Thoughts on a 2014 relaunch

Hello to all, and a happy new year to you. I hope 2013 treated you well and that 2014 is even better.

After a long and only mildly interrupted hiatus, I am finally starting to plan a proper relaunch of the blog, although not ready to predict a date yet.

One reason for deciding to plan a proper relaunch (and please note that we are not yet there, and I do not know when my schedule will allow it) is a gradual and regrettable estrangement over the last couple of years from any sort of academic discussions. By this time I had intended to be back in school, in a Doctoral program, but events have unfolded differently. I still hope to apply next year to start the following year, but that does leave an awfully long gap.

I do miss the discussions of the old blog. And Facebook or Twitter are no substitute. Sure, there are discussions, and I even have many of the old regular commenters on there. But the ephemeral nature of those comment threads grates on me, and the endless timeline of trivia that has become the standard template for Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, etc. has gone from mildly irritating to somewhat repulsive, and I trust I am not the only one embracing a grumpy nostalgia for the web of the ancient days of the mid-2000s.

Key to this effort, I believe, will be commuting to a regular minimum posting schedule of at least one moderately substantive post per week, ideally at the same approximate time and date. For this to work I intend to bank a significant number of pieces in advance, on the order of a dozen or so, such that temporary schedule changes will not lead to a temporary but seemingly total collapse of the blog as an ongoing project. Should coauthors rejoin me on the effort there may very well be more than one point on the standard post schedule, but I believe that even a very low hertz cadence is drastically preferable to total unpredictability.

But what will those posts be? Some will be long-unfinished drafts, many others will be presentations of fun old documents from my personal collection and public online archives, but what else?

What do you, the former readers, want to see? I must admit a significant lack of interest in covering current events in the general case, although I am sure that specific events will eventually prompt a reaction.

But, again, what did you read Mutantfrog for? What did we do differently from all the others? What gap looms?

Recent comments sort of back

After upgrading to WordPress 3.0 the other day the recent comments display in the sidebar stopped working. Unfortunately, the highly customizable plugin I was using before seems to be abandoned and will probably not be updated for the new version of WordPress, but I did find a code snippet that will hold us over until I can get around to a more substantial solution.

I’ve been meaning to switch to a new theme for a long time, but I think instead of being ambitious I’m just going to switch to the new WordPress 3.0 default theme, with colors and header images changed to reflect the classic Mutantfrog.com look. While it would still be nice to have a really stylish and uniquely designed theme at some point, it’s a higher priority to switch to some modern code that just works properly. As long as it’s mutantfrog yellow, that is.

Software upgrade

Just a quick announcement that following the upgrade to WordPress 3.0 the recent comments in the sidebar no longer seems to function. Please let me know if anything else seems to be broken, and if anyone happens to know of a WP 3.0 compatible recent comments plugin, let me know. Either way I’ll try and sort it out later today.

This dude is totally awesome

RoflZoo

With fastly approaching deadlines I have been blogging very little recently, but I have been posting a lot of random links and very short thoughts to my Twitter account (as a former English major, I am, like the New York Times, too proud to use the word verb “tweet” in public). I’ve noticed though that the discussions here tend to be so good that long and in depth ones often develop out of little more than a link, so I am curious, do you – the readers and commenters – think that I (perhaps we) should shed my (our) bias against very short, content-lite blog posts, and put more short posts in this space rather than silly Twitter, on the off chance that it can get some valuable discussion threads going?