by J.D. Roth
A friend once complained to me, “I don’t understand it. My boss is a jerk. How come every single boss I’ve ever had has been a jerk. What have I done to work at so many jobs where the boss is a jerk?” He’d worked at a lot of jobs.
I’d met some of his bosses. They weren’t jerks. The trouble wasn’t with my friend’s bosses — the trouble was with my friend.
You see, I have this theory: if you find that people are saying the same thing about you over and over again, there’s probably a grain of truth to it. If your friends all think you’re bossy, maybe you’re bossy. If your family thinks you’re too competitive, maybe you’re too competitive. Or — to take an example from my own life — if people complain that you only see things in black-and-white, maybe you’re not doing a good job of conveying your ability to see shades of grey.
All this is just a long and drawn-out way to say: I hear you. When all of my readers are saying the same thing, how can I not?
The truth is, I like this layout, too. It feels like home. I’m not fond of the architecture behind the scenes, but I just spent the past eight hours performing renovations. I upgraded Moveable Type to the latest version. I installed new spam protection. (I haven’t received a single piece of spam since doing so. More precisely, I’ve received 55 pieces of spam in the past 9 hours and 21 minutes, but the spamfilter has caught them all, even the goddamn Tramadol ads!) I took the time to funnel every single feed through Feedburner. (I think. If you read via feed and you’re not being routed to Feedburner, please let me know. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, just ignore this.)
I even spent a couple hours creating a new front page. I think it’s pretty nifty. (I haven’t tested it on Windows yet. If you see anything obviously broken, please let me know ASAP.)
Thank you all for sharing your thoughts. I appreciate it. It helped me see the clear direction I needed to take.
Now I’ll see what I can do about adding more content to the site! (Starting with the flotch. It’s back!) One thing you’re going to see, though, are parallel postings. That is, I may post something at both Get Rich Slowly and foldedspace. Or at both Animal Intelligence and foldedspace. The stuff I parallel post will be “best of entries” of which I am particularly proud. It’ll save me a little effort and give you more to read!
Updated: 25 October 2006