Last Friday I went to one of "Brian's last Fridays". Brian is Brian Micklethwait. I've mentioned him before, but this time is going to be different, because standards are going to improve all round in this blog from now on, and so I'm going to explain who he is. Brian is, of course, a giant of the mighty UK Libertarian Alliance. He regularly posts on Libertarian Samizdata, and he hosts meetings on the last Friday of each month.
At Friday's meeting, Perry De Havilland, the Samizdata meister, talked about blogging. And I learned that I'm going to have to sharpen my act up.
That's why this blog is link-rich. Bloggers link to everything, because it's etiquette, and it pays. Links mean hits, and hits mean ego-gratification. If Bill Gates had a blog, I'd link to it right now and say what a great job he's doing. But if he has got one, then he's hiding behind a pseudonym - HornyGeekInSeattle, or some such.
I had been planning to slip this blog's URL into my email sig and let people notice it in ones and twos. After all, if you can't be private and secluded on the Internet, where can you? But I understand now that the blogosphere is a hit jungle, and you have to be a hitslut if you're to be noticed at all.
Now this sort of link is dead easy to do. But the longer-lasting links that should be floating on the left of the screen are more difficult. That's why they're not floating right now. After poking around in my settings, I decided, in my ignorance, that it must be peculiarly hard to create these links, involving knowledge of HTML and radical interference with the template. A conversation with Patrick Crozier at Brian's meeting dispelled these cloudy fears, born of ignorance, and replaced them with hard certainty, born of knowledge. It is absurdly hard. Well, annoying and fiddly, anyway. But with the help of Patrick and others, even I can crack it.
I'm afraid Patrick might now find himself bombarded with requests for more help from thousands of blog dummies like me, who will see his name when they come flooding here because of all the links that I'm going to be posting from now on.
By the way, our monarchy, celebrated for its incomparable pageantry, has a fine Website. And look what Her Majesty is offering!
This is your chance to win a family ticket to the main events in London over the Golden Jubilee Weekend, 1-4 June 2002. Enter our free on-line competition by 10 May 2002. Click on the Golden Ticket to start.
Hurry over there right now!
I'm going to mail her right away with the news of my personal commendation. Once she's linked back, I expect a fair proportion of the UK tourist trade to be passing through here.
Apparently blogs can be broadly classified into journals and punditry. The distinction is that punditry is occasionally of interest to someone other than the author. One qualification: journal blogs written by hot babes describing their active sex lives can be interesting to others. These, of course, are liable to be fiction.
It's a far cry from hot babes to the Blessed Virgin Mary, celebrated for her incomparable immaculateness, but she too has a pretty cool site. I don't see any competitions up there at the moment, but it's still unmissable. Just skim through that list of all the people, places and things that she's patron saint of:
… Arizona, Arkansas, armies of Jalisco, Army of the Andes, diocese of Austin, Texas, Australia, Austria, aviators, … Chilean navy, China, clothworkers, coffee house keepers, coffee house owners, Colombia, Colorado, … fishermen, fishmongers, flooding, Florida, flyers, diocese of Fort Wayne-South Bend Indiana, France, French air crews, … diocese of Monterey California, motherhood, motorcyclists, … storms, Switzerland, diocese of Syracuse New York … Tanzania (8 December 1964), tapestry workers, Tennessee, Teutonic Knights, Texas, tile makers, travellers,
I'm going to pray to her right away. If I can just get a link from her, I'll be getting a fair slice of those coffee-house keepers, French air crews and tapestry workers. I hope blogger.com is going to be up to this traffic.
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The other night, as we looked through this blog, I pointed out to Brian that he had a name-check (March 24). He thought to himself, "How the hell is anyone going to know who I am, you stupid bastard?" Out loud he said he was flattered that I hadn't felt it necessary to explain who he was. This shows you how courteous Brian can be. He's since said some more courteous things about me on Samizdata (April 28).
