Notes from another also ran . . .

     I tweaked the sidebar. Did you notice?. This is an attempt to organize the growing list of blogs I  have marked to follow. I was a boy who used to start the school term with a beautifully tidy desk -  the old fashioned kind with the sloping lid  - which by mid-term was a hodge-podge of text books, exercise books, pencils and papers. My room still gets untidy and I now have so much more stuff to unorganize. When I look for a book I usually remember the shelf it's on. I run my fingers along that row of books until I find it.  If I don't find it I then satisfy myself that at least I have touched it and that my eyes were too quick to see it. And then I find the book in blue covers not the red I had imagined. This was always so when I went looking for dad's copy of  The Ingoldsby Legends. No good me trying to be a librarian. Oh, yes I have heard of the alphabet and the Dewey decimal system; doesn't mean I have to use them at home.

     The side bar is tidy compared to the mess of blogs I have listed under the dashboard. What criteria to use when deciding to follow a blog? Is it the page design? The pictures or the writing? Is it about a subject of which you are particularly fond? Is the writing authentic, that is, from the heart? No time to read more. Time to copy the URL or hit the follow link. Quick! follow publicly or hiddenly (Huh?) .. er .. how about covertly?

     The list under the dashboard grows until one day you try to follow a blog and blogger says, "You already follow {title of the blog}." So that one must be worthwhile if I think it's worth following more than once. Isn't it? Or I link to a blog I marked to follow and a month has gone by since the last post. I begin imagining all sorts of gory* endings to a life;  or under what circumstances one might cease blogging. One might have just got tired of it and stopped. Didn't I read somewhere (probably on another blog) that the majority of blogs last no more than one year? My sceptred isle blog lasted just the duration of the trip, and a couple of addenda. There's another category: travel blogs . . . I feel the need to go tweak some more.

     Family blogs, sports-fan blogs, cliques of memes, tagging . . . oh, like the real world it gets very messy.

*I resisted punning on Gorey and gory. No I didn't. I just did.

Maps - a stub

I get lost wondering around this jungle called the internet. Where are the maps? Ordnance Survey in Southampton was where I used to turn or I should say the old ¼ and 1 inch maps that dad and I would pore over after having been on a bike ride long before the days of personal computers, never mind lap-tops. Why after not before the bike ride? I wonder. I still like poring over maps of places familiar and unfamiliar. All the bike rides. Just looking at maps. Drawing imaginary maps. Lost in the web with no map. And why try to map my life? Where have I been? How do I get there again? Ctrl+h only shows me where I've been! Walking along a crowded virtual street greeting strangers and popping into virtual shops. How did they do that? That blog is too noisy. What language is that?