A return to blogging
The scores of people who read this blog no doubt noticed that I’ve now gone well over two whole weeks without a post. Truly a tragedy. Now that the semester is (almost) over, I won’t let it happen again (I’m going to shoot for a post every other day, so stay alert google).
As I mentioned last month, one reason for my dearth of posts was that I was busy teaching a class on computational complexity. I was also rushing to submit a paper to a workshop (but then the deadline got extended), and to submit a finalized version of this paper. Despite my absence from the Providence blogging community, however, I’ve remained fully entrenched in the blogging lifestyle.
First off, despite my dire predictions, Passive-Aggressive Notes did end up winning a Webby. It turns out that there was both a “People’s Voice Winner”, and a “Webby Award Winner”, which I assume was awarded by a select panel of internet experts (along with David Bowie). It’s no surprise that Passive-Aggressive Notes is the clear preference among educated elite, where as the web surfing masses mostly enjoy crudely captioned pictures of confused cats. (Speaking of which, I saw faildogs.com for the first time yesterday, frickin’ awesome!)
Now I know what you’re thinking, with Passive-Aggressive Notes already having won both a Webby and the SXSWi Best Blog Award, how am I going to continue to fill this blog with posts devoted to the winning of web awards (or “award winning posts” as I like to call them). That was my primary concern as well, which is why I shrewdly decide to support a second found-content blog. Last Thursday was the official debut of the EERac-supported version of Postcards From Yo Momma.
Postcards From Yo Momma is a collection of motherly emails and instant messages. The site’s creators were previously hosting it on tumblr, which is a bit sparse for my taste (particularly for a site that’s already landed a book deal). Since we were able to get the new version of the site up in time for Mother’s Day (Hi Mom!), its launch happened to coincide with it being featured on newsweek.com and npr.
Now that the madness of getting the site up in time has subsided, I’d love to hear suggestions for making the site better. In fact, several of my friends were already kind enough to explain to me why my initial design totally sucked. A few of the sites few commenters have also echoed their concerns, but the internet does tend to lend itself to that sort of thing. At the very least, I’m confident that if we switched back to the old, ultra-minimal design, there’d be a lot more complaints (except no one would hear them because the old site didn’t even allow for comments).
So there you have it, a new award and a new site. Plus two weeks ago I went to a book-release party for prominent political blogger (also my childhood friend), Matthew Yglesias. Viva la blogosphere!





