Usually when these type of meme’s go around you generally get tagged by one person but in the Eight things we don’t know about you meme I’ve been tagged by two totally separate folks and due to my laziness more than a few days apart. Back on July 11 I got tagged by Rob Neville and then today Jason at webomatica tapped on the shoulder for the same meme.
So here goes … let’s see if I can come up with eight before everyone starts falling asleep:
- I just passed the half century plus one mark in my time on this earth – it’s been interesting but not as interesting as the next 50 looks to be
- I suffer from angina and have the pleasure of wearing a nitro patch for the next 50 years
- my favorite music is from folks like Moby, Enigma, Paul Van Dyk, Yello and a bit of original Deep Purple and Moody Blues who I was lucky enough to see live on the first concert date of their reunion tour (Stevie Ray Vaughan was the lead off band) in Calgary
- I originally wanted to be an artist and was even accepted into art college but decided I wanted to hitch hike across Canada instead
- I use to be a bartender and do PR/special events for bars. Still remember the bar I did up for Halloween … it was like walking into a stone dungeon. Had fun doing that one .. well almost as much fun as the one where we had a female mannequin dressed in leather hanging in a giant spider web. I’ll leave that one to your imaginations
- I have been with my wife Kim for 14 years and look forward every day to another 50 years with her
- I hate cars with a passion but for no particular reason than they exist to make the life of every man who can’t tell a spark plug from a lug nut miserable when their wife looks at them like they should know what to do when something goes wrong
- I was born in England but came to Canada when I was six months old on the ship Queen Elizabeth where I apparently was a favorite of the crew.
Whew … done … wasn’t sure I was going to make eight there for a minute. Anyway now on to the second part of the meme rules. Tag you’ve been meme’d:
- Chris Pirillo
- Douglas Karr
- John Chow
- William Meloney (aka Grumpy Papa)
If you are a blogger already writing your heart out you can always hit the ‘J’ key and carry on your merry way as this probably won’t interest you in the least. However if you are sitting on the edge with your fingers hovering over the keyboard thinking you are going to write the next great post to set the blogosphere afire and earn you recognition of the tech blogging elite then grab a coffee and let’s chat.
In most cases bloggers are not coders, nor are they CSS guru’s who can put together a look to wrap around their words and ideas; and this is where theme designers come to the rescue. Without them and their creativity; in most cases anyway, the blogging world would be a much more drab and dreary place to wander through. With WordPress especially there are thousands of themes for us talent inhibited folks to pick from; a task that can seem quite daunting when first laying out your blog idea.
To have comments .. or not to have comments …
Potential financial considerations aside I think there is a much more fundamental reason for having comments enabled; regardless of the administration headaches that come with that decision. It all comes back the very reason for blogs in the first place; or at least that is what the blogging purists having been pushing for years, is the conversation .. the communication between people. Without comments enabled the conversation becomes one way .. which is no different from all the web sites of the Web 1.0 era. There is no conversation and more importantly there is no learning.
For me that is one of the most important parts about blogging and being able to talk with folks all over the world about my ideas and opinions. Take that away and what is the point of even putting fingers to the keyboard let alone engaging the brain. When you turn off comments you are only robbing yourself of a chance to make your blog better, improve your ability to defend your opinions or in those time where your find yourself being proven wrong the ability to share that learning experience.
Without comments your blog is like a castle surrounded by a moat with the drawbridge up, instead of the open marketplace of ideas and conversation. It is a lose – lose proposition.