Links in the side bar and blogging on

I have set up the links sidebar. A few comments:

First, what I know about HTML can be put into a very small thimble. Consequently, the way I set up the sidebar was by "reverse engineering" what was already in the frame.

Second, I discovered that Jerry's posting of Bob's link had an error in it. Specifically, at the end of the link there was a superfluous "." (The superfluous character was a period, not the quotation marks.) Since I had copied the link into the link section via copy and paste (see above comment), the mistake repeated itself. I have now corrected both the link in the link section and in Jerry's original posting.

I point this out not to earn brownie points, but to make a point. I find the blog process to be somewhat exhilarating since it involves a sort of detective work. However, I am mindful that the process only has value if the blog imparts value. By this I mean that my site must be valuable to readers because it imparts matters of substance concerning tax and business law. In this sense, knowledge of a little HTML is necessary, but the real value of offerings such as Blogger, etc. is that they allow individuals with little knowledge of the underlying superstructure to make substantive postings in areas that they presumably know something about.

The reason that we are able to use computers in our daily work is that a lot of programmers managed to create programs (Windows, WP, e-mail, etc.) that allow us to do our work virtually unmindful of the superstructure that they work on. (Think of it this way: How many authors or newspaper reporters ever really understood the process of making a printed page. Perhaps newspaper reporters did, to some extent, at least in the old days because they worked in the same building that the printers who put the paper together worked in. My understanding that this is no longer the case. Yet another example of the isolation of various classes of workers.)

My hope is that the blogger phenomenom will, in essence, extend this capability to a wider group of contributors who don't know and either don't want to know or don't have the time to learn a good deal about the underlying process that allows them to disseminate their knowledge and comments.
Stuart Levine | 1/05/2003 12:14:00 PM   >> Post a comment >>   |