by Ethan Johnson
July 27, 2006

The open source software movement has brought about at least two items that involve clever word-play in their names: LAME, and WINE. Respectively, they mean LAME Ain't an MP3 Encoder, and WINE Is Not an Emulator. Following this line of thought, ethmar.com should be changed to EINAB (EINAB Is Not A Blog). As offline work continues (read: daydreaming and saying "what if" a lot) on this site, and we gear up to make this site the best it can be, I'd like to take a moment to write a short note and reinforce the fact that this site is NOT a blog, despite the default-ish Drupal layout that currently gives that impression.

At this time, I am not "blogging" anymore. Ethmar.com is the Alpha and the Omega, and my sole outlet for a great many things. I will be carving out more space to define and contain my various interests, and this approach will be implemented site-wide. Blogs typically begin and end with the blog content. This site is much deeper, and will be even more so over the coming months. The blog template approach is not conducive to directing traffic to other areas of interest.

I was reading a blog post written by Shelley Powers noting that ever since she shuttered Burningbird she isn't getting the inbound links like she once did (and she's cool with that). I felt bad because she has been writing amazing stuff at The Bb Gun and Just Shelley (for starters) but I haven't mentioned this because it hasn't been appropriate in the context of a more formal article, as opposed to a quickie blog post. And therein lies the distinction: Blog posts easy to write and often do not require much thought other than to supply a juicy pull quote and cap it off with "go read". Articles take more grey matter to produce, such as they are. My cop-out is to occasionally write "Snippets" pieces, but they're few and far between, by design.

By design, this site cannot give or receive "trackbacks", which is another line in the sand that separates us from blogdom. This can be disadvantageous, especially if I want to ping another site to let them know that we're talking about them, but in those instances where I wanted the discussion to be "above board" the people in question found us without the aid of a trackback link. Which perhaps adds fuel to the belief that trackbacks are "dead".

I am considering the removal of the comments boxes from this site with the possible exception of my Recipes page. On the one hand, I feel that it is beneficial to provide an option for a public conversation about whatever we write (with some exceptions). On the other, we get comment spammed a lot. I installed a kick-ass spam filter that is catching most of the crap, but it's not fool-proof. The other spam-guard is to simply remove the comment boxes and move the conversation over to email. While the comment boxes persist, and if you are so inclined, please provide your feedback about this consideration below.

Trackbacks and comments aside, one feature that I am a strong advocate of are the many web feeds that are generated by this site. Feeds may be isolated down to the categorical level, or by author, or the full, anything-goes feed. This doesn't site well with some, but we are not pushing full-text feeds. My work at The Vision Thing gave me insight into the nature of thread hijacking and spam blogs, and I do not wish to feed those particular beasts. If you don't know what web feeds are and don't care, that's great. If you don't know but want to, there is a box on the upper right-hand side of every page on this site that contains a link to the explanation of what web feeds are, how they work, and why you might find them useful.

As always, I appreciate any and all interest in this site and welcome your feedback. Thanks for visiting! <EM>