Blogging Dilemma

A Letter from The Editor.

The Glob does a self evaluation.

In the beginning, there was a form newsletter sent to my family. It was the result of a two-fold desire.

1. I was playing with my brand new 286 computer and figuring out what could be done with WordPerfect 5.0.
2. I was wanting an easy way to stay in contact with my far flung momanddad and brothersandsisters. So, using the mail-merge function of WordPerfect, I created a couple of letters with current happenings and things like inserting their names all in caps so that letters looked like:

Dear DOREEN, as you are my favorite mom/dad/brother/sister I wanted to send you and only you this update on my life.

That provided minor diversion for a few months, when I found a desktop publishing program that used the concept of frames to make layout etc. easy.

The Global Exclaimer was born, complete with 2 whole issues over a 2 month period. It was a tongue in cheek exercise in fun for me, with some serious thought put in on parts of it, and pure nonsense on others. Then life intervened, and something like 5 years went by. At various times people would say, Hey, when's the next Glob coming out. And I would always say something non-committal. But, truth is I wanted to write it, and regularly.

Then I got MS Publisher, and started up again, printing a record 5 issues in a row, to rave reviews from me. I also shared it with family and a wider circle of friends. Then my hard drive died, taking The Glob with it. After much flailing about, wherein I changed operating systems only to find that the driver in W2000 wouldn't drive the duplex function of my printer, I struggled now and then with trying to put out the next rag. Weeks turned into months.

One day on a local sports radio show they were talking about Mark Cuban's blog. Mark Cuban is the owner of the Dallas Mavericks. I thought to myself, what is a blog, really? I'd heard of it, but didn't' really know, so I thought, google will tell me. And I found blogger.com.

I envisioned somehow recreating my news paper look and feel. Here is what the front page looked like:

The Global Exclaimer front page.

But, it just didn't work out that way. The blogger.com interface is good for what blogs are, which is basically an online journal. But, I still want to have more or less a newspaper. And I think I may have found a way to do that, but it will take a bit of research and doing. While I have been jacking with that concept, I have found myself mostly commenting on other blogs, instead of writing on this one. And found myself in a whirlwind of political commentary. Which, while very interesting and enjoyable, was not my initial intent.

Hence my blogging dilemma. For now, I intend to pursue the faux newspaper angle of this thing, and that will include silliness and non-political articles that will nevertheless be some sort of social commentary. Please feel free to comment away on this redirect. It will also involve an attempt to capture some of the front page look from my print edition... Success seems far away, however. Lastly, it may also involve using a feature Blogger has that allows for posts to have a kind of summary paragraph, with a link to the full article. We'll see if that works or not. If it does, then I and the Staff of The Glob may try to compile weekly editions that will be posted over each weekend. Naturally, hot topics requiring immediate posts will be accommodated.

Toodles for now. fb