The Great Change: Turning Cathy into a Lawyer

Welcome to my blog. Thanks to Joe Nekrasz for helping me set it up.

I'm still testing everything, so too soon to start with the "serious" writing.

Come back soon!

I decided that I should formally articulate an editing policy for my blog. I wasn't worried about this at the beginning because I wanted to see how things would develop (and I reserve the right to modify and/or abandon any policy set forth today - my blog, my rules!) but since part of the reason I'm blogging is to set a historical record documenting the Great Change (and you know how I feel about documenting...), I don't want to corrupt that record with retroactive modifications.

There are some reasonable exceptions though:

• Typos are always fair game for fixing.


• After making a post, I may come back later to rephrase parts of it. It's important for me to articulate myself clearly, and sometimes I find myself lacking the correct words to do it at the time I post. Sometimes it's only on re-reading posts that I finally find the phrasing I was searching for. Depending on the time that has passed since the original post and the scale of the changes I may leave a notation describing the edits. I won't generally do this if I make changes on the same day, but I will be more likely to do this if it's possible that readers might get confused ("Didn't it say something different the last time I was here???").


• Inline URLs can be adjusted at any point, but I will try to leave an editing notation to indicate if there has been a significant change.


• If I really change my mind on something, I will try to follow the protocol of not mutilating or destroying the original post. Rather, I will follow it up with another subsequent post and/or a comment. An example where I did (something similar to) this was for the June 13 and June 15 posts.


• Comments, part I: I'm really enthused that there's been some interesting discussions in the comments already. I would like to leave the comments section alone and not edit them at all, but I'll have to see how things shape up. I reserve the right to delete comments that I am not comfortable with hosting on my site for any reason, but I would prefer not to interfere. I've been debating the merits of deleting off-topic comments, but the volume on the site isn't such where I think that's necessary at this point.


• Comments, part II: I have on occasion gone back and removed typos from my own posts, but I am looking to resist editing them for content because the other people leaving comments do not have the same ability.

In continuing with yesterday's post, I've also decided that writing with emoticons should be verboten here. Prior to their advent writers managed to write with precision without resorting to their use, and if I hope the exercise of keeping a blog to improve my mastery of the craft, then I should also eschew them.

Besides, in keeping with the "becoming a lawyer theme," I doubt that most lawyers employ them in their legal documents:

"The plaintiffs in this case assert that the defendents did willfully and knowingly defraud the plaintiffs of $1 million :-("

Somehow I don't think so.

Even outside the blog I'm trying to avoid using emoticons. It seems that they've become a large crutch making me lazy as a writer. On the other hand, in emails and online chats it may still make sense to use them. It's not worth risking the breakdown of a friendship if the gratuitous use of an emoticon could have avoided the problem entirely.

It was also interesting when I administered the survey for my undergraduate thesis (where I researched usage behavior of the Internet). One respondent, who was clearly an early adopter with regards to the Internet, included a handwritten comment to clarify a multiple choice response, and in the margin, after the comment, wrote a smiley face. Sideways.

A follow-up post.

I should have done this a long time ago but I didn't have the mental bandwidth to look into this and figure it out. I have now released the blog under a Creative Commons license.

It's worth checking out the Creative Commons site for more information about these licenses and how they work. Since I began my blog they seem to have added some helpful illustrative cartoons to help explain the licenses and what rights they do or do not reserve for authors. For my part I chose to allow the contents of my blog to be reused in a non-commercial context as long as attribution remains and any derivative works are released under the same license. A benefit to using a Creative Commons license is that people who want to use my work under those conditions can do so without needing to contact me to discuss it first. At the same time, none of my other rights that copyright law protects are compromised beyond what my license chooses to concede. Given that my purpose in blogging is to communicate with as wide an audience as possible to contribute to public discourse, I decided it was worth my while to not be heavy-handed in restraining all of the increasingly myriad rights U.S. copyright law affords.

It has crossed my mind from time to time that people might mistakenly perceive that I'm speaking for other people or organizations I'm connected to, either on this blog or in other contexts. Being in DC has magnified this concern. It's a surprisingly small community of people who deal with each other so frequently that it's fairly easy to learn and remember who knows whom, who said what to whom, who did what to whom, etc. Enemies are surprisingly easy to make, and it's also surprisingly easy to inadvertantly drag other people you may somehow be connected to into your battles just by association.

But that's a pity, if for no other reason than it affects people's autonomy and compromises their honesty. It makes everything political, so you can't do what you think best at the moment because you have to be worried about payback. I suppose that's true in any context, but in Washington where so many people are here to try to affect the world, and so many battles necessarily are fought in the process, a sense of political pragmatism is particularly important.

I really like being in Washington. I really like being somewhere where important things happen. But I absolutely, positively do not want to get sucked in and corrupted by it. While discretion is valuable in any context, and I'm mindful of how I refer to other people on my blog particularly in any identifying way, I do not want to have to compromise my candor, my honesty. To the extent that this blog tracks my intellectual journey, it needs to be a true record of it. If I were to compromise that, I think the journey would be over and there'd be nothing left to tell. The destruction of my idealism would be complete. I want to believe that principle and independent thinking can triumph over all. I will hang on as tightly as I can to keep it from ever turning into a wishful fiction.

That said, there is still the pragmatic problem of inadvertantly sucking in people and organizations I care about into my own little drama. So I want to state clearly and explicitly for the record that I speak for myself. Only myself. People I know may agree with some, much, or even all of what I have to say. The same is true in reverse. But I am an independent thinker and so are my acquaintances. The following statement is therefore unequivocably true: what I communicate, including here on this blog, unless otherwise stated and authorized by another party, REPRESENTS ONLY MY OPINIONS, BELIEFS, ATTITUDES, PHILOSOPHIES, KNOWLEDGE, AND/OR UNDERSTANDING. Regardless of any affiliation, what appears here is only what I as Cathy Gellis, Individual, have to say.

Lately I've been slowly, and reluctantly, turning off the commenting feature on my blog. It distresses me to do this but the comment spammers have been getting out of hand. There have been days when I've had to spend an hour deleting all their crap. Part of the problem is that my blog software doesn't allow for easy deletion. But the other problem is that in their quest to improve their google rankings, they try to get their URLs linked to as many sites as possible. With easy access to mine they've been merrily posting away.

Since I've been turning off the commenting though it's been more under control. The older posts with known URLs to the spammers are now off-limits to them. It's too bad, because I'd really like for people to continue commenting on them, but I had to draw the line somewhere. I'm trying to keep the more recent posts open though. I really like having the comments because I like to see how people react to my writing, and I think the conversations my posts sometimes spawn can be really interesting.

Really posted 11/17.

I decided that my "Law School – The Process" category was getting too disproportionately big. (And it would only get bigger, since most of my posts talk about it, what with it being the ostensible focus of the blog.) So I split it up by year. I figure a year will run from July to July. The dates of my posts suggested that split, and I think it also makes sense. In July you start anticipating the upcoming year. In June you are still getting over the previous one.

I also finally (I think) figured out how to syndicate my site. I'd meant to do it before, when someone commented somewhere here that she'd really like me to do it. I'd like to write her back and tell her I have, but I can't figure out where her comment is to find her email address. (Edit: found it.) What I'd really like is for someone to tell me if I did it right. There's a link on the front page for the syndication, which links to here: http://www.cathygellis.com/mt/html/index.rdf. This is just my best guess though since I don't really know how RSS works. Poking around the MoveableType manual has not so far been helpful on this front.

Edit 11/26: Today I played with my first RSS newsreader. I'm using Thunderbird. It didn't like the URL above, but it did like this one so I've added it to the side navigation: http://www.cathygellis.com/mt/html/index.xml.

Beware with syndicated readings, though, that I frequently edit new posts. I almost wish there was a way I could keep things from going out on the RSS feed until 2 days after the post or something. I think the way it works the headline will go out, but when you click on the article you'll get the latest and greatest version that's posted. Which is fine, as long as you are aware that there may be a later version and don't just delete the article and move on. But I guess that could happen on the real site. Why would you reread an article you've already read? Maybe I'll just have to get better at editing up front...

(The other hazard of the syndication is that those horrible comment spams will go out if I haven't had a chance to delete them. Sorry. I don't mean to be the authority on penile implants and texas poker...)

Speaking of editing, my Musicians for Kerry posts have had some work done to them since first posted. I may still make some tweaks, but they're better than they were before 11/19.

Edit 12/2: It's interesting to note that even if a blog does not have a syndication link on it, it probably still syndicates. The blogging software seems to set up the xml pages automatically, whether the author explicitly advertises the links or not. For instance, apparently my blog was syndicated well before I got around to syndicating it...

Edit 12/8: The dark side of RSS: bandwidth consumption. The BoingBoing post referred to talked about only allowing one RSS download per day/update/other iteration. But I'm not sure how it was achieved. This isn't a huge problem for me though as a publisher - yet. I'm just not that popular... (darnit).

For my latest trick I turned on the trackback feature on my blog. I'm not entirely sure what it is and how it works (MoveableType had rather cryptic documentation on the subject) or that I've got it all set up right, but I think it's a(n automatic) way of listing on my blog any other blogs that link back to mine. So I can now very easily and conveniently see ... just how little influence I have in the blogging world. But in case fame occurs, I'll be ready.

I've added a new category to the blog, called "Blog meta." More and more I feel inclined to comment on issues involving blogging generally - as have many other people on their blogs - and this seemed like a good way to catch those posts. I just set it up and pulled in a few old posts to start populating it.

back·date   (bkdt)

tr.v. back·dat·ed, back·dat·ing, back·dates

To go out with an old flame

No, not really. (Or at least that's not the way I mean it here.)

I've been wrestling with the dating of my posts, and I think it may be time to rethink my policies. I've been trying to keep them spread out, partly because I think it makes the blog look better maintained (and not undeservedly so), and partly because I like to fully populate the calendar on the side (that may be a silly reason, but my blog, my silly reasons). All that may be well and good, but I'm wondering if it's getting out of hand. For one, since I tend to post several things all at once, most of my posts are getting date changed notations on the bottom. It's possible that those notations should be the exception but I think they are becoming a rule. And then there's the problem of the accuracy of the record I'm trying to keep.

On the BlogEthics site I almost posted an answer to another of the questions, "When making decisions about your blog, do any of the following values or duties cross your mind?" And then he listed several values including transparency and factual accuracy. I started writing this as a response (although I didn't post it):

I find myself very caught up in the transparency aspect, although it manifests itself in logistical details. Since I hope my blog will be a record of the time in which it was written, I find myself wanting to ensure that it be as reliable a record as possible. The catch is that I'm trying to create a fixed record in a malleable medium. I can always go back and make changes. I often want to, particularly if I hadn't quite been able to make the point I wanted with sufficient clarity at the time I wrote it. But if I make changes retroactively, I run the risk of undermining its legitimacy as a record. So I find myself pursuing all sorts of conventions to try to reach a happy medium. I have posts outlining my editorial policies on edits, and I leave tons of markers at the bottoms of my posts noting any changes. I don't think I've achieved nirvana on this point, but I'm trying...

Of course, what is it really doing for historical accuracy if I keep changing the dates on my posts?

So I think I'm going to tweak my policy. There are many times when the idea has struck me earlier and I've mentally drafted (or actually drafted) the bulk of the post on an earlier date than when I post. In those instances, I think I will still backdate because it is ultimately more accurate to represent the dates when the mood struck. But for posts that have only been vaguely brewing in my head until the one day when the muse lets several out, I think I will let them all be posted for the same day. It won't break anything. Lots of bloggers have lots of posts on the same day. And in telling the story about my law school process, it does tell it accurately to show which were the days that I felt more prolific.

Of course, we'll see how this goes. Old habits die hard.

Apparently for the last few days comments have been blocked. I only just found out about it now (thanks, Mark) although perhaps I should have gotten the hint from the lack of comment spam needing deleting...

Anyway, it appears a null entry got into the list of IP addresses to block, which effectively blocked everyone from everywhere. No comments, no trackbacks... I hadn't meant to be this unsocial, so my apologies to anyone inconvenienced (unless you are a spammer, in which case, screw you - it's your fault I even need to mess with the IP blocking tool at all). Please come back and link and comment to your heart's content, especially on this entry where I specifically asked you to.

So add this to the list of aggravations... Have I mentioned how much I hate technology?

Edit: Wow, the comment spammers were really chomping at the bit. I've had comments enabled for about an hour and already I've had to delete two spams.

Also, lest anyone think I am making too much out of my technological misery, let me also add to the list my mom's scanner and printer, which both also broke in recent weeks. Luckily I had another scanner I could give her, though it took a few weeks to get them to send the software so we could get it properly installed. (Getting it up and running was important for our ability to send faxes, e.g., transcripts, which comes up from time to time.) But the printer finally bit it this morning, just to make sure everyone in the household could be as inconvenienced as possible.

It's a conspiracy, I tell you...

The blog is now upgraded... mostly. As far as I can tell everything works, at least from your end. On my end, the admin screens are a complete mess -- in Mozilla. They are gorgeous in IE. There's something so wrong with that... In fact, I wonder if anyone else has this problem because I imagine MT users everywhere would be up in arms over it. There must be a quick fix I can get my hands on somewhere... Suggestions?

Edit: It turns out it's only somewhat gorgeous in IE. I've poked around the MT support forum and gotten a few ideas, but none seem to really solve the problem. There must be something obvious that I'm missing, but I can't think of what it is.

In the meantime, I wonder if trackback was broken on my old installation, because as soon as I upgraded I got all sorts of trackback spam. Oh, joy... The good news is that the new MT makes it SO MUCH EASIER to delete them. Yay.

Edit 2/7: Other observed problems include punctuation that has turned into "?" (mostly where you would expect to see quotes, dashes, or the occasional ellipse) and the stylesheet for the search results seems missing. Eventually, I presume, these things will be sorted out... But the important thing is that I can write and you can read, so essentially all is well.

Edit 2/11: The admin screens all work now. Just thought you'd like to know... Some of my external templates are still a bit mushed (eg, page archives, search results) but it's all nearly back to 100% operability.

Apologies to anyone who couldn't connect to my website within the last day. Even *I* couldn't connect to it, not even to post anything. I'm not sure what happened to it, but I suspect that the webserver needed restarting in some form. The problem is that my ISP isn't really a commercial one that provides 24/7 support. It's run by a bunch of people whom I completely trust technically, but it's not their day job and so when things go wrong it sometimes takes them a while to respond. For me it's a trade-off: I like not being with a commercial service and I trust the technical skills of the staff to solve any problems. Unfortunately sometimes the problems can escape unnoticed (and therefore go unfixed) for more time than would be good.

But I've paid for my service for 2005, and I really, really, really don't want to have to try to move everything. So let's hope for the best and lots of uptime...

When I set up my blog originally I anticipated posts falling into certain categories. The structure held up fairly well for a long time. But I'm now nearly two years into blogging, and maybe because of the Great Change itself, the structure has started to get a little frayed.

So today I added a few categories, renamed a few, and moved some posts around. The major changes are the addition of "Law school - Life at BU," which is a category about things that have to do with the law school experience at BU (or even to some extent in general) but not so much my own personal development, and "Politics," which is essentially an off-shoot of the "World Events" category.

I also renamed the "Learning the Law" category to "Reflecting on the Law" and moved a bunch of posts. Posts that had more to do with my progress through the academic curriculum went more to the "Law School - the Process" categories. Remaining are posts that reflect on legal issues that cross my mind either through my classes or other extra-curricular channels.

I'm toying with making a few other changes, but I may wait and see how well this breakdown scales for a while first.

This was an itch I needed to scratch: on the front page, I added a link to the category each post belongs to. I also removed the "author" information, since I'm the only author on the site. All posts are by "Cathy" so there didn't seem to be much point in bashing people over the head with that information repeatedly when I could save all that space by leaving it out.

These are the blogs I read:

Syndicated blogs, as listed in my RSS reader -

Non-syndicated sites (or sites I don't read through RSS) -

BoingBoing - A group blog, like Slashdot, but better. Better stuff, better writing, and Cory Doctorow is there. RSS'd but I read it onsite.
Equal Process? Due Protection? - Written by a 2L at the University of Miami, I think.
Expressio Unius - I think this person may be recent Berkeley law grad, who has me in his blog roll.
Volokh Conspiracy - a group of law professors. It may be RSS'd, but I go to it regularly instead.

Edited 5/5/07.

In trying to figure out why trackbacks weren't showing up on the pages of the posts they belonged to, I discovered that my upgrade didn't go quite as well as I'd thought it had. On the upside, I now know why my search results pages look so ugly, and I was able to get the trackbacks to show up. But now my blog is hovering somewhere between version 2.x and 3.x, and I'm not sure what to do about it.

I liked things the way they looked when it was 2.x. Or at least I got used to it. I pretty much used the default templates and stylesheets, with just a few modifications. Version 3.x seems to require using different templates and stylesheets, and I have to decide if I want to make that leap. Right now though I'm using what went with 2.x, with a minimum of 3.x bandaids to get back functionality that disappeared, like the trackbacks. I'll need to decide if (a) I want to leave everything the way it is, despite the ugliness resulting form the templates and stylesheets not matching, (b) continue to apply bandaids to fix the ugliness, or (c) bring everything over to 3.x so the look-and-feel and functionality match the way they are intended.

Anyway, I mention this so if on subsequent visits the site seems to be a different color than you last remember, you needn't worry you're hallucinating...

I played around with my categories again. I added one, "Sports," where I put most of the cycling, baseball, football, and swimming posts, unless I was focusing more on my participation in them. I also changed - again - my "law school, the process" categories. They are now "The Great Change (1L year)" (et al). I think it's better that way, and the names probably how better reflect how I always envisioned the categories being used.

It might be easier to explain what they contain by explaining what they don't contain. Posts were I describe aspects to the BU experience or the law school process from a structural perspective tend to go in the "Law School, life at BU category." Posts that give insight into who I am as a person but with little reference to (or impact by) law school go in the "About Me" category. What's left goes into the Great Change categories. These are the posts that describe the process of the change or leave breadcrumbs about how who I am as a person has changed as a result of that process. (As I may have mentioned before, the years run from July 1-June 30.)

Clear? I thought so...

I also took the opportunity to update my blogroll.

Web services on my ISP were down since Friday. It made me very sad, not being able to write on my blog. And very distressed, since it also meant no one could read my blog!

I sent a series of increasingly plaintive emails to the sys admins, which went unanswered. But today, when I logged on to check my email, I discovered a pile of comment spam (I get email notifications on every comment and trackback). I've never been so happy to see it - it meant my site was back. Yay!

Of course, during the weekend when there were no comment spams, I had the occasion to admire the regular spams that normally are drowned out by the email notifications. In addition to the flurry of mortgage offers and male physique enhancers, I got a spam from an anti-spam organization, and another offering me a year's supply of pringles.

It got me thinking about the spam I got sometime in early 2003, the one that let me know it was a new world order. It was one of those Nigerian 419 scam emails, except that it wasn't sent under the auspices of a Nigerian diplomat. Instead it read, "Dear Sir or Madam... I am the Minister of Culture for Iraq..."

Just a quick "change log" note to say that I added a new category for "pop culture" and moved some other posts around.

My blog is under a full-scale attack by spammers, at unprecedented levels. As a result I've had to turn off allowing unregistered comments, at least for a little while. I'm hoping that if it's off, the spamming will stop. Or at any rate, I can't let them accumulate faster than I can delete them and block their IPs. Given that turning it on for barely 5 minutes resulted in 27 new comments, I shudder to think how many would accumulate if I were offline for more than an hour (which sometimes happens, like when I sleep and stuff).

I'm hoping it will soon blow over, but in the meantime I've done this and I'm turning off comments on more old posts. Except for closed posts, though, you can still comment -- as long as you register. The problem: I'm not quite sure how you register. I think there's a way you can register on my site if you want to comment, but I haven't quite figured out how. You can also use a TypeKey login, but I think I need to tweak my settings to make that work and I'm not quite sure how to do that either.

One way or another, though, I'll do something (as soon as I get the chance). I like having people comment. But it may be a little hit or miss for a bit until I get this worked out. $#*%$ spammers...

Edit 8/4/05: A compromise on comments... You can post annonymously and unregistered-ly, but they won't show up right away. I'll have to approve them and then they'll show up. I plan to approve everything that's not a spam, though, as a matter of course, and HOPEFULLY this will be temporary and I'll be able to turn them back on completely. But in the meantime this seems like a reasonable middleground.

The last attack at least seems to have abated, and perhaps this change is why.

I temporarily turned off comments again in preparation for upgrading Moveable Type (the blog software) again. Plus it will be a hectic couple of days and spending hours on deletion of the spams is not what I want to be doing.

But expect the look and feel to change a bit in the forseeable future as I get this all squared away.

I hate not being able to blog. It makes me very cranky when I don't get to write, and the last bunch of days with all the travel and moving in left me with little opportunity to sit down and still my thoughts enough to get them down. Then once I could, I was further stymied by not being able to get online. But at least I got a few posts queued up, and I've now added them and backdated then to when they were created. (You should read them in chronological order for the best sense of my character development...)

It does bug me that there were things I wanted to say that I never got a chance to sit down and write. Things that I think were important to write down as part of the documentation of my Great Change, but are now impossible to write about because even just a few days later I've moved on too far past where I would be emotionally able to accurately capture and chronicle how I originally felt when the urge to write had hit.

(Meanwhile I have obviously not gotten around to updating the blog software, and it will be further hampered by the lack of Internet at home, so I think I will leave the comments off for a while longer. Please email me though if you would like to have one manually added – I'd be glad to do that and get good discussions going.)

I'm going to wait until MoveableType figures out how to properly document the upgrading before I attempt it. So in the meantime I've cautiously turned back on the comments, because I hate not getting real ones. (Although it's been a lovely break from the spam ones...) Comments still require approval, though, just to keep it from getting out of hand. I'll try to get on them as soon as I can though.

(I also reserve the right to give up and turn them off again if I need to. Hopefully this upgrade will forstall some of this nonsense though...)

Edited 9/12

A quick housecleaning note: I modified the category name "Life at BU" to "Life at my school," since I've been talking about Bucerius in the same way that I talk about BU in posts of that category.

Edit 10/8: I changed it again to "School life." I think it sounds less stupid.

I went away this weekend and just got back yesterday. I blogged regularly during that time, however. Except not online, but in a notebook. I came back with about 30 handwritten pages that I just typed up for posting. I have adjusted the dates for when they were written.

For the best effect, start reading here and work forward.

The previous post was written in response to a recent site outage. It's back up, sort of. Already published pages are viewable, but the backend that lets me post isn't too healthy right now, which may affect further posting and maintenance. Although I hope not...

(Also, I've - hopefully temporarily - turned off trackback. Kind of. New posts won't accept them, although the old ones are still vulnerable to spamming because I can't easily turn them off. Hopefully once I get MoveableType upgraded I'll be able to manage them better and turn them back on, but for now I'm trying to scale back to try to lessen the load on my apparently fragile infrastructure.)

(However comments are still on. So have at me! Join the crowd...)

(Although if the backend isn't working it's gonna take me a while to get them posted. Sorry.)

I updated my blog roll. Nothing too major - a few sites on, a few sites off. It's kind of sad to take sites off for having gone dormant, particularly if they were really good when they were maintained. I did leave one on that may have gone dormant because I'd actually corresponded with the author and perhaps he'll want to come back to it, but I can't chase after all the other sites of people whom I only "knew" through their posts.

Anyway, now that this itch has been scratched, back to studying for exams...

I finally got around to upgrading the blog software. After much gnashing of teeth and swearing at my ISP that is not too healthy these days, it finally seems upgraded. I hope. I suspect there may still be more things to correct (like, um, what happened to all my comments???), and the look and feel may change drastically if I decide to play around with the stylesheets. Hopefully I'll be able to get this all taken care of soon.

Edit 1/4: This would all go much better if MoveableType actually had something resembling comprehensible documentation to help this process along. Sadly, it doesn't.

The biggest problem that I still have is that I can't administer pre-upgrade comments. The old ones do seem to still be attached to the site, but they don't show up in the admin screens. It's not the most enormous problem as long as I can administer new ones, but I would be much more comfortable if I could get them all to show up. Unfortunately I have no idea how that can be achieved and can't find any intelligible documentation anywhere on the Six Apart website that can shed some light on the problem. If anyone reading has some thoughts on how to fix this, I'd appreciate them.

In the meantime, however, I've allowed comments to be posted again without moderation. We'll see how this works out...

Edit 1/5: Ugh... The upgrade seems to have converted (all? most? some? many?) of my hyphens to question marks! That's going to be a pain in the ass to fix...

With the upgrade to Moveable Type 3.2 I decided to upgrade the templates to the ones they recommended. It seemed just as well since the last time I upgraded things started to break, template-wise, and with the 3.2 version they offered a handy tool to get them all set up right.

Unfortunately that meant that my entire blog interface broke as soon as the templates were updated. This wasn't unexpected, but it was a hassle.

One of the advantages to having the new templates, though, is that there are a lot of stylesheets offered to create varying appearances for one's blog. (A stylesheet is a file that the web browser looks at to determine how to display a page. Thus it's possible to radically change a page's display just by changing the stylesheet file - and not having to reprogram the entire site's HTML.) I tried out a few, and hated them all.

And I liked what I had. I wasn't ready for a change. Changing the look and feel dramatically would seem to also suggest a dramatic change in the blog's content, and that's not happening (at least not today). Plus I found most of the suggested styles to be poor choices given my blog's content. I tend to write long, dense posts, and it's important to make them as easy to read as possible. I'm not sure the way I used to have it was ideal, but the old interface produced posts that were much more legible than any of the new stylesheets I tried.

So instead I settled on using a stylesheet that I could fairly easily hack to make it look like the old one. I used the "green grass" one, and changed it from this to what you see here. It took some doing, but thankfully I have some web development skills... In a way it was fun to dust them off and engage in the unique problem-solving exercise of web development. But in another way it was completely irritating...

There are still some things I need to tweak or fix, as I get around to it. One particular problem that I can't figure out - but I'm sure I didn't cause - is the random closing tag at the top of the monthly archive pages. And I might squish some things closer together, or rearrange little bits of things. But mostly I'm satisfied, and it's mostly the same as it was.

(One thing that is different, however, is that there's no longer a calendar. I could ressurrect it if I wanted - with some effort - but Six Apart recommends against it since it slows down site rebuild times. I have enough problems trying to keep my ISP from crashing while I rebuild things, so the time-savings is much more appealing than the calendar was. Plus maybe now I'll be less inclined to backdate things...)

Edited 1/6. Actually, maybe "edited" isn't the word as much as "completely-rewritten" would be... I'd written the first version of this post at one o'clock in the morning, which didn't do much for fluidity, but I wrote it as a test post as much as anything so it seemed reasonable to go back and fix it in the light of day, particularly after having made more fixes.

Edit again: I figured out how to fix that extra closing tag problem. Have I got skillz or what...

Speaking of web development... I've decided to try having a "recent comments" feature on the side of the blog like many others do.

I'll have to see if I like it. One benefit is that it could help keep some discussions going that are otherwise buried in the site. On the other hand, it could end up being taken over by spam.

I currently have it set to five comments in order not push the categories too far down, but that may or may not be enough to make it worth having.

Instructions for how to do it gleaned and adapted from here and here.

I've done two things:

1) I made it so "visited links" show up in a different color than unvisited links. Unvisited links still show up in current a tealish blue, but now visited links are sort of purplish. What do you think? Choices include going back to the way it was, where links were always the same color, or keeping the change but tweaking the colors, or keeping it just how it is. My thinking is that it's a good idea to have differently-colored visited links since I make so many self-referential links and people might like to keep track of what they've already read. But perhaps the colors could be improved?

2) I changed the font. I'm thinking this font is more readable. What do you think? I'm wishy-washy on keeping it though. For one, it changes the look and feel of the site at an odd junction, and for another, it kind of looks odd with the other serif fonts. I suppose I could change them too, but then the look and feel changes really dramatically.

I guess my thinking is that unless the site is vastly more readable, I may roll it back to the old font just because I'm not quite ready for a drastic change. But feedback on it would be good for when I am.

Edit 3/11: Font rolled back. Someday when I overhaul the look and feel more thoroughly I'll change it to something sans-serif, but for now I think this font may actually work better as it sets the main content off from the sidebar in a way the sans-serif font didn't.

I've been having some problems again with my web host again. The maintenance scripts haven't been running on it properly (preventing me from making updates and edits, and interfering with the submission of comments), and sometimes the site hasn't been available at all. At the moment it all *seems* better, but in case you encounter further strangeness, this is why.

I didn't want anyone to think I was giving up on my blog by being quiet for a while... Some posts I've been working on haven't quite come out the way I'd like so those haven't gone up yet, and they may be further delayed since I *may* have spotty Internet access over the next week. More details about that later... </mysterious>

But stay tuned, because I suspect at some point in the near future I'll have a whole wad of catch-up stuff to post.

FYI - I turned off trackbacks. Much as I liked the idea that I could see who was linking to me, either no one ever was or it just wasn't working. All that happened is that I deleted spam, so forget that. Someday maybe I'll replace the feature with Technorati, if I can figure out how it works, but for now I'll just have to remain ignorant of the extent of my reach...

If you read this blog through Mozilla Firefox you may notice a green "C" in the URL line. I finally started investigating how to make a "favicon.ico" file to give my site a custom icon. However, it may change and/or disappear, as my investigation has not yet gotten me to the point where I know how to make them right. I screwed up the transparency, and the current format doesn't work in IE at all. Plus I'm not sure I'm crazy about the green "C" either. So someday I may fix this, but you'll hopefully all excuse me if I don't rush out to make it my highest priority...

If you've emailed me lately to either my Berkeley account or through this blog, I may not have gotten it (or not gotten it yet). The system I use has been quite ill lately and is not yet recovered. I've managed to get some things forwarded elsewhere, at least for the time being, but your best bet right now if you don't know my BU address is to email me through the blog address. It should turn up somewhere where I can see it...

Meanwhile, for people who've come to know and love me at my Berkeley address, it should someday (soon) work again, but I may use this occasion to transition to a forwarding alias so that in the event this does happen again, you can still find me. Drop me a line if you are someone I know and love and want the alias. People who know and love me through my BU address may also want it, since I suspect the BU one will soon go away too. (But we can cross this bridge later.)

Unbeknownst to me, the script handling comments got turned off. While it offered a wonderful reprieve from comment spam, it also prevented legitimate comments from being posted. I have now turned the script back on, unbeknownst to my ISP system adminstrators, who I think may have turned it off the last time... (I did tell them they could turn off the trackback script, but I guess they got carried away.)

Anyway, it's back on although running slowly. If the page seems to churn without posting, don't worry. More likely than not the comment has been submitted to the database, and the next time the site rebuilds itself the comment will show up. (Try refreshing the front page and hopefully it should show up, but even if it doesn't, it's probably still in the system somewhere.)

This mess is all the comment-spammers' fault. Assholes. I know there are some serious civil liberties concerns with pressing the trespass-to-chattels doctrine to Internet traffic, but in situations like these it sort of seems like a nuanced application of it might be appropriate.

I added a plugin that should help cut down on comment spams. However, I can't yet tell if it works properly. What seems to be happening at the moment is that comments do get submitted successfully, but the page turns blank after their submission. It will take some time to troubleshoot why that is, but if it happens to you, don't panic - I likely got the comment. Just back up your browser to where you were and keep reading. Thanks.

I made a new post category, "The Great Change (post grad)," since little of what I have to post now belongs in the 3L category.

Graduating law school forces a lot of law student bloggers to think about what to do with their blogs since they are no longer chronicling the school experience anymore. But because I decided to write about the change into a lawyer, it means that law school is not so much the delineating point. After all, I'm not technically a lawyer yet. So I think I'll let things run as they are, with the new category, for maybe another year, give or take, and then see if and how I want to refocus my blogging. But right now I'm still working on telling my story, and it's not yet reached its end.

My comments script got turned off AGAIN! And without my knowing about it! This isn't good. I installed a new plugin that helped with the spam problem, so I don't know what's going on.

Apologies for those who wanted to comment and couldn't. In case this happens again, please feel free to email me and I'll post the comment myself. (I'd also appreciate being tipped off if there are problems since I don't always find out right away.)