Recently in About Category

Okay, I think comments are back on and working. Although if you have trouble dropping me a mail to explain what happened would be very nice of you.

I'm doing an upgrade, some things may be wonky, particularly tags and comments.

The performance issues with this blog should be eased now, thanks to some awesome support from my hosting company, 34SP.com. They moved it to a faster server!

I'll also be taking the Movable Type performance release, when it's released, and maybe investigate using FastCGI.

But in the meantime, leaving a comment should be more pain free (but drop me a mail if it isn't).

I'm experiencing some slow performance with this site. It's noticeable when anything calls a cgi script ie. comments, searching tags etc. I'm looking into it.

And before anyone recommends some other blog engine or technology, try running PHP without mod_php and you'll see what the problem is. And yes I should use FastCGI etc. etc.

April 17th is Big Dumb Objects' Official Birthday, however like the Queen it gets two, the official one, and the one when I actually remember, which is today.

The first post on BDO was April 17th 2004 at 22:36:46. 4 years! Where did that go? (Although bizarrely Alexa says it's been online since 06-Apr-2004)

Some stats:

• 2,533 entries
• 931 comments
• Quite a few visits (not sure if my old webstat logs are archived or deleted).

Thanks to everyone for reading and commenting.

Of course BDO is young in comparison to my first blog (now dormant) who's first post was on May 29th 2002 when blogging was still young and fresh and RSS was wildly exciting.

I'm getting all nostalgic.

I think I broke Jeff Vandermeer's reviewing rules.

Oh wait, he said books. I'm okay.

Ho ho.

This seems like a good time to talk about the "Everyone's A Critic" panel at Eastercon, seeing as a rash of "what's a review?" posts have broken out over a few blogs. I hear it's contagious and reoccurring. Cheryl has a sensible post about it and there are comments aplenty on Torque Control.

I enjoyed the panel, it at times felt like bloggers vs. the establishment, in a fun way, and strayed onto a conversation about authors and reviewers and the shenanigans resulting from the collision of the two.

The assumption made by some of the panel was that a review on a blog tries to aspire to being a "proper" review, that there is some serious intention behind it. I don't think this is necessarily true. Someone from the audience said that their blog was just a substitute for talking down the pub, and I like that idea. I'm just chatting away to the interweb, and some people read. I probably wouldn't expect or want this style from a "proper" magazine. It's all about trust I think, or maybe brand. Some places are trusted for serious, impartial reviews, other blogs are read because the blogger spouts torrents of rage, other blogs are read because they feel like reading a friends diary. Fortunately we have the choice these days.

The question also arose as to why bloggers would rather blog than write reviews for other publications. Andrew Drucker summed it up for me, (paraphrase) "that would be work". Made me laugh, but it's also true, blogging is something I do for fun, in between the other stuff I have to do. I have no doubt that working with an editor such as Paul or Niall would help me write better reviews, but for the moment at least, I'm not worried about that. I'm concentrating on trying to write better fiction, not better reviews.

Having said all that, it's my blog and I'll change my mind if I want to. I have control, as I said at the panel. If I feel like taking a few hours to write a serious review I could (or could try), if I want to write a one word review, I can. (Argue the definition of review elsewhere...) But I'll probably just write a few paragraphs about what I liked and didn't like about the book, in a more or less, stream of consciousness, talking down the pub style. Then post a Doctor Who rumour.

Want to know what SF related stuff I'm doing on other sites? Well I've been trying out Movable Type's new Activity Streams plugin, and it's working well enough to tell everyone about.

The last weeks activity is here and there's also a feed of my activity stream. It includes (so far): Science Fiction related twittering, Science Fiction related delicious bookmarks, favourite videos on YouTube, shared Science Fiction related stuff from Google Reader and random quotes and pictures from a Tumblr site I use.

Overall it adds a more micro-blogging feel to things, with items too small to be blogged about, but too good to be forgotten.

I'm back.

New(ish) things:

• A comments feed
• My plugging guidelines.
• A bookshelf list of books I'm reading or have read. (Using Amazon widgets because other stuff didn't work and it's dead easy and shows pretty pictures.)
  

Things to do:

• Write a review of Doctor Who Voyage Of The Damned
• Write a review of Matter by Iain M Banks
• Finish reading The Jennifer Morgue and write a review (I didn't quite finish it before Christmas).
• Finish my thesis on the conservation of cool across SF film series.

I'd just like to wish a happy (Gregorian calendar) new year to everyone. A big thanks especially to all readers, commenters and people who have linked here.

I hope I can continue to provide something worth reading, whether it's trivial, silly, serious, ranting or just old skool weblogging.

Have a good year.

A very happy Christmas to everyone!

Today's agenda is:

• Open presents
• Play with new toys
• Eat turkey
• Watch Doctor Who

I hope you all have a lovely day.