Absent?

I know that I’ve got a bit of a gap here in my posts, but it’s not that I’ve been ignoring things. I just got stuck with a post I’m trying to make. I was so struck at all the coverage and responses to the tsunami that I wanted to have a post that was kind of a survey of what was happening in the blog world----how people were dealing with their reactions to the event, how they were reporting on it, and what people were doing to make a difference.

And not just the bloggers---I was particularly impressed with the likes of Apple and Amazon that dedicated significant website homepage real estate to encouraging people to contribute. Apple did it on their main site and on the iTunes store.

I got kinda hung up in the creation of it though. I wanted to include links to all the sites I mentioned in my entry. These are blogs that I read on almost a daily basis. But that’s the part that hung me up. I mean, I know basic HTML, but I’m still learning how to embed things in my blog posts through Blogger. It’s all fragmented right now, but I’ll get it figured out and posted yet, I just haven’t had much time to tinker. So that’s why the gap. But you’ll notice I wasn’t panicking because I feel like I’ve got some good momentum here and I’m not gonna let that slide.

You know, I fist got my introduction to what could be considered a modern day example of a weblog when I was taking a class on html. It was actually during the class that I found it. The class itself was going pretty slowly (I could get the concepts and was ready to move on before other folks---and the teacher was helping them while I twiddled my thumbs). I was at the back of the room, and in front of a computer hooked up to the internet, with nothing to do---and what comes naturally with that sort of situation? Of course, WEB SURFING! So I quietly opened a browser and put my children’s names in the search to see who was out there sharing their name. They have what are regarded as unique names in the States, but are considered fairly normal by the standard of the British Commonwealth countries. And that’s when I ran across a site in Australia called geekbee.com.

This weblog author caught my imagination. She had interesting, vibrant designs that changed frequently. She posted her photography, her weblog and she had a cam that took shots of her---or sometimes her room or odd little perspectives of her environment that I thought were very clever (like shots of her cereal floating in the bowl in a sort of fish-eye wide angle shot). I didn’t think that this online journal was part of something much larger at first, I just thought that it was this particular person doing this cool thing.

I followed her site for some time, but one day she said she needed to go offline for a while (which I find is not uncommon for bloggers). The site was inactive for a bit and then the URL became empty. I kept checking, hoping she’d come back, but she never did, and finally geekbee.com expired and there was nothing.

Some time later, I was surfing around some random weblogs, after I’d discovered that there was a whole universe of these things out there, and on one I notice a website that referenced her name on the blogroll! My heart skipped a beat. It was odd, it really did excite me. It was like someone had died in an accident but the body was never recovered and then you find out that they are alive and have been living in this other place the whole time. It was exhilarating---and it struck me how strange it was that it effected me like that. I had never even communicated with this person. She didn’t even know that I had been reading her page.

The link on that blogroll referenced beeep.net as the site. “She must have registered a new name”, I reasoned. I went to the site to see if it was the same person. It seemed to be her style of design and writing but nothing definitive---and worst of all, the blog was password protected. There was a statement saying that you could ask permission to be granted access, by an email, but that she made no promises. Didn’t sound too promising, but what could it hurt, I thought. So I sent my request to her---I expressed that I had followed her writing for a while and how disappointed I was when it went away---and that there were things that she was in the middle of at that time that I wanted to find out how they went.

Then, after about a day, her reply came. She said yes!

She wrote back saying that she thought it was cool that I was interested in what she wrote and that she would grant me permission to get in (she was very nice). I was almost as thrilled to have her write back to me as I was to find her site again. I’ve been reading again ever since. She’s on holiday in Brittan right now, but she should be returning soon.

I’m anxious to hear how things have gone.