apart from the screaming 😉
That would be Small. He didn’t want to go to bed last night off the path as it was all too exciting, and tonight he was just too tired, so when he woke up getting out of the car, he cried.
Last night was pleasant, catching up with Jan and Jonathan. Amazingly I’d barely seen them since Okehampton, but it was good to stop over at our home from home 🙂
Would have been there longer if Big had managed to stick to our clothing agreement, but she didn’t. Big sigh – four changes of clothing and she eventually left the house in the first outfit, a mere forty minutes after we got started. And then they were doing carparking on the M1, even on the slip road that I would usually use, so we had a scenic trip round the back roads to pick it up above the blockage. Decent run in apart from that, and decentish run over to Jan’s afterwards, just a lot later than I’d been hoping too.
Big and M are really hitting it off atm, and Small made valiant attempts at several extra names. He’s really getting the hang of it now, although he does amuse me. If you ask who he is, you get told “Boy!”, but if you ask his name, he will tell you that too. He refers to Big as ‘nomar’, something he made up himself, although he does know her name too. I didn’t get to watch Big develop language like this, as she took to it really rather rapidly and quite early, so I’m very much enjoying and savouring this experience 🙂
Let’s see, what else? Big has lost another tooth, the one immediately under the first one, so the gap is now somewhat larger. She’s inordinately proud of this for some reason, very odd. Apparently she’s done lots of maths this last couple of days at school, and A, the principal seems very impressed with her. Small has spent some time in the children’s house again, although I get the impression his favourite area is the sandpit, closely followed by the sink. He does like being able to wash his hands!
I’ve managed another step in our financial management tonight, only leaving me with I think four more pressing targets for the rest of this month. (Lots of non pressing targets as well, but I’m focussing on important and urgent, something I vaguely remember from a variety of books on time management from the bank 😉 )
And on that moderately optimistic note, I’ll knock off for the night.
Comments
18 responses to “Quiet evenings”
Every so often I spend some time exploring the links in your blogs and have a browse. I’m not a home-education parent, not even a parent, but I do find it interesting to read people talking about the world from a non-establishment perspective.
I noticed that the off the path website is completely passworded, and recall that on an earlier post several of your commenters have talked about protecting their sites from lurkers and bad apples.
It strikes me that this goes to the heart of what the purpose of a blog is. You talked a few posts ago about how useful it is to put thoughts out into the world but how they must also be self censored because they can never be erased on the net.
I pretty much agree with you. I have used mine to build some ideas, to tell my family about what I am doing, and I also hope to provide up to date information and reviews about places I have visited. I am starting to consider that these functions should be separated into different blogs for they have different audiences.
It strikes me that this may also be the case for a number of people on your blog ring. Many of the people on the blog ring are friends [at least that is the way I am interpreting it!] and want to share news about the family with their friends. The password protection allows you to do this.
But the people on the blog ring have put themselves there in order that new people might find their blogs. In fact there might even be a group think that putting information about home education into the public realm is a good thing for home education. The password protection is preventing that.
My experience of blogging software is not extensive, but I think that most of them provide some means of moderating comments. Many provide means of login for users to comment, thus preventing abusive or unpleasant comments from people you would rather not appear on your site. These may be options your friends could consider if they wish to share their blogs outside of the small group of friends.
On the other hand the programmer in me says we why cant we have some super blog software. A blog that allows you to write all your blog entries and then decide how you publish them. One web domain publishes every thing you blog that would be password protected for family and friends only. And another web domain publishes a subset of your blog entries that is fully open to the public. They could look exactly the same, use the same styles etc and only the content would differ. The people reading the public site would not know of the existance of the private site, and you would still be able to manage bad apples by moderating comments.
Throwing it open. Would this be useful? Is there software that does it already? Do we need to write it?
B****r I forgot that your site doesnt allow < Q > codes. I think my comment still reads ok, I’m not rewriting with quotes in all over the place!
With wordpress readers can register, and you can assigen ‘levels’ to them – then when you blog you can say which level can read each post. That works – I’ve used it, but only to see if it does work, and Not Sheep use it.
Or of course you can just individually password particularly sensitive posts, as many people do.
I’ve just got two blogs 🙂 One anonymised one all about HE, one password-protected personal one for any random thoughts.
assigen??? I do know how to spell, honest …
Password-protecting posts is no different from submitting court documents under seal, which is done usually to prevent otherwise private information relevant to a case (and required to discuss it) but potentially damaging to third-parties from becoming public by route of the court records.
Likewise, password protecting a blog post allows otherwise private details from becoming public by route of the blog. I have recently had an experience that required me to think this scenario through, very quickly. I decided to seal certain posts on my blog not because of their content, but because of an anticipated change to the profile of my blog traffic.
I was hosting discussions that I didn’t want just any old Tom, Dick or Harry poking their nose into, while loudly shouting “Tom! Dick! Harry!” Ouch. Stupid. Won’t happen again.
As to WordPress registration, I don’t consider that to offer the moderator much over leaving users unregistered, save as a brake on comment spam for high-traffic blogs. I suppose security is a matter of taste.
I’m planning to mould WordPress into offering “clique” posts, accessible only to invited registered users, and “personal” pages (I thought of the name “confessionals” but thought better), accessible only to the moderator and the registered user. If anyone rolls these ideas around in their head and has thoughts or suggestions, please do share.
There’s probably already a plug-in that does it, but I can’t be bothered to look. Programming is more fun.
You did a great job with the introduction to Jennifer’s “30 Days…” book. Congrats 🙂
Just thought I’d tell you that, and inflate your ego
God bless.
Pete W
Yeah, the WP levels thing does that if you want. Though if you had more than one clique, they’d have to be arranged as subsets not as mutually exclusive groups.
Just registering doesn’t add much of any use, but changing the registered users’ levels does – giving them rights to post though, which you may not want!
Thanks, Pete, kind of you to drop by and tell me 🙂
The rest of you, will address some of these comments in a post later on.
Liberta, if you’d like to read SOTP just register an account and I’ll authorize you.
There is more than one reason for wanting to blog, and though I can see your point about one of the blog ring’s purposes, I like to know who I’m talking to.
Jonathan says: the software our blog runs on (Drupal) is perfectly capable of being configured as you suggest, and he’s wondered about opening up some of the content (e.g. certain categories of posts, picture galleries, book reviews, et c.) but it’s not a task that is likely to accumulate tuits all that rapidly 🙂
Alison,
The trouble with using the WP levels to group users for discussion purposes is that each successive level offers the holder more and more priviledges on the board. The right to post, which is granted at level 1, is the primary right I don’t want to grant!
Hmm. My point was that it is bleeding obvious that there is something being protected. I have a knee jerk reaction to that. I object to people hiding things from me – but I can only do that if I know they exist!
Password protection of a single message lets the public know there is something there, but they can’t see it. I think thats impolite. It would be much better if a post is not intended for my eyes that I never know it exists. If I dont know its there then I cannot grieve over why I am excluded from the priviledged few who can see it.
My idea was that as the author I can write a number of different posts to my blog and put a setting on them. My friends come along and log into my blog [or use cookies with long lifetimes so dont have to think about it] and they get to see the full nonsense everytime. If any old tom dick or harry comes along through google or somesuch, they get to see a subset of posts that I have set as appropriate for the general public, but they dont get any hint that anything else exists.
I’m still humming and hawing about it. Theres so many issues. I mean if we blog then its in the public domain so surely we should be willing to take responsibility for that. But on the other hand we might have to juggle a private self with a very public role that cannot withstand mud-slingers. [I’m thinking of Garfieldd]. How do we handle a transition from being a social and fun blog where we might have said anything to something more professional when we take on a differing real world role and what we say online can seriously effect our careers ?
I’m afraid I’ve taken the view that I don’t mind being impolite every so often 😉
If I password posts it’s usually just because they’re personal, and generally anyone who knows me and emails to ask for the password will get it. I don’t see a problem with that – although I see your point.
🙂
Oh and Sarah, I want the password!
Don’t know if WP et al. can do what you’re after Liberta, but Drupal can.
There are a couple of loose ends though. (At least there were when I last looked into it a few releases back.) The problems were that all the posts showed up in the RSS feeds and IIRC in the side bar.
Modding the feeds so that you only get to see categories your login gets you shouldn’t require too many tuits since I added the RSS cloaking. Hmmn…, tuits….
The newest version of WordPress is set up differently when it comes to user-levels, and works much better for these purposes imo. It was always easy to customise it though – just a case of changing a few numbers in one of the files – but you did have to know how to do it. With WP2.0, you don’t even have to do that.
I’ve looked at the Drupal site and found a plug in for the blog software that is called “Taxonomy Access Control”. I presume thats what Jonathon was referring to. It claims to be able to limit users (logged in folks) to specific categories or taxonomys of posts, which is the kind of thing I was talking about. The implication is that non-logged in folks get the default categories which are more limited.
Unfortunately this being Open Source, the documentation is not very forthcoming, although there is a helpful little caveat saying that plugins are not the responsibility of Dupral and they dont guarantee they will work! Theres a lot of traffic on the bug report forums, which is a good thing because they are sorting them out, but probably a bad thing for someone not techy savvy who wants this plug in. I think I will leave it until it is more stable.
Wordpress doesnt offer anything like this. WordPress uses user levels to increase the ability to write, edit and delete posts and users. User level 1 can write posts and save them as draft for someone higher to approve. User level 2 can write and publish a post.
That kind of functionality might be ok for a community blog site – for example if the home educators wanted to set up a blog for one of your events, you could all have logins and be able to add posts, with only a few trusted to have full access to moderate and delete.
My problem with giving users access to write and edit on my site is two fold. First, its my site, I dont want anyone else writing stuff on my board because then its not mine anymore is it? Second, from user level 2, WP users are allowed to delete posts from user levels below them. They are not the editor (thats me) but they can decide whether to edit or delete someone elses post. Dont like that.
So WP doesnt do it for me at the moment. I will keep an eye on the Dupral plug in and see how that develops. Maybe we can do something similar on WP. Thanks for the tip Jonathon.
I mean “maybe we can develop something similar on WP”.. us programmers must be kept busy 😉
Jax – hoping Small was less scream-y for you last night!
Liberta – maybe you would feel differently about passwording if you had someone you knew read your blog who was a total creep that you didn’t want reading stuff about your more intimate life that you are happy to share with friends.