You know, there was a time in the wretched, bygone days of 'Old Twitter' when we would be burdened with antiquated functions such as...you know, Twitter actually letting us know when someone had sent us a message. Thank heavens the service has been 'modernised' since then. I've just discovered that an Argentinian journalist making a documentary about the Falklands sent me a message asking for my email address two weeks ago (presumably in connection with this post), and I was totally oblivious to it. I certainly didn't receive an email alert, and having checked the 'mentions' timeline on Opera's mobile phone service, there's no sign of the message there either - perhaps it only shows mentions from people I actually follow? If so, that's a bit useless. Incidentally, I had to check on my mobile, because as far as I can see there's no "mentions" timeline at all anymore when I go into Twitter on my desktop!
Something very similar happened two or three months ago - a researcher from Channel 4's 10 O'Clock Live sent me (and three or four other Scottish bloggers/journalists) a message about the possibility of an interview on the subject of Scottish independence, and if I hadn't happened to check through the list of people who had recently followed me, I would never have seen it in time. As it was, I found myself being 'auditioned' down the phone ten minutes later. Curiously enough, the question that very nearly stumped me was the obvious one - "why are you in favour of Scottish independence?" It wasn't that I didn't know the answer (or answers), but off the top of my head I couldn't think of how to compress it all into a few quick sentences. What would other people have said?
By the way, having just seen Blogger's new interface, I think there may be a post entitled "Blogger - Grrrrrr" before too long.
UPDATE : Those words could hardly have proved more prophetic - having pressed the 'publish' button, it seems that New Blogger doesn't do paragraphs. Oh wonderful. For the avoidance of doubt, this post is supposed to be split into three paragraphs, not including this update.
UPDATE II : Fixed (after a considerable period of head-scratching).
Agreed. I wish they would stop messing about with stuff. I'm sure the intention is to make it better, but 'no alerts' and 'no paragraphs', two fundamentals, hardly sound like improvements to me.
ReplyDeleteGiven that it is business that runs these operations it wouldn't be that they want to make it cheaper, would it?
Have you had any problems with the new interface, Tris? The only thing I can think of is to try changing the blog template, but that would be awfully drastic, and it probably wouldn't work anyway.
ReplyDeleteI think I'm just going to have to stop blogging until I can find a solution, because this post looks utterly ridiculous.
...the question that very nearly stumped me was the obvious one - "why are you in favour of Scottish independence?" It wasn't that I didn't know the answer (or answers), but off the top of my head I couldn't think of how to compress it all into a few quick sentences. What would other people have said?
ReplyDeleteAs Scots we have our own legal system, education system, church, languages, music, culture, traditional festivals, history, geography, natural resources and most importantly our own sense of identity as a distinct people.
We've got all the trappings of a nation without being a state. Independence is both natural and needed for Scotland
Yes, that's an excellent, succinct answer. I think I ended up talking about our political culture being well to the left of the rest of the UK's, with little hope of that ever having much impact at Westminster due to our modest share of the population.
ReplyDeleteI also mentioned how peripheral Scotland is within the UK - most people in the south have never set foot here, so there isn't much hope of widespread understanding of Scottish distinctiveness.
So far no problems, James.
ReplyDeleteI had terrible problems a while ago, involving paragraphs, and spacing, but I changed to Google Chrome, from Explorer and all the issues cleared up.
I also had a period when I couldn't log into my own blog. But that was a while ago, and eventually it passed without me doing anything.
For heaven's sake don't stop blogging. I'd rather read your stuff with no paragraph breaks than not at all...
That said, it appears that since you wrote this the problem has gone...?
Doug: Great answer, and I think that James's additions make it even better.
I always feel that it's almost pointless us having people at Westminster if they can be walked over by 550+ English MPs
Yes, the problem has gone - I eventually realised that when the interface changed it had (for some reason) switched me to a setting of using tags for linebreaks, rather than pressing 'enter'.
ReplyDeleteI use Chrome as well, and it seems to work much more smoothly than Explorer or Firefox (touch wood).