Apr
7
Discussed at Ancarett’s Abode a while back: End of an Era and it sure brought back some sweet memories. I didn’t get clear on the process for requesting migration, so I contacted Member Support and got a reply back from Hobbit herself about changing the email info in my iVillage profile; the one on record was an ivillage email address, long defunct.
Well, old URLs still appear at Google and redirect to an iVillage page, but lo and behold, some of the sites seem to have migrated over with -ivil appended to the former membername - including my very first one, which is what got me started on the whole road I’ve been on since.
Ancarett did a phenomenal job of it, getting that personal homepages community off to a start, and I look back with fond recall to the fun help boards and the weekly chats. Of course there were those interesting membernames, too - like hot4truckers and jellyboons, mamafoofoo and spottydoodle to name just a few.
I somehow found iVillage and joined up my very first day online, and it was my first experience with online communities. There are some great ones around today, but as great as they may be, none has the qualities that made that little homepages group so special. I have a lot things to be thankful for in this life, and that’s one of them.
Mar
9
Sometimes Life is a Mechanical Failure
Filed Under Marcia Personal | Comments Off
This post is actually the remnant of some kind of a WordPress bug, starting out as a duplicate that refused to be deleted even after multiple tries. It almost seems like there are seasons of mechanical failure, with fix-its coming in groups.
While a dead car battery, a stopped up WC, a dishwasher that’s flooding the floor and a vacuum cleaner that choked on a penny are not a good thing, the biggest fix-it at the moment is ME.
OK, it’s lovely and I know it’s a blossoming favorite among the blogging crowd, but I don’t find WordPress to be particularly friendly for the technically challenged who just don’t have time to delve; so I figured since everything else is breaking anyway it might be a good time to try the “Excerpt” feature to see what it does - or considering recent history, what it doesn’t do. It’s been a very out of sorts few weeks, which might be an indication that it’s time to grab a box of See’s candy, curl up on the couch and do absolutely nothing, since nothing seems to be working anyway. Nothing except the websites 
PS: Excerpt didn’t work - but then, who expected it to?
Sep
19
Self-Censorship is Just Too Annoying
Filed Under Marcia Personal | Comments Off
First off, being a member of a Christian webmasters group and also webmaster of my own local congregation, both of which serve as reminders of my own core value structure and also as bolsters to my own already_idiotic conscience, means that I can’t express certain things that are on my mind, or that they can’t be expressed in the ways I’d normally express them, without offending some of the people with whom I’m associated and who I happen to care about.
Second, there are people I’m acquainted with online who I either dislike intensely “as a person” and not without good reason, and certain sites I believe are an offense to humanity in general in some cases, and in others, are an offense to a person who values either the dignity of the human soul or the integrity of personal expression by individuals.
The first scenario is a valid one. Technically, there are some things I should not say if I am who I believe I am and if I believe in what I claim to believe in. Good enough. The second scenario is not quite as valid. There are just some people who are hypocritical sonsabitches, egotistical, self-centered b*stards of the worst kind, and there’s no other words to describe them. There are also sites out there that misinform, misrepresent and manipulate, also for personal ends without conscience.
So what’s a person to do? Tact and “appropriate behavior” say one thing, while standards of personal honesty and integrity say something else entirely. Somewhere there has to be a line drawn between being intelligently politically correct and dysfuctional, neurotic people_pleasing behavior.
Really, self-censorship is a bummer. And this is exactly the kind of issue that divides the dysfunctional portion of the population from the rest. Some know and some just don’t.
Sep
15
Marcia Who? And Why the Hoo?
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Marcia who?
First of all, the one who’s blessed to be the proud Mom of Samantha, who helped me get my first Windows computer and got me started on this adventure called the internet. I started net life as an iVillage member with the handle mamafoofoo the first day logged on and in a couple of months began hosting message boards and chats. I haven’t stopped yet, though I did move on from there.
Having begun doing web design and SEO, from iVillage I moved on to WebmasterWorld, where I became the first moderator of Commercial Exchange and then, the first Mod of the WebmasterWorld Community Center when it changed to that from a tech announcement and testing forum. I was an Administrator there as well as one of the Moderators in the Google News Forum for a few years, until stepping down as an Admin last year to lighten the load.
The commitment of being an Admin and moderating three forums, and being possibly over-conscientious about it, had grown to taking an average of 30+ hours a week and it was time for some personal breathing room. I continued on as one of the Moderators of the Google News Forum there, which is busy beyond belief, until the end of June, 2004 when I decided it had become time to resign as a Mod and have a time of personal refreshing, both in terms of time allocation and perspective.
My workload remains heavy and time-consuming, but it’s been a summer of renewed inner strength and peace. I’ve found the time to begin updating my own sites that have been long-neglected, and regained perspective, including a renewed appreciation for my first love when I first began, which was personal websites. There’s something about the “I” of a personal site rather than the “we” of a business site that makes the internet a very enriching experience.
Why the hoo?
The Marcia with almost 7K posts at WebmasterWorld alone at the date of this writing can’t find any of them without remembering part of the posts or exact words and Googling for them, which isn’t easy and doesn’t always work. Not to mention all the other scenes of my crimes called posts at other forums that also can’t be found.
PLUS - and it’s a big plus, if not the biggest one, how about all the great resources, articles, papers and forum discussions out there that can’t be found again either? Like the Mike Grehan interview with the guy from Yahoo where the meta keywords tag was discussed, and Grehan’s paper out there on linking. Sheesh, it isn’t easy. If I could remember the words used in that last one I’d have found it.
Then there was the quick interview with someone from Google right around the Florida update, where mention was made that Google is looking for breadth of content. It was posted in a forum thread, ended up getting nuked, and that was that That is not an insignificant piece of information, and having kept it in mind it’s done rather nicely by me since then.
Something like a personal police blotter, if you will. I think of it as a dysfunctional look at the world of search engine optimization, internet marketing and website promotion, as they relate to web design and development. I have to add that I most humbly consider myself to be well qualified to render dysfunctional views and opinions, by reason of having long personal experience with dysfunction in its various forms.
Thus the hoo.