Tag: blog

Normal Service Resumed, I think

I just got my blog working pretty close to the way I want it to be again. I should be back up and posting.

Big huge apologies to Catherine, with whom I was quite unnecessarily grouchy while this was not working. Sorry, Hen!

Mostly working

Okay, WordPress works now. I’m keeping the old MT archives for now, as there doesn’t seem to be a sane way of getting Apache’s mod_rewrite to work properly here. I suspect PEBCAK, probably, with intensely arcane rewrite rule syntax as a mitigating factor.

No ISSNs for Canadian blogs

I applied for an ISSN yesterday after reading Joe Clark’s ISSN for Weblogs page. This is what I got back from ISSN Canada today:

Thank you for your application. At the moment, we are no longer assigning ISSN to weblogs, but the situation is under review. The question of whether weblogs will be able to be assigned ISSN is under discussion in the international ISSN Network. The question hinges on the scope of the ISSN but also on the very real consideration of the limited staff resources of ISSN centres worldwide.

I guess it’s their ball and they can take it away if they wish. Blogs are serial publications, though, and therefore have all the rights of any regular publication.

how the blog got its name

We showed this film to an audience and asked them what they had seen, and they said they had seen a chicken, a fowl, and we didn’t know that there was a fowl in it! So we carefully scanned the frames one by one for this fowl, and, sure enough, for about a second, a fowl went over the corner of the frame. … The film was about five minutes long. …

Wilson: We simply asked them: what did you see in the film?
…
Question: No one gave you a response other than “We saw the chicken”?

Wilson: No, this was the first quick response— “We saw a chicken.”

— from “Film Literacy in Africa”, by John Wilson (Canadian Communications vol.1 no. 4, summer, 1961, pp. 7-14), cited in McLuhan’s “The Gutenberg Galaxy”.