JWeb's blog summary

JWeb posted his blog summary and asked me to post the link: http://jwebfys.blogspot.com/2006/10/blog-summary.html

Problems accepting course blog invites

Several people have had problems accepting their invitations to be posters here on the course blog. Based on a couple of examples, I'm guessing that the problem in many cases is that your e-mail client is breaking the (fairly long) URL that Google/Blogger is mailing to you.

As an example, one person passed along their invitation e-mail and it had a link that looked something like (I've changed some of the numbers):

http://beta.blogger.com/i.g?inviteID=4622562676191033393&blogID=89562679374
14
940892

Notice how the "14" and "940892" ended up on the following lines? There are part of the "blogID" field in that URL and need to be added (without any spaces) to the end of the URL for it to work. (Thus the end of the URL should be "...37414940892".) Many mail clients break up long lines, even when they're URLs, leading to links that in fact don't work (like the one above). If your mail client is doing that I would (a) fuss about it and/or change to a different client for reading your mail and (b) type in the URL by hand, putting together the broken pieces. That should work, allowing you to accept the invitation.

If you can't seem to get the darn thing to work, please swing by the office some time and we can go through it together. Thanks!

We now have a list of recent student blog posts

I was finding it pretty difficult to wade through checking all your blogs one at a time for new posts, so I figured out how to get the lists of new posts, merge them, and post them over on the left in the beige box just under the banjo picture. As people add posts to their personal blogs, their titles will automagically appear in that box, so people can more easily keep an eye on what's happening on the various blogs.

Remember that this blog exists to serve you and the class, so definitely let me know if you have problems with it, or ideas for how to make it more useful.

First blog and discussion summaries

We now have all four blog/discussion summaries posted, with some perceptive observations and pointers to some of the very nice writing that you folks have been doing, so definitely go check them out!

• Culture Jammer's discussion summary
  
• The Little Rabbit's discussion summary
  
• Kat's blog summary
• Steph's blog summary

Thanks to these four for getting us off to a good start!

Also, the question came up of how to post notices of these summaries. I'd like everyone who writes a summary to post it here, and I've sent everyone an invitation that (when you accept it) will allow you to post here. The invitation takes the form of an e-mail from Blogger/Google, so check your mail spool for that.

Reminders that the next blog summarizers (the whole list is here) are Kelsey and Adrienne, and the next discussion summarizers are Dan and Jennifer L.

Please check the blogroll for your blog

I've copied all the addresses of your blogs based on the comments you posted in class today. There are 31 there (including me), which makes me think that I'm one short. Copying those over was all done by hand, though, so it's certainly possible that I just missed someone by accident. Could everyone please check that their blog is on the list? If yours is missing, let me know ASAP and I'll fix it.

I just made up link names based on what I had in front of my (your screen name and your URL), and some are more probably more useful as discriminators than others (many are very similar and could easily be confused). If you'd like me to change the label of your link, just let me know, as it's a pretty trivial thing for me to fix.

While most of the info in your comments is enough for me to know who's who, there are several blogs that are currently anonymous to me. If yours is anonymous, and if you haven't sent me an e-mail with the info, please do so soon. Thanks.

Lastly, you should have gotten an e-mail informing that you've been invited to join this blog as a co-author. Clicking the link in that e-mail and logging in with your Google account e-mail and password will then complete the process of making you a co-author of this blog. All your personal blogs will remain personal, and only you can post to them. This blog, though, will be shared, with anyone able to post. My intent is that any personal writing (e.g., my answer to the meme questions) will go on individual blogs, but that material that's likely to be of general interest (upcoming events, certain assignments to be discussed next week, questions about pizza preferences) would go here. I'm hoping that this co-author invitation will be pretty straightforward, but I've not used this before so let me know if you have any difficulties or just find it strange and baffling. Thanks!

Initial blog assignment

Think of this as being one of those blogging memes, where one blogger "tags" another blogger with a set of questions (sometimes profound, sometimes ridiculous), and the recipient of the tag is then expected to write a post on their own blog addressing the given questions. Thus everyone in the class (including me) is now "tagged" and should write up the answers on their own blog (which we'll set up in class today). Feel free to answer these either in a single, longer post, or a set of smaller posts. (Using smaller posts may be better strategy since you can then break the task up into more managable pieces that you can sneak in between other bits.)

So, the questions:

• Why did you sign up for a roots music FYS section? (It's totally OK if the answer is something like "I didn't really want to, but everything else was full.".)
  
• If you could take 5 pieces of music with you to a desert isle, what would they be? (The definition of "piece of music" here is always tricky. Think "song", but I'll let you get away with a more extended piece like a symphony. A 4 CD compilation of 70's punk just isn't going to count as a single piece of music, though, no matter how cool it might be.)
  
• What's a piece of music you associate with a parent, grandparent, or someone you know well that's at least a generation older than you. (I'm particularly interested in people like grandparents that are two or more generations older than you, but I realize that not everyone is going to have an association for that.)
• If we all decided to replace the national anthem with a new song, and everyone agreed that you got to choose, what would you recommend?
• What kinds of music related performance stuff (if any) do you do? I interpret this pretty broadly so it can be playing one or more instruments, singing, dance, DJing (dance or radio), etc. (It's totally OK if the answer is "None".)
  
• Given the readings and what (little) you know about Governor Blanco, if you had a chance to ask her one question, what would it be?

This is due at the beginning of class on Tuesday, 5 Sep 2006. Given the many distractions of the long weekend, I'd recommend doing it right away.