A Catastrophic Convergence and the Limits of a Blog

 

Hello folks, how's your morning going? Mine could be better! 

Last night I learned that when the universe is trying to tell you something, and you refuse to listen, she can go out of her way to make sure you grasp the point. In one three hour period, it became utterly apparent to me that I was going to have to change some things, long term, about the way my writing is organized.

First, a few of my most loyal readers approached me on social media to express their misgivings about the micro-analysis blogging I've been doing on Facebook. Specifically, they wanted to read my weekday blogs, but they had no desire to help a company as evil as Facebook in any way. This immediately put me in an awkward spot because while I like some of the technical aspects of blogging on Facebook, and a great number of my readers use only Facebook for their social media needs; I can't disagree with folks who want to boycott the platform. 

There's no denying the fact Mark Zuckerberg is literally a supervillain billionaire reactionary whose business model harms journalism, and helps fascists; whether that's his intention, or not. As an independent writer, I'm pretty much required to use Facebook to reach new readers; it's just how the business works in 2021. Without a proverbial gun to my head however? I'd almost certainly boycott the platform myself; there are far better social media services available for free these days, although some of them also tend to be run by reactionary billionaire tech bros.

A little while later, I was still mulling over the problem while working on the latest edition of Film Sessions here on Media Madness. That series has been featured on this blog because when I first started it, the posts I was making were very much blog material; just a quick intro, an embedded video link and some keyword tags. Over time however, these Film Sessions posts evolved into heavily-sourced essays in their own right.

Now I don't know how much you know about the software Blogger uses to let me create this website, but my experience working with it has taught me a few things. If what you're asking Blogger to do is let you bang out a few ranty paragraphs, attach a picture, and link to a few sources, this platform is really good at its job. If on the other hand you ask the platform to work like a full blown website, letting you post multi-thousand word essays with hundreds of links and embedded video player boxes, things break down quickly. Specifically, Blogger starts eating your links and bizarrely, some of the spaces between words and sentences. 

You can see where this is going, right? While I was pondering ways to solve the Facebook conundrum, Blogger ate a whole bunch of my research links and chewed up the article formatting. This is not even remotely the first time this has happened to me here on Media Madness, and while it may be my fault for not saving my research links in another location, that doesn't change the fact that I lost hours of hard work in one sitting this time.

At that point I found myself approaching what I assumed was my absolute peak of white-hot rage; as it turns out however, I assumed wrong. A few moments later, while I was out of the room trying not to punch my monitor, Google Chrome triggered an automated update I'd forgotten to turn off. The open websites auto-restore failed, and failed again a few minutes later when I tried to do it manually. In other words, I lost every open tab on my browser and with it literally all the research links I've been saving; compromising progress on as many as four or five projects I'm working on. 

Naturally then, I started laughing; but not in a happy way.

When I finally stopped thrashing about on the floor in anguish however, I decided that there probably were a few easy solutions to my converging problems. Going forward, I'm going to make some changes in terms of what types of articles go where in my down-market media empire (snicker) and in doing so, alter how I use this site in particular:

• I'm going to start using Media Madness as a media-focused blog. Pursuant to this, I'm going to migrate my weekday blog posts (which always include an article link) to this website; we'll call the new feature "Nina-Bytes" because I like making a horse's ass of myself, clearly. I will continue to cross post these micro-analysis blogs for the Facebook only crowd, but their home base will remain here. Other posts will likely include blog-length social media discussions, short take downs, and advertisement links for my full length media essays on NIDC.
• I'm moving the Film Sessions feature, and all full length essays off Media Madness, and on to ninaillingworth.com (NIDC.) While I will still posts linked advertisements for those features here, I'm absolutely done losing any more work to Blogger's buggy software. I will also be moving the new In the Aggregate feature to NIDC and altering its composition slightly to allow for easier compilation of all my social media writing.

Obviously, none of this is how I wanted to spend the wee hours of my Tuesday morning, but I feel the technical limitations of the Blogger platform have pretty much forced my hand here. Throughout the day I'm going to slowly transfer the pre-existing seven Facebook blogs to this website; subscribers are asked to please excuse unwanted notifications in advance. Hopefully by tomorrow this will all be a bad memory and we can just proceed forward as if I've always been smart enough to use the blogging software for, well, blogging.

 nina illingworth

Anarcho-syndicalist writer, critic, and analyst. 

You can find my work at NIDC, Can’t You Read, Media Madness and my Patreon Blog

Updates available on Twitter, Instagram, Mastodon and Facebook. Podcast at “No Fugazi” on Soundcloud.

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“It’s ok Willie; swing heil, swing heil…”