A few years ago, after I first created a website by copying the HTML from a HTML folder on an Internet Explorer 4—infested Windows 95 machine (it was a BtVS site which never saw the light of day), but before I created a site about the only subject close enough to my heart to motivate me to continue — me — I read a personal site which formed — along with Aquarionics — the inspiration for this site. None of this is really important except that I wanted to tell you that it was this site that used the term "elseweb" for it’s external link list. Now I’m co-opting the word to describe all the stuff I do online that you don’t always hear about. It’s sort of an excuse you see, for not being here as often as you are.
You see that list of sites under the heading of ‘linkroll’? Not a nice name is it? I thought it sounded nicer than ‘blogroll’ which itself sounds too much like something used to sanitise the rear end after… desanitising it. Anyway that list features about half of the personal blogs that I read daily, or more than daily depending on how much it takes to keep up. Thanks to Aquarion’s new league table of commenters you can see that I’m in joined 37th place (and joined 144th place since I forgot to use my whole name once).
Not only that but at Pharyngula I’ve just finished a long debate withassault on a creationist, I’m just starting what promises to be a very long discussion with, surprisingly, not a creationist and I’m trying to help with and diagnose two software bugs that resulted in me getting no less than ten reply notifications for a single comment.
Outside of the blogosphere I’m trying to keep my Slashdot foes numbering fewer than my friends. I’m at eight and 16 respectively and I think that’s a fair difference. Thankfully my fans (five) outweigh my freaks (two) aswell (fans are people who mark me as a friend, freaks are people who mark me as a foe.) I have my display preferences set up so that I’m more likely to see my friends’ and my friends’ friends’ posts, I’m almost guaranteed to see my fans’ posts and I’m almost guaranteed not to see my foes’ or freaks’ posts. I’ve also given a huge bonus to new users for a reason that made sense at the time but I can’t remember what it was now.
My process for deciding on new friends is intricate. In essence I have to be convinced by the quality or content of one post to consider the possibility. Then I look at the poster’s history, specifically at the comments that I didn’t see because they were below my threshold but that I would have seen if the friend bonus was active. Then I decide whether or not I ould have liked to see those posts at the time. If I would have, they make the cut. Otherwise they’re forgotten. Of the people on the list right now, one is Wil Wheaton one is a member of the Mozilla Foundation, two others are well-regarded Open Source advocates, the rest just impressed me with wit, style or substance.
At Wikipedia I’ve been contributing to a few of the professional wrestling articles for the simple reason that pro wrestling doesn’t have a huge number of literate fans.
Also, big shout out to Mom, who walked past the door and said, "Are you blogging? Am I in it?"