Today I discovered that the RSS feed link in my sidebar was broken. I don’t know how long it’s been that way, and I wish someone had told me. The correct RSS link is here, and it’s now in my sidebar.
It doesn’t work with Leaf; I don’t know why. It works with Feedbro. If you have problems with it, please let me know.
It probably won’t surprise you that I’m a fan of text blogs. It wouldn’t surprise me if many of you are too, since my target audience here is writers. There are some podcasts with excellent content, but I rarely have the patience for them. Music podcasts are an exception. If an essential part of the content is musical, words don’t do the job. A podcast that interviews interesting people has a justification, though transcripts mostly work fine. But if the podcaster is just going to talk about something, it’s rarely worth my time.
The top podcasts (at least according to this list, which mercifully starts with #1 instead of starting with #100 and making me scroll to the bottom) are a mix of news, interviews, and commentary. No doubt they include a lot of interesting material, but it’s so time-consuming!
Let’s look at a few of the reasons why text blogs are better than podcasts:
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When you read the news, too often you find distorted and misleading accounts of the facts. It’s not “fake news” in the sense of deliberate fabrication, but the result of writers not understanding the issue, wanting to make it more exciting, or repeating errors which others have made for the first two reasons. I’ve been guilty of repeating erroneous reporting myself,
A video by Aron Ra shows how this works in reporting on paleobiology. He talks about an article that claims 800,000 year old DNA from Homo antecessor has been found.
The source was a respectable one, and its claims weren’t obviously impossible. He found multiple articles on the Web making similar claims, but only one of them provided a link to the original article in Nature. That article makes no claims about finding DNA; what was found was dental enamel containing identifiable proteins. That’s newsworthy enough to scientists, but not the same thing. Nonetheless, the report of hominid DNA four-fifths of a million years old even made it into the New York Times. (I hope I’ve got it right on whether that species is a hominid or a hominin. I think any member of the genus Homo is both.)
Ra says, “They were comparing dental enamel proteomes. What reporter is even going to know what that means?” He checked with some experts to confirm that proteomes aren’t genetic material. “They’re more like a genetic by-product.” Aside from the esoteric nature of the discovery, why did so many sources get it wrong in the same way? One reason is that “editors want to embellish everything to make it sound more interesting. Don’t ever do that.”
It’s good advice, but sometimes we get it wrong anyway. Reporting involves writing about things you aren’t an expert on. Sometimes you have to rely one another person’s explanation. But we should try to avoid making errors just to juice up our stories, and we should let our readers know when we discover our errors.
A lot of would-be authors don’t understand the difference between an accent and a dialect. An accent is a way of pronouncing words. A dialect is a way of choosing and arranging words which characterizes a subgroup of a language’s speakers. Writing in a dialect is legitimate in fiction or when quoting real people. Trying to write an accent is usually a mistake.
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Today I found out that WriterAccess has a new dashboard for its writers and has eliminated its forums. The only way I learned about it was by reading a message on a forum for another service I write for. Some people got an email about it. I didn’t, probably because I asked to be taken off their mailing list. The mail I had been getting consisted of promotions for webinars and such which were directed at clients, not writers. WriterAccess’s Byron White must have concluded that if writers weren’t interested in those, we couldn’t possibly want to be notified about a total redesign of the platform we use.
Update, July 14, 2020: Things haven’t turned out as badly as I feared. Either WA backed off from the 24-hour deadline for Solo orders, or they expressed themselves in a confusing way. I’ve been getting paid for my articles. There are still Casting Calls. Solo and Love List items have returned to the dashboard. On the negative side, the forums are truly gone, and I can’t disable Love List emails from clients I’m not interested in (i.e., low-paying ones). More than half of the problem was, ironically, bad writing and communication.
If there had been a link on the new dashboard to an explanation of the changes, it wouldn’t be so bad. But there’s no explanation beyond “Welcome to new talent portal! Please use the Feedback orange button to report any bugs, requests, or feedback for betterment. Thanks!” (And I don’t see an orange Feedback button.)
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I’ve cancelled my Medium account. It’s become a hangout for the most rabid haters of capitalism, as well as often featuring articles hating men, white people, and occasionally human life as such. I don’t know whether it got that way by the design of the people running it or because of other factors. It doesn’t matter very much. Medium has become a sewer.
A number of libertarian accounts can be found on Medium, but they’ve mostly gone inactive. They figured it out before I did, and they gave up.
I should still get paid for my articles till my one-year term runs out later this year. There’s no longer any point in getting a Medium account, but if you have one and feel like supporting me by reading my articles, I won’t mind at all.
Update:The Union Leader corrected the headline, possibly in response to my complaint. Kudos!
News websites want clicks to their articles. They’re what bring in advertising revenue. Too many of them mislead the reader or sensationalize the story for the sake of clicks. Sometimes they engage in outright falsehood. An example is an article on the website of the Manchester, NH Union Leader, which carries the false headline “Free staters continue to meet despite ban.”
The article is actually about the Free Keene organization, which has no connection with the Free State Project beyond being based in the same state. Most libertarians in New Hampshire regard Free Keene as a little crazy. Putting their health at risk to make a point isn’t very smart.
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When we write about issues related to COVID-19 and other major health risks, we carry a serious responsibility. Most of us aren’t medical professionals or specialists in biological sciences, but we have to get as much right as we can. Giving false reassurances and spreading panic are both harmful. Advising ineffective or dangerous preventive methods is still worse.
When we write for hire, we present our clients’ opinions, not necessarily our own, but that doesn’t let us off the hook. A pandemic is too serious to spin and make excuses about it. If a client wants you to give out inaccurate information, please decline the assignment.
But anyone can give that advice. I’d like to talk here about a couple of technical issues that writers need to understand. The projected spread of the disease is a matter of statistics. You’ve seen a lot of advice urging us to “flatten the curve.” What does this mean, and why do we want to flatten it? You’ve also seen that the number of cases is growing exponentially. That’s true, but most people don’t clearly understand what it means.
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There’s a little-known security risk built into the design of HTML. It concerns links that open in a new tab or window. You make it happen by specifying target="blank" in an anchor (a) element. For example:
<a href="something.example.com" target="_blank">The trouble is that when you do it, you put the page containing that link at risk. For some bizarre reason, the designers of HTML decided that the destination page should gain access to the window.opener property of the source page. This gives the target page — the one run by someone else considerable control over your page. For instance, it can redirect your page to another URL.
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This video explains how impotent it is to poofread your peppers. Some of the humor may be considered R-rated.