, I do one or more of
the
following:
- write a long essay on one subject
- pull a half dozen items from my RSS
aggregator to post as "syndicated" content
- go back and add comments or corrections to those
earlier items (rarely more than a few hours later)
- add a "changed" note (like the one at the end of this page)
if
the comments or revisions were substantial, or if a story "developed"
several times during the day.
- convert all or parts
of dated "blog" entries into one of those
longer "story" entries, and put a pointer from the original dated
entry's address to the new version.
- read and
respond to legitimate "comments" appended to my blog items, and
delete off-topic comments,
especially attempts to promote gambling, pornography or
pharmaceutical-sales sites.
That process means some items could be updated several times: a "raw"
syndication posting as written by someone else; a paraphrased or edited
version that I've tinkered with, or a longer essay by me, inspired by
(and citing) the original syndicated item, and then a comment in
response to some other commenter. I try to make those changes
clear, especially if more than an hour has passed between
revisions.
So far I've only found one case of someone quoting an early version of
an item that I changed later in the day. I liked the phrasing of the
sentence he'd quoted enough to put it back.
At times I've supplemented or summarized some of this blog's items at Boblog, my old Blogger site, or in my Red Liner Weblog, a mostly archival collection of notes related to the Thursday
blogging group I was part of at Harvard's
Berkman
Center for the Internet & Society. (The site takes its name from
its
Harvard-crimson motif and the MBTA subway at Harvard Square, not either
right or left political interpretation of the color red.)
My more general Backgrounder:
About Weblogs
page links to my oldest classroom demo
and experimental blogs done with plain old HTML, Trellix, Blogger and
Manila, in roughlly that order.
updated June
2006
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© Copyright
2009
Bob Stepno.
Last update:
7/27/09; 3:57:28 AM. |
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